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Flexible Fund 
Strand 3

Flexible Fund awards are intended to support new, independent activities that sit outside the core RiSC+ programme of work and are led by individuals or teams beyond the core project delivery team. These activities should contribute to the wider aims of RiSC+ by developing, applying, or validating statistical, computational, simulation-based, or systems models as a central component of the proposed work. Funded initiatives should contribute to research, innovation, or policy development aimed at modelling resilient UK supply chains.

RiSC+ therefore invites collaborative multidisciplinary teams to undertake research that is focused on generating actionable insights and models for decision makers, including those in government, industry, funding bodies, and research organisations.

All lead applicants must meet UKRI eligibility criteria to apply for or administer funding. Organisations that do not meet these criteria (e.g. certain companies, charities, or public bodies) are encouraged to partner with an eligible UKRI organisation to support their application. This ensures broader participation while maintaining compliance with UKRI funding rules and helping to foster collaboration across sectors. 

Note: Throughout this guidance, the term applicant refers to the individual Project Lead unless otherwise stated. Application limits apply to individuals, not organisations. Applicants must:

• Be based in the UK*
• Be employed by, or formally affiliated with, a UK stakeholder organisation (e.g. industry, policy, public sector, or third sector).
• Demonstrate a clear connection to RiSC+ aims, particularly in relation to strengthening stakeholder engagement, policy development, or knowledge exchange to build and strengthen the resilience of the UK supply chains.

Lead organisations must:

• Be legally registered in the UK.
• Be employed by, or formally affiliated with, a UK University, independent research organisation, public sector research establishment, UKRI institute, Catapults or NHS body.
• Hold a UK bank account and be able to receive and administer funds.
• Be able to meet UKRI financial compliance requirements if funding is awarded.
• Accept responsibility for the delivery and reporting of the proposed activity.

*Visa Holders: If the lead applicant is applying in an individual capacity, they must ensure that their visa status permits undertaking externally funded collaboration or engagement activity in the UK. It is the applicant’s responsibility to confirm with their employer or sponsor that they are eligible to deliver the proposed activity in line with visa conditions.

Industry, public sector and third-sector partners are encouraged but applications must be led by an organisation eligible to receive UKRI funding.

Number of applications

Individual eligibility 

• An individual may act as Project Lead on a maximum of one application per theme. 
• An individual may not act as Project Lead on applications submitted to both Strand 2 and Strand 3. 
• If an individual is named as Project Lead on more than one application within the same theme, they will be required to nominate a single application for assessment. Failure to do so may result in only the first application received being considered. 
• Academics who have previously received funding as Principal Investigator under RiSC+ Strand 2 – Stakeholder Fund 2 are not eligible to act as Project Lead on applications submitted under Strand 2 or Strand 3. 

Organisational eligibility 

• Eligible organisations may support multiple applications across the call, provided that all individual eligibility requirements are met. 
• There is no requirement for organisations to nominate or prioritise a single application where multiple applications are being submitted by different Project Leads, schools, departments, or disciplinary areas. 
• Each application will be considered on its own merits.  

Core RiSC+ staff, including Principal Investigator, Co-Investigators, PDRAs, Engineers and Professional Support Staff, are not eligible to apply for or receive Flexible Fund awards. This is because their posts and activities are already supported by the UKRI grant.

Core staff may, however, be involved in Flexible Fund projects in other ways:

• Acting as collaborators, mentors, or advisors.
• Providing expertise, data, technical input, or access to contacts/networks.
• Offering in-kind contributions (time, facilities, resources) to strengthen applications.

Please click here for UKRI eligibility criteria.

Strand 3 is designed to support the development and application of modelling-driven research and innovation that advances the resilience and security of UK supply chains. The strand seeks to stimulate the creation of novel modelling approaches, simulations, digital tools, and decision-support capabilities that can support industry, policymakers, and researchers in understanding, anticipating, and responding to supply chain risks and disruptions. 

