Funded research projects

We seek grant funding to support large, interdisciplinary research projects that can make a real impact in the world and drive positive change across society.

Our funded research programmes and projects usually include academic researchers from outside of the School and the University of Warwick, and commonly include policy and practice partners who co-produce the research from initiation.

We ensure a positive cycle where large‑scale external grant funding and investment in our faculty and our physical and data infrastructures leads to strong research outcomes; high‑quality publications, faculty development, meaningful influence on policy and practice, and active public engagement with our research. This input-output relationship is supported by School structures and practices, which encourage disciplinary excellence within our subject groups, and interdisciplinarity and impact through our research centres and networks, Communities of Impact (CoI) and the University of Warwick’s Interdisciplinary Research Spotlights.

You can find a selection of our funded research programmes and projects below:
 

Resource rational contractualism: A foundation for moral judgment and decision-making

  • Funded by: UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), led by Harvard University
  • Award: £373,155
  • Principal Investigator: Professor Nick Chater

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) – UKRI funded study is a partnership between Harvard College and Warwick Business School.

Moral decisions help people cooperate, but how do individuals determine what is right or wrong? Traditionally, two approaches dominate: following rules (deontological) or focusing on overall benefits (utilitarian). A third idea, contractualism, is less studied but significant. It proposes that actions are moral if everyone could agree to them because they improve collective wellbeing. This research examines how contractualism operates in real-life contexts, where formal agreements are often impractical. Instead, people frequently imagine what others would agree to (“virtual bargaining”) or rely on past agreements as rules. These shortcuts save time and effort but can lead to rigid norms. The study will test when individuals adhere to rules versus renegotiate, and how virtual bargaining influences group decisions. Ultimately, the goal is to develop AI systems that apply these principles to help humans solve complex problems and enhance cooperation.

Management Insights for Tackling Grand Challenges: Exploring policy instruments, building a transdisciplinary understanding, and extending impact

The project is funded under the Future Leaders Fellowship (FLF) scheme by the UK Research and Innovation Council (UKRI).

Dr Katharina Dittrich was originally awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship to explore how financial institutions use climate data and frameworks to support the transition to a low-carbon economy. Initial research revealed significant gaps: although knowledge and tools exist, they’re not fully applied due to barriers such as short-term thinking and unclear policies. Current investment practices remain far from meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement.

The fellowship has now been extended to build on these findings. The renewed project will examine how financial regulations shape investment practices and work with policymakers, NGOs, and financial firms to design solutions that redirect capital toward low-carbon investments and away from high-carbon assets. This work aims to help meet global climate targets and strengthen the role of finance in driving climate action.

CONCORD: Co-developing system-wide principles and frameworks for “good” involvement

  • Funded by: Coventry & Warwickshire Integrated Care Board
  • Award: £122,977
  • Principal Investigator: Dr Emily Rowe

The CONCORD study is looking at how communities are currently involved in health and care decisions within the Coventry & Warwickshire Integrated Care System (ICS) and aims to create a clear framework for doing this well. The research will first review existing practices and talk to key stakeholders, then gather views from local communities and voluntary groups, and finally use this information to design practical tools and guidelines. The goal is to produce easy-to-use resources, like best-practice examples, a toolkit, and an evaluation framework, that help organisations involve people effectively and make sure engagement really makes a difference. These findings will be shared widely to improve involvement across the region.

ERC AFS6 - ERC Legacy Funding

  • Funded by: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
  • Award: £125,000
  • Principal Investigator: Professor Stephen Roper

The Enterprise Research Centre (ERC) conducts policy-focused research on entrepreneurship, SME growth, innovation, and productivity, working closely with UK government departments and agencies. Its evidence has shaped major initiatives, including Help-to-Grow Management and the Catapult Network. Moving into its legacy phase, the ERC will consolidate operations at Warwick Business School, reducing costs and strengthening engagement.

Future research will address entrepreneurial mindsets, business investment, SMEs in global value chains, climate response, the future of work, and business support. The ERC will also maintain its website, deliver policy advice, host the State of Small Business Britain report and conference, and support capacity-building activities. With a diverse funding base and new partnerships, the ERC aims to continue informing policy and driving impact on UK business growth and productivity.

