Productivity Institute Programme

The Productivity Institute Programme (PIP) was established in 2019 by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), through an investment of £40m from UKRI's Strategic Priorities Fund (SPF), to address the UK's productivity challenges. As the ESRC's largest single funding investment, the programme has set out the following primary objectives in the business case:

• Drive a step-change improvement in the UK's productivity research and innovation (R&I) by creating a sustainable, world-class programme capable of coordinating and leading an ambitious agenda to improve productivity in the UK.
• Improve and sustain the systematic generation and use of evidence to address the UK's productivity challenge and effectively embed cutting-edge research within policymaking across the UK's sectors and regions.
• Develop practical interventions for improving productivity based on high-quality evidence that will inform policymaking and organisational decision making across the UK.
• Involve all relevant stakeholders, especially those from un- and underrepresented places, groups, and sectors.
• Support the formation of a dynamic multi- and interdisciplinary community working together on research and practical interventions to address the UK's productivity challenge.
• Form enduring and sustainable structures to facilitate mutual engagement between researchers, policymakers and businesses (ESRC 2019).

The PIP is implemented through three main investment streams: The Productivity Institute (TPI), receiving £26m in funding to deliver a research hub to advance understanding of the UK's productivity challenge through a UK-wide network housed in the Alliance Manchester Business School; the Programme on Innovation and Diffusion (POID), an investment of £4m based in the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), focused on producing cutting-edge research on how to enable the diffusion of innovative ideas and technologies across the UK's economy to boost productivity growth; and an investment of £11m in a set of seven thematic investments that have recently been awarded.

The aim of the evaluation is to understand the extent to which, and how, the PIP has fulfilled its objectives as listed above. The insights generated by this evaluation will inform ESRC's governance and management of the investment and will inform future research investment priorities and strategy relating to productivity and more widely. This report is the first deliverable of the evaluation, which sets out the evaluation framework and baseline assessment.