Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex Business School, UK

The Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex Business School in the UK coordinates our strategic international partnership on science, technology and innovation thinking. TIPC is one of SPRU’s major research initiatives.

In 2016, this new innovative collaboration launched, created by the then Director of SPRU, Professor Johan Schot. Professor Schot, now at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, remains the Academic Director of TIPC.

The Consortium brings together global innovation actors with researchers, funders, NGOs and agencies from across the globe – Colombia, South Africa, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Mexico as well as other associates – to work on project that develop a TIP approach.

Running from 2018 to 2022, the partnership programme contains four key strands: experimentation, evaluation, research; and capacity building and training. TIPC also focuses heavily on engagement and communications to inform on and inspire TIP thinking. The TIPC network collaborates to co-create new narratives, frameworks, methods and tools for science, technology and innovation policy.

TIPC is underpinned by research into new ways to provision for societies to bring about transformations that can address the grand challenges of our time.

Foremost, Transformative Innovation Policy (TIP) looks to help solve urgent social and environmental issues, and consequently then economic ones. There is a focus on finding paths to reaching the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. There are associate TIP projects too in China, Brazil, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal and Panama.