Rewiring the Knowledge Economy: Building a New Infrastructure for Research Funding
Maya Gavin and Ronit Kanwar
Over the past four decades, the administrative layer around research has gradually swelled. By some estimates Early Career Researchers today spend up to half their time looking and applying for funding and only a third on actual research.
Administrative process is part of the story. But an often less discussed bottleneck is connectivity: ideas and capital not meeting in the right way, at the right time.
Most researchers apply to the same visible funders – UKRI, Wellcome, the large charities – because that's what they know exists. The wider landscape remains unseen. This concentration produces congestion. Applications to UKRI rose over 80% between 2017 and 2024 and success rates nearly halved over the same period. In a single Australian funding round, researchers spent the equivalent of 550 working years preparing proposals; roughly 400 years of work towards unsuccessful applications. In the US, federally funded researchers report spending 42% of their research time on administration rather than research.
Our conversations with UK charities and foundations reveal an inverse problem on their end: the same applicants returning cycle after cycle, limited reach beyond the golden triangle, particular difficulty connecting with clinical researchers. Most still rely on departments to disseminate calls manually. And because funding is largely uncoordinated across the sector, funders can’t see the full landscape: where effort is clustering, where gaps are growing, what's being missed.
The result is a system where both sides default to what's visible – and what they know is the same narrow set of highly visible, highly congested channels. This has obvious costs for efficiency. But it has a subtler cost for the kind of research that gets funded.
Filtering out the outliers
The difficulty of a career in science is worrying in the face of a system that seems increasingly consensus-driven. Early-career researchers who might otherwise pursue high-variance ideas can reasonably feel there is less room to do so.
This filtering happens in two parts. First, peer review requires consensus; reviewers must agree on what counts as excellent. This compresses the distribution of what gets funded. Weak proposals are screened out, but so too are unconventional ones that lack a shared framework for evaluation.
Second, researchers know this. Faced with narrow channels and success rates between 12-20% (UKRI, Wellcome and the ERC), many steer toward safer framings, or don't pursue high-variance ideas in the first place. The deeper cost may not be the proposals that fail at review, but the ones never written.
A disconnected knowledge economy makes both layers worse. When researchers can only see a narrow set of high-profile funders, they cluster on the same calls, using the same language, competing for the same limited pots. This creates tautological incentives for science – what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called ‘academic capital’. That is, capital that is based on accumulating academic leverage, not advancing the frontier.
The effects are measurable. A Nature study analysing 25 million papers and 4 million patents found that disruptiveness – the tendency of work to open entirely new directions – has declined significantly across fields since 1945. Since 1955, the share of citations going to newer work has fallen dramatically.
The history of science shows us that many paradigmatic shifts came from disciplinary and institutional outliers. Barbara McClintock presented her discovery of "jumping genes" at Cold Spring Harbor in 1951 and was met with silence. The idea that genetic elements could move around the genome was so far outside the prevailing framework that the field simply couldn't absorb it. She stopped publishing her findings; the Nobel came thirty-three years later. Peter Mitchell's chemiosmotic theory was initially dismissed as heretical by the biochemistry establishment. He resigned from the University of Edinburgh and converted a Cornish manor house into a private laboratory. He received the Nobel in 1978.
As physicist David Deutsch suggests, it’s possible that even Einstein wouldn’t have stood a chance in today’s academic environment!
The question is how to surface outliers before they’re engineered out of the pipeline? Part of the answer lies in rethinking peer review (Metascience Unit). The more immediate lever, however, is connectivity: If researchers could see beyond the same narrow set of funders – and funders could reach beyond their usual channels – the pressure to converge would ease. The challenge is to widen the variance of what gets seen and funded.
For the first time in technological history, we have the tools to rewire this.
Building New Infrastructure for the Knowledge Economy
Universities today rely in large parts on a relatively laissez-faire model whereby academics fundraise and institutions absorb some overhead costs. The leverage point is the infrastructure connecting researchers to funding – a centralised visibility and intelligence layer that currently doesn't exist. That's what Asothia is building.
