Why Research Expectations Have Outpaced the Systems That Enabled Them

Published on 20 July 2026‍ ‍• Written by Dr Lisa Colledge

This article was originally published on The Scholarly Kitchen Blog

➡️ This is Part 1 of a two-part series. You can find the second post here: Designing the shift: a sequenced pathway for research system renewal

Editors’ note: Today’s post is by Dr. Lisa Colledge, founder of Lisa Colledge Consulting. In a previous Scholarly Kitchen post, Lisa explored cognitive inclusion as a universal framework for connecting across differences and improving outcomes in complex research environments. This post builds on that argument by asking why the operating model around research has made these capabilities so difficult to sustain at scale. Reviewer credits to Chef Alice Meadows.

Universities are delivering research outcomes that would have been almost unimaginable a generation ago. Research is now expected not only to generate knowledge, but also to contribute visibly to economic growth and societal impact. The complex challenges shaping research agendas can no longer be addressed effectively within a single discipline, and instead increasingly depend on interdisciplinary collaboration layered with global and cross-sector partnerships.

This direction of travel is familiar. What is new is the intensity of turbulence under which these ambitions are now unfolding, and the fractures this pressure is revealing. Many experienced leaders describe no longer being able to find sustainable ways to absorb mounting financial constraints, political scrutiny, administrative complexity, and shifting expectations from researchers themselves.

These tensions are being felt across funders, publishers, policymakers, professional services, and researchers alike. The observations and anonymized quotes in this article draw on exploratory discussions that I conducted over the past 18 months with stakeholders across the research ecosystem, primarily in the UK, including researchers, funders, research office leaders, professional services colleagues, and researcher developers. Similar signals have also appeared in international and other knowledge-intensive contexts.

Recurring themes include change fatigue as a result of cost-cutting, down-sizing, and structural transformation; pressure to demonstrate immediate value even within the rhetoric of the value of longer-term contribution; growing centralization of decision-making and detachment from local experiences; and growing tension between the expectations of emerging research talent and systems still largely optimized around older expectations of individual academic success.

These symptoms are often framed as distinct problems. But, taken together, they point toward a deeper mismatch between the demands of modern research and its operating model that evolved to support a different era of research.

The Model that Built Modern Research

Research systems evolved over decades — even centuries — to support forms of inquiry built around disciplinary depth, individual expertise, and academic autonomy. As one senior research leader commented to me, academia is “a profession built around doing your own thing.”

These structures have helped to build one of the most productive knowledge-generation systems in human history. They enabled deep specialization and academic freedom; scaled peer review as a mechanism for international quality control and scholarly trust; and created systems for allocating prestige, funding, and career progression.

As universities grew from relatively small scholarly communities into globally connected research enterprises capable of producing extraordinary scientific and intellectual advances, so too did the ecosystem surrounding them: funders, publishers, regulators, innovation agencies, professional services, and policy frameworks all added layers of coordination and accountability. Research infrastructure has also expanded significantly: research offices, researcher development teams, impact support, open research specialists, data stewardship, and professional services functions now carry substantial responsibility for enabling complex research. Yet in many of the conversations informing this article, this infrastructure was not understood as a central lever for system adaptation, but rather as the place where expectations are being translated, absorbed, and worked around in practice.

But the evolution of the underlying operating architecture has not kept pace. Research, leadership, and recognition systems remained largely shaped around relatively autonomous models of contribution developed in a less interconnected, less policy-driven, and less mission-led world.

As a professional services leader reflected, academia is “a profession built around individual autonomy that is now trying to solve collective problems.”

The Present Strain

Traditional distinctions between knowledge generation, societal impact, and commercialization are increasingly collapsing as research agendas become more mission-led and externally connected. As was recently argued, the historic separation between ‘basic’ and ‘applied’ research no longer adequately reflects how mission-led research problems are actually solved.

Climate resilience, pandemic preparedness, AI safety, and energy transition are just some examples of challenges that depend on collaborative problem-solving, relational coordination, and the integration of expertise across disciplines, sectors, institutions, and professional boundaries. Increasingly, research leadership depends less on directing individual activity and more on enabling coordination between highly specialized contributors working within complex systems. Yet, many of the incentives still prevalent within research systems reward individual productivity, disciplinary prestige, and traditional forms of authority.

Several stakeholders described this as a growing “two-system” or “dual-system” dynamic: expectations around collaboration, leadership, interdisciplinarity, and broader contribution are evolving rapidly, while evaluation and progression systems remain more closely aligned with earlier models of individual academic success.

As one sector leader reflected, “The sector still rewards sameness; the success template persists.” Another described the system as having become “a factory for a certain level of performance — and people who look the same.”

Several stakeholders described a growing mismatch between how researchers are trained and the forms of leadership increasingly required of them. A senior researcher development lead at a major funder reflected that many early-career researchers are already coordinating collaborations, supervising students, navigating institutional systems, and influencing peers long before they are formally recognized as “leaders.” Yet meaningful leadership development often arrives only after these researchers have already assumed substantial responsibility for teams, staff, and complex collaborations.