Projects funded under Strand 3 must place modelling at their core. This may include, but is not limited to: 

• computational modelling and simulation; 
• system dynamics and complex systems modelling; 
• agent-based modelling; 
• network science and graph-based approaches; 
• optimisation and scenario modelling; 
• digital twins; 
• Bayesian and probabilistic approaches; 
• AI and machine learning methods; 
• fuzzy cognitive mapping; 
• hybrid modelling and simulation approaches. 

Projects should go beyond descriptive or conceptual studies and demonstrate how modelling is used to generate insights, predictions, resilience assessments, intervention evaluations, or decision-support outputs. 

Funding is available for projects between £50,000 and £100,000, with expected durations of 12 months. Projects requiring significant stakeholder engagement, co-design activities, or extensive validation may request up to 18 months where appropriately justified. 

Applicants should align their proposal with one of the following themes and clearly demonstrate the modelling approach(es) that will be employed. It is anticipated 1-2 awards will be made across each of the following areas: Food, Fashion, Critical Minerals, Supply Chain Simulation & Digital Twin, System Dynamics.   

Each applicant may submit a maximum of one application under each theme. If more than one application is submitted for the same theme, the applicant will be required to nominate a single application for assessment. Failure to do so may result in only the first application received being considered. 

Theme 1. Critical Minerals Supply Chains: Industrial Stakeholder Evidence, Dependence Mapping and Policy Modelling

Critical minerals are essential to the UK’s industrial strategy, energy transition, defence capabilities, and advanced manufacturing sectors. However, supply chains remain vulnerable to geopolitical disruption, market concentration, trade restrictions, and limited domestic processing and recycling capacity.

This theme supports modelling studies that improve understanding of critical mineral supply chain dependencies, vulnerabilities, resilience pathways, and policy interventions relevant to UK supply chain security. Projects are expected to generate primary evidence through engagement with industrial stakeholders and supply chain actors. This may include interviews, structured surveys, workshops, expert elicitation, focus groups, or other stakeholder engagement approaches designed to capture supply chain dependencies, vulnerabilities, risk perceptions, and resilience strategies.

Projects should use stakeholder-derived evidence to inform the development of models that quantify critical mineral dependencies and evaluate alternative resilience pathways. Relevant sectors may include defence, electric vehicles and automotive, renewable energy, electronics, pharmaceuticals, aerospace, and other strategically important UK industries dependent on critical mineral imports.

Applications are encouraged to investigate dependence on imported critical minerals such as rare earth elements (REEs), cobalt, lithium, gallium, indium, platinum group metals (PGMs), tantalum, and other strategically important resources. Projects may examine the implications of different policy and industry interventions, including stockpiling strategies, recycling and circular economy approaches, supply diversification, friend-shoring, trade agreements, and domestic capability development. Comparative analysis of UK policy objectives against international approaches, including the UK Critical Imports and Supply Chains Strategy, the EU Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), and the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), is also encouraged.

Expected outputs may include stakeholder-informed models, resilience assessments, dependence maps, scenario analyses, decision-support tools, and policy insights that support industry and government decision-making.

Theme 2. Identifying and Mitigating Interdependencies and Cascading Risks

Modern supply chains operate as highly interconnected systems, where disruptions affecting one supply chain, critical infrastructure, commodity, or geographical region can rapidly propagate across multiple industry sectors. Climate events, geopolitical tensions, cyber-attacks, pandemics, financial instability, and disruptions to critical infrastructure increasingly generate cascading impacts that challenge organisational, industrial, and national resilience.

This theme supports modelling studies that improve understanding of interdependencies, systemic vulnerabilities, and cascading risks affecting supply chains across multiple industry sectors. Projects should investigate how disruptions emerge, propagate, and interact between interconnected supply chains, and how resilience interventions can strengthen preparedness, adaptive capacity, and long-term resilience.

