An invitation to propose research projects

Nesta plans to award a number of grants to fund research that uses new analytical techniques or new data sets to measure and map innovative activity and growth among businesses across the UK.

 What Nesta is looking to fund:

Nesta invites proposals for research projects that make use of new analytic technologies to cast light on innovation and business growth in the UK. Methodologies that we are particularly interested in supporting include:

a) Analysis of new data from social media or other online interactions used to provide more up-to-date or granular figures than structured official statistics.

b) Analysis of unstructured data through web scraping, text mining or similar techniques

c) Novel combinations of structured and unstructured data to review new insights.

We are particularly interested in research addressing any of the following questions:

i. Insight into start-up activity in the UK, including levels of start-up activity, trends among start-ups, and other insights into what start-ups are doing

ii. Insight into high-tech firms in the UK, including levels of activity, trends among tech businesses, and other insights into what tech businesses are doing

iii. Connections between start-ups and supporting organisations (e.g. accelerators, funders, incubators)

iv. Connections between start-ups or high-growth firms and economic growth or innovation

Deadline: Monday 4th March 2013, 09:00am GMT

We would expect projects to be substantially complete by 31 March 2014, but are willing to consider exceptions where this would improve the research.

For further information go to: http://www.nesta.org.uk/library/documents/ITTDatascienceinnovationgrowthgrants2.pdf