RSA Fellowship Research Grant Scheme (FeRSA)

Previous and Current Grant Holders

Fumi Kitagawa

Supporting Regions towards Net-Zero Journeys: Alignment of Strategies and Transformation between Universities and their Places

Supported by the FeRSA Grant, this project aims to investigate dynamic relationships between universities and places throughout their journeys to net-zero solutions. Universities can be engines of societal transformation of their regions. They can play an important role as anchor institutions, by addressing societal challenges and providing mission-oriented solutions to the local as well as global problems. Universities can help build skills and re-skill workforce for the future. With the help of universities and other tertiary education institutions, local communities can generate innovative visions about the future of places and their transition paths.

The research provides evidence on the diverse approaches and models of dynamic relationships between the places and universities in their journeys towards net-zero. It will propose new and multi-dimensional frameworks to understand the relationships between universities and their places by adopting and integrating a set of research lenses – multi-scale governance, place leadership and data-driven innovation. While exploratory in nature, this research aims to provide a distinctive and novel contribution, which will lead to policy and user impacts. To enable impacts from the research, the project actively engages with key partners internationally as the users and co-creators of knowledge.

“I am delighted to receive the RSA Fellowship Grant to carry out this new project. I will start this project with my personal reflection – I became an RSA member when I was a PhD student many years ago, when I was studying the roles of higher education institutions in regional innovation processes in England. Many years later, it is intriguing to revisit the role of universities in their regions now – as we face global societal challenges and new net-zero imperatives. I am grateful to the RSA for the grant – enabling me to conduct this new study. I also want to say big thanks to the RSA for having helped my professional development so far. This project would provide me with an exciting opportunity to engage with the RSA communities internationally.”

Principal Investigator: Fumi Kitagawa

Professor Fumi Kitagawa holds Chair in Regional Economic Development at City Region Economic and Development Institute (City–REDI), Birmingham, Business School, University of Birmingham in the UK. She has conducted research related to regional innovation, entrepreneurship policies, and higher education policy and regional development, across a variety of local, regional, national and international contexts. She has expertise on the role of universities in innovation and entrepreneurial processes.

Will Eadson

Older industrial towns at the frontier of new energy economies

Transformation of energy systems in response to decarbonisation pressures is gathering pace. Moving from fossil-fuelled to renewable energy production involves shifts in energy production technologies, resource use and distribution systems, creating distinctive geographies of production.

This project seeks to generate new insights into emerging geographies of new energy economies with specific reference to the under-researched position of old industrial towns within energy transitions research. Although there is a growing literature on the economic geography of energy transitions, there remains a need for investigation of fragile, uncertain and uneven outcomes of emerging economic geographies of energy transition and to look ‘beyond the metropole’.

Older industrial towns are particularly relevant to debates on uneven development and energy transitions for various reasons. They have been more vulnerable to waves of economic restructuring over the last 50 years due to locational factors, increased tendency towards dependency on particular industries and/or small numbers of dominant firms, and weaker institutional networks, including connections to policy networks.

These places have also often been neglected in economic policy responses which have prioritised economies in cities and metropolitan regions. This vulnerability can take new dimensions in energy transitions: any continued industrial presence in such places can make them exposed to carbon regulation and rising energy costs, placing pressure on remaining production-based industries.

The research will involve qualitative case studies in five older industrial towns at the frontier of new energy economies in different ways, in England, Germany, Scotland, Spain and Sweden.

I am delighted to be embarking on this project, which has been in gestation for a number of years, and extremely grateful to the RSA for providing the grant to allow the project to happen. Besides being an important topic for study (or at least I think so!), it has personal resonance as someone whose childhood was spent living in an industrial town deeply impacted by a previous energy transition in the UK: the swift end to the UK’s coal industry during the 1980s and early 1990s. Through this work I want to understand better how the paths taken by industrial towns are shaped by, and shape, economic geographies of low and zero carbon energy transitions, looking at places that now find themselves in some way at the ‘frontier’ of new energy economies (for instance because they are the site of investment for new energy technologies, or disinvestment in high carbon activities). And I’m particularly interested in these places that on the surface are less well placed to react than core cities and regions. The grant will help me to further develop research agendas on this theme, connecting with others in the Regional Studies community interested in geographies of sustainability transitions, and feels like an important staging point in my career.