Measuring What Matters: The economic, aesthetic, and social impact on cultural assets on local communities

  • Funded by: University of Warwick, ESRC IAA Impact Fellowship
  • Award: £46,580
  • Principal Investigator: Dr Mark Scott

Measuring What Matters develops an evidence-based framework to assess the economic, social, and cultural impact of arts and culture. Building on doctoral research, the project addresses gaps in current impact measurement by creating robust, replicable metrics and data collection methods. These tools aim to help policymakers make informed funding decisions that support priorities such as reducing inequalities, improving wellbeing, and strengthening local economies.

Working in partnership with Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre and Coventry City Council, the project will design a place-based model that meets local policy needs while offering insights for regional and national application. By equipping authorities with data-led tools, it seeks to strengthen cultural policy and position culture as a driver of social and economic resilience.

Maximising the growth effects from FDI in Northern Ireland: Current challenges and possible interventions

This research, commissioned by the Department for the Economy (DfE), explores strategies to maximise the benefits of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Northern Ireland, recognising that a single approach will not suit all contexts. The project will identify metrics to evaluate these strategies and inform an optimal policy mix for a long-term FDI strategy. Analysis will consider global trade uncertainty, including the impact of new US tariffs announced in April 2025, and incorporate feedback from Invest NI economists where possible.

Machine learning approaches to understand financial access and welfare in rural India

  • Funded by: British Academy (BA SRG)
  • Value: £9,749
  • Principal Investigator: Dr Giorgia Barboni

This project uses British Academy funds to support a Research Assistant in applying advanced AI tools, to deepen understanding of results from a large-scale RCT on financial access in rural South India. The original experiment, which randomised the opening of new bank branches across 870 villages, showed strong effects: increased use of formal credit, reduced informal borrowing, and gains in income, labour demand, and welfare. The next phase expands this work by examining how impacts vary across individuals, exploring spillover effects, and identifying mechanisms driving these changes. Random forest models will be used to estimate who in control villages would likely have borrowed had branches opened, with implementations compared in Python and R to validate the approach and learn from their differences. The resulting paper will offer new evidence on the heterogeneous effects of financial access at scale.

The mind as a sampler: Towards a standard model for cognitive science (ESRC Responsive Mode)

  • Funded by: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), led by the Psychology Department at the University of Warwick
  • Value: £41,284
  • Principal Investigator: Professor Nick Chater

This project addresses a key challenge in cognitive science: creating a standard process model that transforms rational probabilistic models into realistic models of human decision-making. It builds on the Autocorrelated Bayesian Sampler (ABS), which simulates decisions under task constraints while accounting for biases and variability. The research will test the generality of cognitive and perceptual biases across tasks, develop systematic methods for modelling these biases, and validate the approach using large datasets. Outcomes include high-profile publications and software tools that advance understanding of decision processes and improve predictive models of behaviour.

Towards better business support: Extending learnings from the 'Business Basics' Randomised Controlled Trials

The Business Basics programme, led by BEIS from 2018 to 2022, funded 32 projects involving nearly 3,500 SMEs at a cost of £6.4 million to test ways of improving productivity through technology and management practices. Uniquely, it included 17 Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs), offering rare experimental evidence on business support. This project uses that data to address key evaluation challenges: assessing long-term effectiveness, identifying biases in quasi-experimental methods, profiling participants, and validating interim outcomes. The findings will inform better evaluation methodologies, strengthen policymaking, and improve the targeting of business support, ultimately contributing to more effective outcomes for SMEs.

Understanding the heterogeneity of behavioural interventions through mixture modelling

  • Funded by: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), BR-UK hosted by University of Edinburgh
  • Award: £49,971
  • Principal Investigator: Professor Nick Chater

Behavioural interventions, such as energy-saving reminders or opt-out organ donation policies, are widely used to tackle societal challenges, yet their effectiveness often varies across contexts. This project develops meta-analytic mixture modelling, a data-driven method that identifies clusters of interventions with similar outcomes to reveal patterns and conditions for success. The team will validate this approach, create an easy-to-use software package, and apply it to large behaviour-change datasets. These insights will help researchers, policymakers, and practitioners choose interventions that work best, improve evidence-based decision-making, and ultimately enhance health, sustainability, and wellbeing.

