WIREDGOV

UKRI has published its first evaluation strategy to aid transparency and demonstrate our commitment to effective evaluation of our investments.

The evaluation strategy describes why evaluation is important to UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and some of the features of evaluation in a research and innovation context.

It outlines our vision for evaluation and highlights key areas of focus to help us achieve that vision.

Importance

Evaluations provide us with a deep understanding of how our investments were delivered and the outcomes and impacts they went on to achieve.

This enables us to learn from what we do and make evidence-based decisions on how best to support research and innovation priorities.

By communicating our impact, we can also help demonstrate that we are a responsible investor of public funding, justifying and securing future investment in research and innovation.

Our vision

Our vision is for high-quality evaluation to be embedded throughout UKRI, generating robust, reliable, and trusted evidence, helping us understand and improve our impact.

Areas of focus

To achieve our vision, we are focusing on four key areas of action:

• proportionate evaluation practices
• high-quality evaluation
• a culture of continuous improvement
• ethical evaluation

Next steps

Across these areas we will work collaboratively with the sector to collectively tackle challenges in undertaking research and innovation evaluation.

We will also promote the use of evaluation evidence within programme design and decision making and will continue to publish our evaluation reports on our evaluation reports web page.

Feedback

We are committed to improving our evaluation strategy and approach to evaluation at UKRI and we value feedback, suggestions or insights.

For any queries or to provide feedback on our evaluation strategy contact us at: evaluation-performance@ukri.org