Helen Lawton Smith

Addressing regional inequalities in innovation opportunities for BAME and disabled groups

The Blog article is available here – Addressing regional inequalities in innovation opportunities for BAME and disabled groups

Helen Lawton Smith has been awarded a Regional Studies Association Fellowship Grant (FeRSA) on ‘Addressing regional inequalities in innovation opportunities for BAME and disabled groups’. The study beginning in January 2020 will last a year.

The purpose is to understand and explain the UK geography of support for innovators in BAME and disabled groups. It will map the provision of support for under-represented and under-utilised the groups of business innovators recognising their intersectionality. The project is a follow-up to the eight month Innovate UK commissioned project (Jan 2019-August 2019) which aimed to understand barriers and opportunities for innovation for a diverse range of people.

The study will address three research questions. These are first, what are the national and regional institutional contexts in which support organisations for BAME and disabled innovators operate and to what extent do they affect their ability to function? The second is, how does UK business innovation support compare with that in other countries such as the USA? And third, in what ways could public policy initiatives be improved to help such organisations in delivering support for business innovation?

Fully utilising BAME and disabled innovators is currently high on the political agenda and the work will impact government support agencies by informing decision-making on the kinds of policies needed to improve the provision, design, demand and effectiveness of innovation support for these two groups. The project is novel in that it will add new knowledge and understanding about diversity and inclusion of innovation in a regional context. It will map the provision by type of institution so that the major actors, their stakeholders and kinds of provision and possible actions are identified. Interviews with support organisations will determine what is available to which kinds of clients’ profile (e.g. sector, age and gender) and where there are opportunities and gaps in support. Examples of best practice will be provided in the UK resulting from this research. By drawing on research in other countries notably the USA, it will provide a comparative perspective on capacity building in different contexts.

Study team: Helen Lawton Smith and Dina Mansour

I am delighted to be awarded this FeRSA award. It will highlight the great work of support agencies for disabled and BAME innovators and entrepreneurs in regions across the UK and where more intervention on their behalf is needed.

This project extends and enhances the research portfolio of the Birkbeck Centre for Innovation Management Research (CIMR). It provides avenues for further research by myself, colleagues, PhD students and Masters students and for publication. I will benefit from the prestige the award brings as well as the impact that the work will have at a regional and national level.

Elvira Uyarra

Constructing markets for new path development. The role of the state.

The aim of this project is to understand the role of strategic or deliberate state action in influencing the demand conditions for new regional path creation. The deliberate creation of markets is a relatively less explored dimension of path creation, both conceptually and in the practical design of regional policies and smart specialisation strategies. The project aims to address this gap by advancing the conceptualisation of market creation in regional branching processes and gathering evidence of past or on-going examples of deliberate demand-driven initiatives. The research will identify instances of deliberate path creation where public demand has played a key role. The focus will be on the role of public sector actors, intermediaries and other institutional entrepreneurs with system-level agency to support industrial paths. The main findings of this work are intended to inform the current debate on the role of the state in evolutionary economic geography as well as policy agendas around industrial policy and smart specialisation.

I am really honoured to receive an RSA Fellowship Research Grant for my project ‘Constructing markets for new path development’. The award will provide the resources and support needed to immerse myself into new literature and to gather empirical evidence into regional policies for new industrial path creation. The grant will help deepen and expand my research collaborations with key scholars and build a new and impactful research agenda.

