RESEARCH BEHAVIOUR INSIGHT
See the research system, not just the metrics.
Research Behaviour Insight (RBI) reveals how research capability develops, changes and is sustained across people, institutions and national research systems.
Combining longitudinal evidence on funding, people, portfolios and research economics, RBI reveals emerging capability, concentration and potential erosion, informing strategic decisions about investment, development and resilience.
One analytical framework, two complementary applications
Institutional insight
Understanding and developing research capability, people, portfolios and strategy.
System and funder insight
Understanding concentration, renewal, resilience, investment and competitive positioning.
Purpose · Stock · Flow · Economics · Outcomes
How healthy is a research system, and where is it heading?
National research systems comprise institutions with different missions, capabilities and economic circumstances. Aggregate statistics can conceal important differences in their trajectories.
RBI tracks changes in research funding, award scale, leadership, replenishment and collaboration across institutions and funders.
Understanding these dynamics allows research leaders to measure strategic progress against comparators and peers, whether that is within a university portfolio and SPRE narrative, or a national system.
THE LEADERSHIP PROBLEM
Most research reporting tells you what happened. RBI reveals where capability is heading.
Income, awards and applications describe research activity, but rarely explain how capability develops. RBI examines who participates, who leads, how relationships evolve and what these patterns mean for future strategic choices.
RBI makes emerging changes visible before they appear in headline metrics.
What is it costing?
Recovery, subsidy, capacity and portfolio choices can create financial consequences measured in millions.
Where is it heading?
Patterns of participation, activity and flow can reveal direction long before year-end metrics explain what happened.
Is capability emerging?
Participation, leadership, collaboration and recurring relationships leave statistically observable signs of emerging capability.
BEYOND DASHBOARDS, KPIs AND SNAPSHOTS
Research capability emerges through interactions between people, funding, portfolios, partnerships and institutional strategy. RBI examines these relationships longitudinally, revealing patterns of development, replenishment and change that annual reporting cannot capture.
Five connected analytical lenses reveal how research systems behave and evolve.
How do people, economics and outcomes connect?
Every substantive factual claim is traceable through the evidence chain to its admitted source data.
Your portfolio IS your people story
PORTFOLIO ECONOMICS
Institutions with similar research income can have very different financial exposures. Cost recovery, funding concentration, award scale and the deployment of academic time determine whether research activity is economically sustainable.
Who participates, leads, develops and returns shapes both the economics and future capability of the research portfolio. Understanding these relationships makes more precise strategic intervention possible.
SPRE AND YOUR RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT
Gateway is the confidential institutional evidence layer within RBI, linking applications, roles, participation and leadership over time in ways that public comparator data alone can’t. Gateway is explicitly not ranking: it helps inform precision, personalised development for cadres of people.
People development shows up when it changes the research environment.
Strategy, People and Research Environment (SPRE) needs a university to show it is building the inclusion, leadership, relationships and environments needed by its strategy. RBI makes those changes observable by tracing how people enter, connect, develop and recur in their research. The aim here isn’t counting development activity, but instead to see whether capability is actually forming. This in turn allows an evidence-led approach to precision people development tailored for specific cadres.
Researcher development need not be evaluated only by trying to track whether a course or programme “worked”. We can observe changes in people, roles, networks and institutional capability as properties of the research system itself. RBI shows who, how, what, where, and financial sustainability together as one people-centric infrastructure: this is what SPRE is really trying to understand.
COMMUNITY DISCOVERY
Do your formal structures reflect how research actually happens?
RBI identifies research communities through observed patterns of collaboration, participation and shared activity, independently of formal departments, schools or institutes.
Network analysis reveals connections, interdependencies and potentially fragile relationships that organisational charts may overlook.
Controlled perturbations can explore how these communities respond to the loss or disruption of key connections, identifying potential vulnerabilities and opportunities for greater resilience.
INSTITUTIONAL TRAJECTORY
Apparently similar institutions can be heading in very different directions.
Research income provides only a partial picture of institutional performance. RBI follows the changing stock and flow of funded research, revealing how activity, leadership and capability evolve over time.
By distinguishing inherited awards from new funding, RBI exposes changes that annual income statistics can obscure. Institutions can be compared with peers, collaborators and the wider research system.
The Scotland-18 analysis illustrates how different institutional trajectories contribute to the national research landscape. Changes in award scale, funded leadership and replenishment reveal patterns of concentration, divergence and potential capability erosion.
PARTNERSHIPS, COLLABORATION AND NETWORKS
Research creates value far beyond grant income.
Value lies in understanding contributions organisations make to the wider research system.
RBI reveals how institutions connect with collaborators, sectors and places, identifying distinctive patterns of partnership, reach and engagement. Normalised comparisons across research organisations and peer groups reveal differences in collaboration behaviour, while integrating evidence across funders and institutions provides a wider view of their roles within the research system.
Longitudinal analysis shows how these relationships develop, persist or change, providing insight into institutional positioning, collaboration breadth and potential resilience.
What do you need to understand about your research system?
For universities and research organisations
RBI supports research strategy, portfolio sustainability, research leadership and people development, collaboration, SPRE and institutional transformation.
For research funders, governments and sector bodies
RBI supports longitudinal research-system analysis, institutional differentiation, concentration and capability renewal, funding effectiveness and strategic investment decisions.
Engagements can range from focused evidence reviews to deeper institutional or sector-wide assessments, supported by traceable methods and clearly defined analytical boundaries.
RBI analyses are grounded in traceable source data, documented methods and reproducible analytical workflows. Findings are subject to validation and review, with clear distinctions between observed evidence, interpretation and strategic judgement.
Public-source data and confidential institutional information are handled under appropriate, separate controls. Confidential client data are processed in controlled local environments.