Applications should address supply chain resilience challenges that are relevant to at least two industry sectors, or clearly demonstrate how the proposed modelling approach can be applied across multiple supply chain contexts. Projects focused primarily on a single critical minerals, fashion and textiles, or food supply chain should apply under the relevant sector-specific theme.

Projects may investigate procurement and sourcing vulnerabilities, dependencies between critical infrastructure and supply chains, commodity-specific cyber threats, or cascading shocks arising from financial, climate, geopolitical, technological, or pandemic-related disruptions. Applications are also encouraged to explore the role of emerging technologies, including AI-enabled and agentic approaches, in supporting resilience analysis, risk identification, sourcing optimisation, scenario generation, governance processes, and resilience planning across interconnected supply chains.

Projects should clearly demonstrate how modelling is used to identify systemic risks, evaluate resilience interventions, and improve understanding of interdependencies between supply chains.

Expected outputs may include models of interdependencies and cascading risks, scenario simulation environments, resilience intervention evaluations, resilience assessments, and evidence to support resilience planning and policy development across multiple industry sectors.

Theme 3. Evidence-Informed Decision Support Tools for Supply Chain Resilience

Effective resilience decisions require organisations and policymakers to balance uncertainty, competing objectives, and multiple sources of evidence. There is a growing need for transferable decision-support methodologies that enable evidence-informed planning, investment, governance, and operational decision-making across different supply chain contexts.

This theme supports the development, testing, and validation of evidence-informed modelling methodologies, decision-support tools, and resilience assessment frameworks that improve resilience-related decision-making. Unlike the sector-specific themes, the primary contribution should be the development of transferable approaches that can be applied across multiple industry sectors and supply chain contexts, rather than the modelling of a single supply chain.

Applications should demonstrate relevance to at least two industry sectors or clearly justify how the proposed methodology can be transferred across different supply chain contexts. Projects focused primarily on developing models for a single critical minerals, fashion and textiles, or food supply chain should apply under the relevant sector-specific theme.

Projects should demonstrate how stakeholder knowledge, operational experience, historical disruptions, expert judgement, behavioural insights, or other forms of evidence can be incorporated into modelling approaches that support risk assessment, prioritisation, preparedness, adaptation, investment planning, governance, and policy development.

Applications may draw upon interviews, surveys, expert elicitation, participatory workshops, behavioural studies, operational observations, case studies, or industry data where these contribute directly to the development and validation of the proposed methodology or decision-support tool. Evidence collection should support tool development and validation rather than being an end in itself.

Projects may develop resilience assessment methodologies, decision-support platforms, resilience maturity models, resilience indicators and metrics, risk prioritisation approaches, scenario planning tools, multi-criteria decision analysis methods, Bayesian or probabilistic decision-support tools, procurement and sourcing decision-support methodologies, governance frameworks, early-warning systems, interactive dashboards, or other transferable approaches for resilience management.

Projects should demonstrate clear pathways to practical application through stakeholder engagement, co-design, testing, validation, or user evaluation.

Expected outputs may include transferable decision-support tools, resilience assessment methodologies, resilience indicators and metrics, scenario planning tools, stakeholder-facing toolkits, policy-support frameworks, implementation roadmaps, interactive dashboards, and other reusable approaches that support resilience decision-making across multiple industry sectors and supply chain contexts.

Theme 4. Overcoming Supply Chain Barriers in Fashion and Textiles for a Resilient and Sustainable Future

Fashion and textile supply chains face persistent challenges associated with material scarcity, labour vulnerability, environmental pressures, limited transparency, and increasing exposure to climate-related and geopolitical disruptions. Addressing these challenges requires a systems-level understanding of how supply chain actors, policies, technologies, and market dynamics interact over time.

This theme supports modelling studies that develop and apply integrated modelling frameworks to improve the resilience, sustainability, circularity, and ethical performance of fashion and textile supply chains. Projects should investigate how structural barriers can be overcome through policy interventions, organisational change, technological innovation, circular business models, alternative sourcing strategies, or new forms of supply chain coordination.