The resulting strain reflects three interlocking misalignments: leadership structures remain shaped around a narrow archetype of positional authority; operating systems reflect assumptions from an earlier era of research; and accountability for redesigning the increasingly important “in-between” spaces of modern research remains unclear. These patterns are a predictable consequence of systems attempting to deliver new forms of research through operating models optimized for older ones.

A major Wellcome Trust study found widespread concern among researchers about the sustainability of the current research culture. Recurring themes included aggressive competition, expectation of long hours, pressure to prioritize productivity metrics and visible outputs over rigorous and sustainable research quality, bullying linked to power imbalances, and widespread anxiety about career precarity and mental health. Researchers are increasingly expected not only to produce excellent research, but also to navigate leadership, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, mentoring, inclusion, impact, and institutional coordination — often without corresponding clarity about how those capabilities are developed, recognized, or evaluated.

As one research leader described it to me, “The system still rewards the person who can dominate the room… and produce visible outputs at speed — even though the work increasingly depends on something very different.”

Orphaned Governance and the ‘In-Between’ challenge

Despite growing recognition that research systems are under strain, accountability for adapting them remains surprisingly unclear.

Across multiple conversations, one theme emerged repeatedly: the sense that the sector increasingly recognizes the need for new ways of working, but has not yet fully developed the shared language, structures, or governance mechanisms needed to embed them coherently.

Most actors within the ecosystem can see at least part of the problem. Universities are investing in leadership development, team science, interdisciplinary institutes, and research culture initiatives. Publishers are exploring new models of openness, contribution, and collaboration. Professional services teams are being asked to support increasingly complex coordination across organizational and sector boundaries. Funders are experimenting with narrative CVs, responsible research assessment, and broader definitions of research excellence.

Some funders are beginning to embed questions about leadership and research environment directly into their application processes, such as intentionally asking early-career applicants not only about their research ideas, but also how they intend to support staff development, build teams, and develop their own leadership capability.

Researcher developers are responding by using tools such as narrative CVs, not only as application formats, but also as developmental prompts to help researchers understand what kinds of contributions, leadership, and collaboration are now expected. Yet those working closely with researchers regularly described how difficult it remains to move beyond “I need to fill in this form so I can submit this application.” This is especially the case given that uncertainty persists about whether broader contributions are consistently recognized in review and progression processes, or whether older heuristics still dominate when decisions are made.

Yet many of the capabilities modern research increasingly depends upon remain fundamentally ‘in-between’ — between disciplines; between institutions; between academic and professional expertise; between team-level practice and organizational policy; between local context and national or global collaboration; and between individual autonomy and collective coordination.

Accountability, therefore, becomes diffuse. Researchers are encouraged to collaborate across boundaries while still operating within systems optimized around competition and differentiation. Leaders absorb growing coordination burdens without corresponding structural support. Professional and operational teams are asked to enable transformation without being empowered to shape it.

One funder reflected that many researchers are now expected to demonstrate leadership capability at increasingly early career stages, yet “there’s a belief that people should know [how to lead] by now … but they actually don’t.” Another emphasized that “context is everything” — recognizing that even strong leadership development initiatives struggle when surrounding institutional systems continue reinforcing older models of success.

One research office leader reflected on the growing disconnect between public recognition of collaboration, inclusion, and broader contribution, and the persistence of incentives still rewarding highly individualized prestige and performance.

Several stakeholders also noted that promising initiatives often remain localized rather than cumulative. Leadership programs, team science initiatives, and research culture pilots can all create meaningful value, but in the absence of stronger mechanisms for evidencing, connecting, and embedding them across the wider operating system, their impact can remain difficult to measure or to sustain at scale.

As a senior researcher development lead at a major research funder reflected, the challenge is no longer proving that different forms of leadership matter but understanding “how to embed it systemically.”

Beyond Individual Excellence

Rather than treating collaboration, leadership, inclusion, coordination, and research culture as secondary concerns surrounding the “real” work of research, institutions may increasingly need to recognize these capabilities as part of the infrastructure through which excellent research is actually produced — alongside disciplinary excellence, academic freedom, and individual expertise.

Success in modern research increasingly depends on the ability to coordinate across differences, integrate multiple forms of expertise, distribute leadership effectively, and sustain collaborative work over time. This shift is already beginning in parts of the sector through growing attention to team science, narrative CVs, responsible research assessment, and broader definitions of contribution. But meaningful adaptation is unlikely to come from isolated interventions alone.

The challenge is systemic because the work itself has become systemic. The question is whether the systems that built modern research can evolve quickly enough to support what modern research is increasingly being asked to become.

➡️ This is Part 1 of a two-part series. You can find the second post here: Designing the shift: a sequenced pathway for research system renewal