Luís Carvalho

Can startups solve urban problems? Bridging the geography of innovation, procurement and smart city research

Engaging startups in urban sustainability issues (e.g. mobility management, climate adaptation, social integration) is becoming a popular policy ambition in many cities and regions worldwide. The topic has gained a relevant place in regional innovation policy debates and, more recently, within discussions about mission-oriented innovation and bottom-up “smart city” development. Yet, little is known about the actual results and innovation processes involved. Namely, as the nature of urban sustainability-related innovations shift from a pure techno-functional focus to embrace social and value ascribing dimensions, the notions of “solution”, innovation, and upscaling are challenged, as well as the geographies through which these processes unfold. In order to better understand these issues, this research will build at the interface between literature on the geography of knowledge and innovation, public procurement and smart cities; moreover, it will carry out a systematic comparison between two frontrunning policy initiatives in Amsterdam and Lisbon to critically compare expectations, designs, co-creation processes and actual results. Due to the novelty of the policy tool and the “lighthouse” role of pioneer cities, this research can be seen as a pilot to develop a number of propositions to be further tested in a larger study.

Simona Iammarino

Regional connectivity through global production networks in Europe and beyond: new policy approaches
The assessment of the balance and complementarity between inward and outward global capital flows – in terms of creation/destruction and specialisation/diversification of regional and local economic activities, sectors and functions, employment, skills and innovation – is all the more urgent to enhance the understanding of regional development trajectories and resilience, and the ways to support them. This project proposal aims at reviewing systematically and comparatively, and in the light of a new conceptual framework, territorial (subnational) policy measures for the connectivity of regions, with a specific focus on the simultaneous occurrence of inward and outward productive capital flows. The current policy tools are still largely dominated by inward FDI attractiveness as a means to increase regional productivity. However, the current state of globalisation and the relevance of global production and innovation networks (GPNs) neither justify nor ensure effectiveness of such a narrow – and still largely nationally-designed – intervention to enhancing regional economic development. A critical and comprehensive review would be the starting point for the identification of both further theoretical and empirical research, and alternative policy tools for the variety of European regions.
Read the blog article Globalisation through FDI and regional development policy by Simona Iammarino here: https://blog.regionalstudies.org/globalisation-fdi-regional-development-policy/

The FeRSA grant allowed me to develop my arguments about the urgent need to adopt a territorial view on internationalisation processes and policies, and to expand some regional case studies on the topic. This is becoming a crucial issue in rethinking regional and cohesion policies in the European Union, and I am now collaborating with various stakeholders, including the European Commission, in a reflection on how to incorporate global capital flows and value chains into regional strategies and smart specialisation. This would have not been possible without the grant and the research assistance it provided, particularly as I was coming out from a period of intensive academic management. In addition, the FeRSA also allowed me to confront with major experts in the field outside Europe, and new and exciting research lines which came out of those discussions. RSA takes good care of its members, at all stages of career!

David Gibbs

Transition Regions and the Development of the Green Economy
Recent years have seen growing interest by policy makers and academics in the development of the green economy, defined as being “low carbon, resource efficient, and socially inclusive”. This project will focus upon cities and regions as key locations where transitions towards a green economy are occurring, focusing empirically on case study research in two leading regions (e.gs. Styria, Portland, Boston) and two aspirant regions (e.gs. East of England, Flanders, Öresund/Skåne). However, we have limited understanding of how these developments occur over space, and little purchase on the ways local and regional governments are promoting their green economies. This project will deliver new insights into the processes of transition towards green regional economies, through exploring how regional actors aim to bring about transitions. It will also investigate how the processes of transition affects those places e.g. through widespread adoption of renewable energy and community-based economic initiatives, or the promotion of their regions as green economy exemplars. From an academic perspective, shifts towards a green economy have been explored by research using the conceptual framework of sustainability transitions. However, these largely lack spatial context and fail to capture the evolution and development of networks of institutions, entrepreneurs and innovations into stable forms to challenge and replace existing regimes. The role of purposive actors and institutions is important, not just within the local area, but also to help transcend the city and regional scales. In addition to offering new theoretical insights, the project also aims to provide policy advice and information.
Read more about this research here: https://regions.regionalstudies.org/ezine/article/sustainability-transitions-and-green-regional-economies/

I was very pleased to be awarded a Fellowship Research Grant which allowed me to further develop my research into the green economy and regional development. This has led to opportunities to build links and collaboration with researchers and policy makers across Europe, as well as to network with the wider Regional Studies community. The research itself has led to invitations to present at conferences, publications and also formed a useful pilot study for larger scale research grant applications.