The Productivity Institute

  • Funded by: The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
  • Award: £1.4 million to the University of Warwick, total award to the University of Manchester (Lead Partner) of £25.7 million
  • Principal Investigator: Professor Nigel Driffield

The Productivity Institute is a UK-wide research organisation dedicated to understanding and addressing the country’s longstanding productivity challenges. Funded by the ESRC, they collaborate with a network of leading universities and industry partners to drive meaningful change. Their mission is to support a step-change in the quality and quantity of productivity research available in the UK. They provide evidence that directly informs government policies and business strategies, helping to improve productivity outcomes across the nation.

A practice-theoretical account of organisational attention

  • Funded by: The Swiss National Science Foundation
  • Award: £114,000 to the University of Warwick, total award to USI (Lead Partner) of £518,000
  • Principal Investigator: Professor Davide Nicolini

This study aims to shed new light on the mundane, concrete practices of how organisations, rather than their individual members, pay attention. It will explore how attention comes to be weaved in everything we do at work; how specific situations, spaces, and arrangements of objects make us pay attention (often without any effort or even us realising); and how all these aspects together combine in orienting the attention of organisations and generating their attention and foresight capability.

Although the research is exploratory, uncovering existing attention processes will help organisations improve their overall attentional capacity and identify attentional bottlenecks and blind spots. The study is conducted in collaboration between the Department of Communication of the USI (Università della Svizzera Italiana), Lungano (Switzerland) and Warwick Business school and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) Phase 4

  • Funded by: The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
  • Award: £638,000 to the University of Warwick, total award to UCL (Lead Partner) of £8.5 million
  • Principal Investigator: Professor Michael Bradshaw

This project spans the length of the UKERC 4 research programme and is a continuation of work started in the Resource and Vectors theme of UKERC 3. UKERC carries out world-class research into sustainable future energy systems and acts as a focal point for UK energy research and a gateway between the UK and the international energy research communities. Their interdisciplinary research informs UK policy development and strategies of public, private and third sector organisations.

Current research is focusing on the increasingly contested and uncertain nature of energy system change. The project is divided into five over-lapping work packages that together will provide a comprehensive assessment of the global context for the UK’s transition to net-zero. Professor Bradshaw leads the theme ‘Geopolitical economy of energy system transformation’ and involves researchers at Durham University, University College London, and the University of Southampton, together with the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Collaborations with non-academic partners

Collaborations with non-academic partners are critical to the success and delivery of many funded research studies in the School and our faculty recognise the increasing importance of transferring knowledge between academia and policy and practice. For our industry partners, the availability of existing knowledge, deliverable in the short-term, is often more valuable and timelier than new knowledge creation.

Examples include:

  • Transforming productivity with artificial intelligence in the sugar industry (with/for AB Sugar (British Sugar plc) 
  • How customers are using banking channels and technologies, and how these usage patterns are influencing long-term financial behaviours and outcomes (with/for Lloyds Bank) 
  • Examining behavioural risk through customer audits (with/for NatWest Bank)
  • Evaluation of tools to Improve the financial capability of University students and young adults (with/for Money Advice Service)
  • Communication of the uncertainty of statistics (with/for Office of National Statistics)
  • Monetary policy and fluctuations (with/for Centre for Economic Policy Research (CERP)
  • FDI in Chinese pharmaceutical and related sectors (with/for Beijing Grace Management Consulting Co. Ltd) 
  • NetDesign Re-optimisation - Robust and dynamic optimisation of fibreoptic telecommunication networks (with/for British Telcom)
  • Applying AI-based solutions into high-value litigation rapidly through access to structured data and data analytics collector (with/for Innovate UK via Solomonic) 
  • Knowledge partnership transfer (with/for Slicker Recycling Ltd).