Strategic Priority 2:
Financial Sustainability
Purpose
To sustain long-term research vitality through strategic decisions informed by a clear understanding of the financial landscape, responsible stewardship of institutional investment, and high-quality data and planning. Research sustainability is embedded through a digitally enabled, data-informed environment that aligns resources, capability, and investment across the research and innovation lifecycle.
Priority Activities
We will achieve this by:
1. Optimising Infrastructure Return On Investment:
Strategically planning cost recovery from funders for our facilities, equipment, and staff, from initial investment to implementation.
2. Strong Cost Recovery and Balanced Portfolio:
Institutional progress on research cost recovery enabled through a balanced and diversified portfolio that supports a range of awards while taking a whole-portfolio approach to cost recovery, including consideration of competitive pricing of industry and government contract research.
3. Enhancing Research Proposal Quality:
Improving the quality of grant applications and success rates, securing maximum cost recovery, while promoting our environmentally sustainable research practices.
4. Facilitating Impactful Research Activity:
Recognising the value of and improving the effectiveness of institutionally funded research activity in delivering research excellence, outputs and outcomes, thereby maximising cost recovery recognising disciplinary benchmarks.
5. Integrating Our Teams:
Using a ‘one research team’ approach to integrate academic and professional staff expertise in funding bids, improving research outcomes and cost recovery.
6. Making Data Work for Us:
Promote financial engagement by developing enhanced management information for our research community, targeting key financial sustainability metrics, facilitating funder portfolio balance, impactful activity and cost-effective decision making.
We will facilitate this by:
Embedding digital tools, coordinating resources, streamlining processes, and upskilling staff to develop useful insights from a variety of data, helping target sustainable activity and manage those activities throughout the research and innovation lifecycle efficiently, making our research sustainability a key selling point to funders.