Colin Mason

The genesis of entrepreneurial ecosystems: the case of Atlantic Canada

Entrepreneurial ecosystems is the latest buzz word in the lexicon of policy-makers, practitioners and the media and attracting considerable policy focus. Several studies have listed the attributes of entrepreneurial ecosystems. However, the emerging literature on entrepreneurial ecosystems takes a largely static approach, identifying their attributes. So how to entrepreneurial ecosystems come into being? This question requires an evolutionary perspective. The focus should be on the entrepreneurial process. Where did the original entrepreneurs emerge – which organisations performed as entrepreneurial incubators? How did the start-up process start and develop momentum? At what point in the process did support organisations emerge? And how did they emerge? Were any elements missing or deficient? If so, what were the consequences for the evolution of the entrepreneurial ecosystem? The research will be undertaken in Atlantic Canada (primarily Nova Scotia) – a peripheral, economically lagging region of Canada which has exhibited a number of the characteristics of an emerging entrepreneurial ecosystem within the past five years.
The research is a response to calls in the literature for more studies of the evolution of entrepreneurial ecosystems. It will also will give policy-makers a better understanding of the emergence and evolution of entrepreneurial ecosystems and thereby appreciate more clearly their scope for intervention and nature of possible interventions.– it will therefore also benefit current and future scholars who study this topic.

Professor Mason is co-author of a widely cited OECD paper on Entrepreneurial Ecosystems and Growth-Oriented Entrepreneurship. This drew in part on the research that he undertook in the early 2000s on Ottawa’s technology cluster. He was keynote speaker at the 5th Workshop for Professionals of the Ecosystems in Latin America. Santiago, Chile, May 2015 and an expert summariser at the Kauffman Foundation’s Regional Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Conference on October 2015, at Kansas City, Missouri.
He has longstanding teaching and research links with Canada, having taught at the University of Ottawa and Memorial University of Newfoundland and was the inaugural holder of the David F Sobey Chair in Business at the Sobey School of Management at St Mary’s University Halifax. He has also been a recipient of various Canada-related teaching and research grants.

Sarah Ayres

Assessing the impact of ‘informal governance’ on devolution in English cities
The aim of this research is to investigate the impact of ‘informal governance’ on devolution to English cities post the 2014 Scottish referendum. Informal governance can be defined as a means of decision-making that is un-codified, non-institutional and where social relationships and webs of influence play crucial roles. This research involves a case study of Bristol to examine the structures and processes that are currently guiding central-local relations and decisions about devolution in England. The study will be guided by four key research questions:

In what ways does informal governance shape inter-governmental relations between Whitehall departments and the city of Bristol?
What is the relationship between formal and informal governance in shaping inter-governmental relations and decisions about devolution in Bristol?
What are the implications of informal governance for efficiency?
What are the implications of informal governance for democracy?

This research will provide critical insights into how state and non-state actors are using formal and informal arrangements to manage inter-governmental relations and decisions about devolution to England’s cities.
The theme of this proposal fits squarely with the RSA’s research themes, as set out in the 2015-2020 Development Plan. More specifically, it relates to the themes of ‘territory, politics and governance’ and ‘regional and urban policy’. Although the study is UK based, it will generate theoretical and methodological reflections of interest to the RSA’s global membership.
Read the series of articles about Sarah`s research written for our blog:

Andy Jonas

RSA members are invited to visit the project blog/website for “Global infrastructure public-private partnerships and the geopolitics of city-regions” at https://gip3cityreg.wordpress.com/ .
Read the blog article by Andy Jonas here: https://blog.regionalstudies.org/global-infrastructure-public-private-partnerships-and-the-geopolitics-of-city-regions/
Andy Jonas’ interview
Where did you hear about the grant? I saw it via the RSA e-bulletin that the Association emails on a monthly basis
How did you find the application process? I found that it was a very good process especially because of the two-step process. Perhaps more feedback could have been given but I understand that with the high number of applications received, the number of grants offered and the RSA Research Committee being made up of expert volunteers, it would be very difficult to provide personnalised feedback to applicants.
Why did you apply? I had a project that needed to be put together (seed funding) and £7,500 is a very generous sum that allowed me to complete it.
How will this grant impact your career/what will it bring to it? Getting this project funded means that my portfolio of research grew and opened the door to a wider choice of larger funding body networks. I also visited several institutions that developed my network and therefore I can propagate and disseminate ideas and findings to a larger audience (rolling stone effect).
What would your advice be to those who are interested in applying for this grant? My advice would be to follow the instructions carefully and not hesitate to take advantage of this fantastic opportunity! The RSA staff is very helpful if you have any queries about the application and it is suficiently rigurous yet very prestigious!
Can those wanting advice from FeRSA awardees contact you to seek advice for their application? Yes of course. My email is A.E.Jonas@hull.ac.uk
Any other comments? Thank you RSA!!

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Grants

As part of our Regions in Recovery Global E-Festival, we organised a session on our Fellowship Research Grant Scheme (FeRSA) – Chair: Sally Hardy, Regional Studies Association, UK; Speakers: Wolfgang Petzold, Committee of the Regions, Belgium & Elvira Uyarra, Manchester Business School, UK. Watch the recording of our session and learn more about the FeRSA funding –

The RSA Fellowship Research Grants (FeRSA) are provided to support a discrete piece of regional studies and/or regional science research. The value of the award is up to £7,500 (c. $10,000; c. €8,900). The award has a maximum time span of 18 months and reporting conditions apply. The full terms, application guidelines and conditions governing the grant are available in the FeRSA Handbook.

This award is open to Fellows of the RSA only. The FeRSA was introduced to support the research of established researchers and long-term RSA members. RSA Fellows are individual members who have been continuous members for a minimum of 5 years and who have also been defined as ‘active members’. This means that they have contributed to the life of the Association through serving on the Board or committees, have spoken at conferences, have applied for grants and other forms of funding etc. Please email the membership team at membership@regionalstudies.org to check your eligibility for this category of membership.

Please click here for the updated prioritised research themes.

Application Deadline (Expression of Interest): 12th May 2025, 23:59 BST

The FeRSA Grant operates a two stage application and assessment process. In the first round, applicants are asked to submit an expression of interest. The Expression of Interest should submitted via the form – please click on the button below to apply. Shortlisted applicants from this first round will then be asked to submit a full proposal as part of the final selection round. The Expression of Interest should include the following (see details in the handbook):

Applicant information details
Title of the research project
Timings of the research
Summary including details of research and the advances it is hoped to make
Brief overview of costs and budget
1-3 page CV

Apply for FeRSA grant scheme

If you have any questions or need any help with the submission form, please send us an email to fersa@regionalstudies.org.

To see about our grant holder research projects and to watch their videos explaining their research, please click on the Previous and Current Grant Holders grant holder names on the lower left of this page.

RSA Fellowship Research Grant Scheme (FeRSA)

Award Month

Location

Fumi Kitagawa

Award Month

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Will Eadson

Older industrial towns at the frontier of new energy economies

Award Month

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Helen Lawton Smith

Addressing regional inequalities in innovation opportunities for BAME and disabled groups

Award Month

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Elvira Uyarra

Constructing markets for new path development. The role of the state.

Award Month

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Luís Carvalho

Can startups solve urban problems? Bridging the geography of innovation, procurement and smart city research

Award Month

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Simona Iammarino

Award Month

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David Gibbs

Award Month

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Colin Mason

Award Month

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Sarah Ayres

Award Month

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Andy Jonas

Application Deadline (Expression of Interest): 12th May 2025, 23:59 BST