Impact Evaluation of the Innovation Accelerator Pilot Programme
The Innovation Accelerator programme is a pilot approach to place-based innovation funding. It reflects two high level responses to the challenge of generating economic growth: increased emphasis on investment across the UK, including in lower productivity areas, to help boost R&D activity; and better place-based decision-making through a deepening devolution agenda and greater partnership working.
Announced in the Levelling Up White Paper, the programme originally made £100m of R&D grant funding available over the 2022-2025 period to the three city regions of Glasgow, Greater Manchester and the West Midlands. The 2024 Autumn Budget announced a one year, £30m extension to the programme.
The three city regions selected a total of 26 R&D projects. These cover a variety of themes (including Net Zero/Clean Tech, Advanced Manufacturing, Health and Life Sciences, and Digital/Fintech) and a variety of activity types, with a mix of collaborative R&D amongst industry and academia, secondary grant funding competitions, skills support, and wider networking, events and promotion across the innovation ecosystems. The Innovation Accelerator programme also includes a distinctive ‘policy offer’ which is intended to bring city region stakeholders together with leads from relevant government departments to identify opportunities where policy support could help achieve programme objectives.
SQW has been commissioned by Innovate UK to develop an impact evaluation framework, and then conduct the impact evaluation of the Innovation Accelerator programme. The evaluation framework was finalised in summer 2025 and sets out a theory-based approach, including contribution analysis, to understand the scale and nature of impact, and the contribution of the programme relative to other factors. The evaluation will use a mixed methods approach including primary research, secondary data analysis and quasi-experimental techniques. The interim evaluation will take place over Autumn 2025, with the final evaluation scheduled for 2027.
If you would like to find out more about SQW’s evaluation, please contact John Nolan via jnolan@sqw.co.uk.