Asothia is an AI-powered platform that connects researchers with funders across the entire UK funding landscape: public, private, philanthropic, and industry sources in one intelligent system. With support from Coefficient Giving, Asothia has built a grant matching tool for researchers with 10,000 grants spanning all sciences. In early pilots, 83% of researchers discovered funding sources they'd never encountered – including sources with faster timelines and higher risk tolerance than traditional routes.
The platform works across three layers:
Expanding the radar: The database surfaces funding opportunities researchers didn't know existed, and gives funders direct reach to emerging talent without relying on departmental emails as intermediaries.
Intelligent matching: Vectorised researcher profiles – encoding abstracts, interests, and career stage – are matched against funder eligibility and funding thesis. This enables a newfound precision at UK and soon global scale.
Funder intelligence: A live map of the funding landscape showing emerging talent clusters, activation thresholds for new research areas, and funding gaps – enabling funders to discover the outliers currently filtered out.
Reshaping Capabilities for Science in Partnership
Technical infrastructure alone won't solve the outlier problem. That's why Asothia and Renaissance Philanthropy are working together to bring two complimentary approaches to reducing the distance between exceptional talent and the capital that can support it.
Renaissance Philanthropy is building the human and capital networks that will underlie this century's scientific developments. The UK Horizons programme – spanning Higgs (community of exceptional scientists), ATLAS (network of scientific community leaders), and BiTS (training programme for technical R&D Programme Directors) – creates new pathways for ambitious researchers to pursue transformative science. Asothia is building a UK-wide technical & data layer that makes funding flows visible and enables intelligent matching at scale.
Together, the partnership will:
Pilot the platform with Renaissance Philanthropy's scientific communities, offering free access to a database of over 10,000 live grants.
Create feedback loops between community insights and funding intelligence
Generate new intelligence on UK talent clusters, funding gaps and opportunity spaces, to allow for a coordinated research funding environment.
We're excited to work with Asothia to help UK researchers spend more time on discovery and less on administration. By opening access to data and using AI to make funding more transparent, we can channel more resources toward the ideas and people capable of reshaping entire fields. – Ronit Kanwar, Managing Director & Head of Strategy and Partnerships at Renaissance Philanthropy
Both organisations are building toward a broader goal to reduce the latency between transformative ideas and capital. Better connectivity across a wider radar of researchers and funders – combined with new routes for philanthropic and industry capital to enter the system – dramatically expands the surface area for breakthrough science.
Why Now, Why the UK?
Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison's 2019 call for a ‘science of progress’ opened a new space for thinking about science funding a science in itself. But we've barely begun to practice it seriously.
The UK is uniquely positioned as a starting point for this experiment. It has a critical mass of research talent and expanding scientific infrastructure. More importantly, it has one of the most diverse funding landscapes globally: small disease-specific charities sit alongside major foundations, government agencies, industry, and philanthropic capital. It’s a system with enormous potential, currently hobbled by its own complexity.
There's also a cultural opening. From ARIA's focus on high-risk research to growing pushes for alternative funding models and sovereign compute for AI-accelerated science. The current AI for science juncture is more than an opportunity to accelerate discovery. It’s also a chance to build coordinated infrastructure for a new knowledge economy.
Get Involved
The platform is live with Renaissance Philanthropy's communities. UK-wide access launches in Spring 2026, with international expansion to follow. Watch this space
For researchers in the Renaissance Philanthropy community: If you're part of Higgs, ATLAS, BiTS, or related programmes and would like early access during the pilot, please email maya@asothia.com or info@renphil.org with the subject line "Asothia x Renaissance Philanthropy early access".
For funders and philanthropists:If you're interested in using Asothia to identify emerging talent and visualise the UK research funding landscape, get in touch at maya@asothia.com.