The Social Mobility Innovation Partnership (SMIP): city regions will bring together community partners, policy makers, city leaders, local industry and researchers to analyse barriers to social mobility, establish which can be most effectively tackled in a local context, and then co-create effective interventions that seek to make a real impact on those barriers. The SMIP will be established within the Greater Bristol city region, reaching out through its national partners and the LPIP Strategic Coordination Hub, to Core Cities across the UK. Our ambition is for the SMIP to deliver a programme of activity to promote social mobility and enable neighbourhoods and communities to develop and thrive, in turn supporting inclusive and sustainable growth in city regions. It will operate via three thematic lenses: 1. Access to education, skills and meaningful employment opportunities 2. Sustainable living and places 3. Culture and identity The project will adopt a participatory iterative research design. In Phase 1, the Partnership will explore the needs and opportunities for collaboration across all three themes through data gathering, landscape and evidence analysis and a series of workshops, chaired by co-investigators from key community groups. It will take a deep dive into the theme of 'Access to skills and employment in the green economy', applying learning and a 'what works' approach to the establishment of an appropriate model for Phase 2, as well as drawing on Bristol's extensive track-record in Connected Community approaches. The proposal has significant local and national support from senior political, academic, professional, and community leaders. It has the potential to transform the futures of disadvantaged and minority communities in the Bristol city region, influencing social mobility and inclusive growth in city regions across the UK.

Future Finance 4 All, led by the University of Bristol, will take a mission led approach to accelerate innovation adoption in Mid-Tier organisations and small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), in the UK Financial Services (FS) Sector across the four UK home nations. The focus of this partnership is to enhance the sector's productivity and global competitiveness. To achieve this, we will develop an understanding, from a social science perspective, of the drivers and obstacles to innovation uptake in this target group. We will then put in place a mission-oriented approach that leverages both leading social science research and experience in supporting SME innovation adoption to inform the development of an innovation adoption accelerator. The accelerator will be delivered over three phases, Phase 1-Local, Phase 2-Regional, Phase 3-National. Working with partners, including policy makers, industry and community organisations, the accelerator will help us overcome obstacles and drive innovation adoption across UK regional FS clusters. This will overcome the market failures that are holding back innovation uptake, unlocking productivity and levelling benefits across the UK regions. The accelerator will also enable us to also tackle societal challenges around responsible access and uptake of FS for underserved communities, individuals and companies. This will lead to the development of new bespoke products and services, which the Mid-Tier organisations and SMEs, which are the accelerator's focus, could then exploit. This potential 'market making opportunity' for new FS product and service innovation could have relevance in both UK and global markets that share similar inclusion challenges. The innovation accelerator activities will facilitate networking and partnerships between social science experts and the financial services community through innovator pathway fellows', drawn from high potential early career researchers. Building on our partnership's research base and expertise supporting innovation clusters, we will then deliver a rolling collaborative challenge programme that brings together industry, academic and social insights to explore and address barriers to innovation adoption. Through a rolling programme and digital platform the challenge programme outputs will inform the development of specific interventions for FS firms and stakeholders to enable them to gain the skills and capabilities to innovate. To maximise engagement and efficiency the innovation skill & training Programme will be delivered in scalable hybrid format and include peer-to-peer learning. Foundational to the Programme will be a focus on inclusive growth and diversifying the talent pipeline, addressing key findings from the 2022 UoB-led FinTech report, Kalifa Review, cross-sector surveys (EY and Innovate Finance, 2022), and sector-wide consultations. The accelerator will support the creation of habit-forming behaviour change through the exploitation of the Quadruple Helix model that brings universities, underserved communities, industry (including the sector's charities and not for profit players) and government to: Better connect key actors across the FS sector to overcome fragmentations, this will build new skills and capabilities within the partners and the project team. Ensure that the voices of underserved communities, individuals and companies are heard and reflected in the tangible delivery of new, or enhanced, FS products and services. Stimulate and support industry to prioritise innovation investment. Provide pathways, and practical solutions, to enable innovation uptake, including digital innovation, that enhances the productivity of mid-tier FS organisations and SMEs. A key project output will the measurement of these productive gains and their impact on the organisations that we support, and how this will contribute towards UK regional levelling up by unlocking a broad spectrum of organisational, economic and social benefits

We are in a biodiversity crisis. A million species of plants and animals are threatened with global extinction, and wildlife populations across much of the planet have been dramatically reduced, perhaps by as much as a half in recent decades. This is of profound concern because biodiversity underpins human existence. Biodiversity provides the foundation of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life. Increasing numbers of people, organisations and governments recognise the need to reverse the perilous state of our ecological inheritance. However, while there is unprecedented willingness to act, what we do not know is what will work most effectively to renew biodiversity and ensure continued delivery of its benefits. The Renewing biodiversity through a people-in-nature approach (RENEW) programme will develop solutions to the renewal of biodiversity. We will work, with a sense of urgency, to reshape understanding and action on biodiversity renewal across scales, creating knowledge at the cutting edge of global debates and policy development, and influencing national institutions, communities and individuals. We know that understanding of, and action on, renewal must take a step change and we will focus on the agency of people in nature, both as part of the problem and as the solution. We focus on a set of challenges: how popular support for biodiversity renewal can be harnessed; how populations that are disengaged, disadvantaged, or disconnected from nature can benefit from inclusion in solutions development; how renewal activities can be designed and delivered by diverse sets of land-managers and interest groups; and how biodiversity renewal can most effectively be embedded in finance and business activities (as has occurred with carbon accounting and climate change). This sits alongside the scientific and technical development necessary to underpin solutions options. Biodiversity renewal is a complex and whole system problem. The solutions require the creation of a new kind of inclusive and diverse research community, one that transcends traditional boundaries between the disciplines needed to tackle the environmental crises of the Anthropocene. Solutions also need to address the inequalities and lack of diversity found in current renewal practices. RENEW has therefore prioritised partnership building, to allow us to combine research with experiment, learning, sharing, outreach and impact, across relevant organisations and wider communities. Our approach means that practical impact is guaranteed. With the National Trust as co-owners of RENEW, we will have significant reach through their membership, outreach programs and public voice. Alongside other key partners in RENEW, our links are responsible for or have influence over much of the UK landscape in which biodiversity renewal activities need to occur. We will use the many landscape-scale nature activities currently underway (or planned in the near future) to develop learning, as if they were 'real time' experiments. The UK is one of the most biodiversity depleted countries in the world. Our ways of working in RENEW, the knowledge we develop, and the solutions we propose, will be of international importance. The lessons we learn will enable future biodiversity researchers and practitioners around the world to do better science, and deliver fairer outcomes.