Building on Learning with Each Sprint Call

In this blog, Pete describes how some of the learning and experimentation from previous calls and Sprints has been folded into the design of our current call.

In case you have been in an Agile black-out-zone recently, we just launched our latest call for proposals. Through this call we hope to spend around £2million on new Sprints, so it’s a big deal for us!

Experimentation is one of our core values, and in this call we are continuing to try out different ways to curate, fund, and support policy-relevant research Sprints.  The biggest changes in this call are:

• The two tracks to apply through, with some topics suggested to us by non-academic partners in our ‘defined track’, and an ‘open track’ in which researchers and their collaborators can suggest topics.
• More emphasis on the private and NGO sectors in our defined track topics, since we already have a strong representation of work with UK, local, and international governments.
• New tools and guidance to help researchers develop their Sprints.

Other aspects of the call are similar to previous rounds: the rough size of Sprints and funding we will provide, the timeframes, and the consistent push for rapid delivery and co-production with partners.

So why did we introduce these three new elements in this call?

Defined and open tracks

We are keen to help researchers make connections and realise the impact potential of their work. We are also keen to work directly with policy partners to understand what they need from academic research. This means we have consistently put a lot of effort into working directly with policy partners ourselves. One part of this has been developing topics for Sprints with them. This makes things clearer for us and helps researchers who are not already deeply connected with partners to see how their work can have impact.

However, we are also acutely aware that some of the most impactful and timely research is borne out of long-term collaborations and relationships. Our core team at Agile is never going to replace this in all the many areas Oxford researchers work.

So, we want to get the best of both these approaches. We want to allow Sprints to emerge from partnerships built up over long periods, while also offering opportunities that policy partners have put directly to us and helping researchers – who might not already be connected into partners – find topics. This means we have ended up with two tracks in the call: the defined and open tracks.

Private and NGO sectors

Most of our existing work is with governments and public sector organisations. This is great and is a natural place for many researchers to operate. However, the biodiversity and climate crises are not just about government action and policy. The private sector and NGOs are just as important.

It varies by discipline, but we have found it harder to engage with private and NGO sectors. It is not always clear to those organisations how they can engage with interdisciplinary research projects with public-good-type thinking, and it is not always clear to us how to avoid being co-opted by commercial interests or risking losing our sense of impartiality and independence.

These challenges remain, but we are keen to work more with private and NGO organisations, and so we have developed topics in our defined track with those types of organisations. We should note, we are still just as keen as ever to see the public sector involved in open track proposals too!

New guidance and support tools

We have always sought to support Sprints in their setup and delivery. We have an excellent team in our ‘engine room’ that makes this happen. Our most recent Sprints have benefitted from our increasingly mature and settled guidance and tools, which include a Sprint Handbook and a webinar series which you can watch on YouTube about how to deliver a Sprint.

I also want to highlight our new equality impact assessment tool (feel free to contact our EDI Officer to talk about this). As we have been applying it with our newest Sprints, and sharing it with colleagues around the university, our thinking has really matured in this space. This new round of Sprints will benefit from pragmatic and productive thinking on how to consider the impacts of who is doing the research, who is involved, whose voices are heard, and how topics are shaped. I think we are now really getting to that ideal sweet spot, where these tools support and prompt better thinking and research, rather than just being tick-box exercises.

This is just one example of how this next round of Sprints will benefit from the learning of previous rounds. All of our guidance and support has been refined and improved as we go, and I really think our support and encouragement of Sprints as they develop is now world-class.

Get involved now!

If you’ve got this far, you must take a closer look at the new call and consider applying. We will have a Q&A webinar on October 22^nd and are happy to answer questions anytime. So, get in touch and get involved!

Read more: Call for Funding Autumn 2024: Agile Initiative Sprints