Grand challenges fail in predictable ways. Here’s what we’ve learned

We are entering an era of prevention and cures, the UK’s science minister, Patrick Vallance, said recently. He was pointing to the extraordinary medical breakthroughs that have become almost routine in recent years.

But those breakthroughs didn’t happen by accident. They reflect decades of work across disciplines that rarely align without active efforts to bring together people who would never normally collaborate.

Gene therapies for inherited diseases are a case in point. Treatments now reaching patients for conditions once thought untreatable depend on bringing together advances in molecular genetics, clinical medicine, imaging, engineering and regulatory science. At UCL, work on rare genetic conditions has brought together laboratory science, clinical practice and advanced data approaches. 

The Cancer Grand Challenges programme, co-founded by Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute in the US in 2020, is another model for tackling problems too complex for any one institution or discipline to crack alone. It explicitly invites researchers from outside cancer research – even outside biology – to form international teams and take on the disease’s hardest questions.

Such broad collaboration has never been harder to achieve when conflict, instability, polarisation and institutional self-preservation pull in the opposite direction. But of all institutions, universities, with their apolitical, non-commercial imperatives, are best placed to sustain it – provided they build and defend the necessary conditions.

Grand challenge programmes fail in predictable ways. At UCL, we have run such a programme – now focused on mental health, climate, data, inequality and intercultural understanding – for nearly two decades, and we have failed in some of those ways ourselves. And from speaking to more than 40 university leaders, funders and policymakers around the world for our Where Next for Grand Challenges report, published this week, we know we are not the only ones learning how to do this. 

Programmes die when they only live in vision documents. At UCL, our programme is a working infrastructure, consisting of dedicated teams, ring-fenced funding and an events and partnerships programme. We make it easier for a neuroscientist to work with an economist, and for them both to work with business, policy and civil society actors. The difference between a programme and a priority is whether it has an institutional home. 

It is important to see cross-disciplinary collaboration as a cultural project. It carries real financial costs. It takes time to build a shared language. It does not always fit conventional metrics of success. But small, rapid funding lowers the cost of experimentation, and support from academic leadership signals that boundary-crossing work is valued. Over time, this changes behaviour.

That support is much more visible if the scheme’s senior sponsor does not have 15 other responsibilities. This work requires people for whom it is the singular mission and who are willing to spend political capital, absorb failure publicly, and try again. 

Early-stage collaborations are often about translation rather than results. They are uncertain by design. If institutions punish that uncertainty, the work will not happen. Grand challenges programmes need to create protected space where partial progress is acceptable and reputational risk is low. And they need to involve active learning-by-doing, which captures good practices, as well as success measures.

There is an uncomfortable truth beneath all of this. Many of the societal problems grand challenge programmes address – climate change, persistent inequality, low productivity – are not primarily problems of insufficient research. The knowledge needed to make substantial progress on each of them largely exists. What is missing is the institutional capacity to act on it: to integrate findings across disciplines, to work alongside communities and policymakers, rather than just reporting to them, and to treat implementation as a legitimate intellectual project rather than someone else’s problem. 

We must be clear about what universities can and cannot do. Our role is not to substitute for government or industry, but to work alongside them. That means engaging seriously with partners beyond the academy, including working side-by-side with communities and civil society, and being willing to be challenged.

As well as research, innovation and education, universities’ strength is our convening power. We can create spaces where disagreement is possible and productive. We can bring together people with different perspectives and incompatible incentives and hold them in the same conversation long enough for something useful to happen. To disagree well is often the hardest part of progress.

That is why, on 5 June, UCL is hosting colleagues and partners from across the UK and around the world to share what we have all learned, including how we build broad and resilient coalitions that can accelerate the pace and scale of change.

Whatever the geopolitical uncertainty and financial constraints, the need for such coalitions is evidently more urgent than ever. Radical collaboration – across disciplines and borders, spanning multiple leadership terms and political cycles – is one grand challenge that we must not fail.

Geraint Rees is vice-provost for research, innovation and global engagement at UCL.