Research funding to aid UK innovation and growth

High-growth and innovation are essential if the UK wants to surface successfully from the recession. Research has an important role to play in successfully introducing new improved services, products, processes and business models to support the business sector. In return this will give businesses more opportunities to effectively meet customer demands and needs.

The Innovation Research Initiative, The UK Innovation Research Centre (UK~IRC) and partners are coordinating several funded research projects aiming to promote UK growth and innovation.

Warwick Business School's Professor Joe Nandhakumar has been awarded funding under the above Initiative for an exploratory project on Valuing innovation: an exploratory study of developing business models for 'serious' computer games. Professor Harry Scarbrough and Dr Nikiforos Panourgias, both of WBS, are also involved. Joe explained the background to this project.

"The computer games sector represents a success story for the UK economy, with many important computer game design and development companies located on its territory. New markets are now being explored by games companies, for example 'serious games', which offer significant potential for growth in the overall addressable market for the sector.

'Serious games' are products that seek to use the technologies of computer games and the skills of computer game developers and designers to address the problems of for example, training and development, decision-making, and organizational change, which face most businesses and organisations. They can be contrasted with mainstream computer games which are aimed at individual consumers and whose value is more readily identified in terms of entertainment value.

"One major obstacle to the development and wider use of 'serious games', which has so far received little research attention, has been the challenge of establishing robust business models for their production and exchange. This challenge arises because the benefits of these games are novel and generally difficult to quantify in narrow financial terms. The difficulty in valuing and pricing these new products also make it hard to come up with estimates regarding the size of the potential market for 'serious games'. These problems represent a significant constraint on innovation in this field, but also have wider relevance to the many sectors where the benefits of innovation are uncertain and difficult to quantify.

"The project aims to contribute to theory development in this area by exploring the relevance of a new theoretical framework - termed 'regimes of worth' - to an empirical study of two case-studies of serious games innovation. We will investigate how the innovation's value, and ultimately the underlying business model, is constructed through the interactions between 'serious games' developers and their actual or potential clients. By focusing on two contrasting cases - one relatively successful, one less so - of the valuing and development of serious games, the study will not only contribute to theory development but will also help to identify the scope for, and potential practical and theoretical contribution of, future research on this topic.

Speaking on behalf of the UK~IRC, its Director Professor Alan Hughes said, "The new projects provide an exciting complement to the research projects already being performed in the centre. My colleagues and I look forward to working closely with the new projects through the knowledge hub of UK~IRC to maximise interactions between the research programme of the different teams as well as the policy and practice community."

Further information:
In brief, there are two streams to this new research initiative - substantive and exploratory. Substantive research projects are based on longer-term research using relatively established methods. Exploratory research is shorter, focused pieces of research designed to explore potentially new lines of research methods and investigation.

The total funding amount for these projects is GBP1.5 million. Funding is agreed on an equal footing between the Economic and Social Research Council, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) and the Technology Strategy Board (TSB). Work will commence on 1 October 2009.

The ESRC press release giving details of all projects can be accessed through the link below.