Applications should use modelling approaches to simulate the complex interactions within fashion and textile supply chains and evaluate how different interventions influence resilience outcomes under future uncertainty. Relevant challenges may include material scarcity, labour vulnerabilities, climate impacts, resource constraints, transparency and traceability, circular economy transitions, sustainable procurement, and changing consumer or market behaviours.

Projects may explore the effectiveness of interventions such as circular material flows, recycling and reuse strategies, policy incentives, transparency mechanisms, sustainable sourcing approaches, localisation and reshoring strategies, digital traceability systems, or organisational change initiatives. Proposals should assess how such interventions affect resilience, sustainability performance, environmental outcomes, and ethical considerations under different future scenarios.

Expected outputs may include resilience and sustainability models, intervention assessments, scenario analyses, decision-support tools, digital demonstrators, policy evaluations, or evidence to support industry and government decision-making on the future of fashion and textile supply chains.

Theme 5. Strengthening Food Security Through Resilient and Sustainable Food Supply Chains

Food supply systems are increasingly exposed to climate variability, geopolitical disruption, resource constraints, and changing patterns of production and consumption. At the same time, the growing availability of digital technologies and data presents new opportunities to improve the resilience, sustainability, and performance of food supply chains. Understanding the interactions between these factors requires integrated modelling approaches capable of capturing complex behaviours, feedback mechanisms, and trade-offs across the food system.

This theme supports modelling studies that improve understanding of resilience, sustainability, food security, and equity within UK food supply systems. Projects should investigate how digitally enabled and interconnected food supply networks can respond to future disruptions and evaluate which interventions, technologies, or policy measures are most effective in strengthening resilience while supporting equitable access to food and reducing environmental impacts.

Applications are encouraged to develop hybrid modelling approaches that combine multiple perspectives on food system behaviour and performance. Projects may examine the impacts of climate shocks, extreme weather events, crop failures, trade disruptions, energy price volatility, labour shortages, or geopolitical events on food system resilience. Proposals may also investigate the role of digital technologies and data-driven approaches in improving visibility, coordination, forecasting, traceability, and adaptive decision-making across food supply chains.

Projects may explore the role of technologies such as digital twins, IoT-enabled monitoring, blockchain-enabled traceability, AI-assisted forecasting, logistics optimisation, or real-time data-sharing systems. Applications are encouraged to assess how these interventions influence resilience, food security, affordability, environmental sustainability, and operational performance under different future scenarios.

Projects should demonstrate how modelling outputs can support resilience planning, policy development, investment decisions, and long-term food system transformation.

Expected outputs may include food system resilience models, scenario analyses, digital demonstrators, intervention assessments, resilience metrics, policy evaluations, and decision-support tools that support industry and government decision-making on food security and sustainable food supply chains.

Call Opens:

• The application process begins when the call is officially opened on the 1st July.

Application Process

• The call remains open for 14 weeks, during which prospective applicants may prepare and submit proposals.

Call Closure

• The call officially closes after the 14 week submission window on the 7th October.

Eligibility check

• All applications are reviewed to ensure they meet the fund requirements.

Panel review and scoring

• The Strand 3 RiSC+ Decision Panel will be coordinated by the RiSC+ Network Management Team and will include, at a minimum, senior academics with relevant subject matter expertise, a professional services representative with experience in research partnerships, knowledge exchange, or impact delivery, and an external representative from the industry or public sector who can offer insight into practical relevance, stakeholder engagement, and collaborative value. 

Funding decision

• After the panel meeting, applicants are informed of the outcome of their application.
• Successful applicants are invited to proceed to the Award Stage. 

Acceptance

• All successful applicants will receive a formal letter of offer outlining the terms of the award, including reporting requirements and any specific conditions related to the funded activity. 

Project kick-off

• Project leads will be invited to a kick-start meeting with the RiSC+ Professional Support Team. This session will outline expectations, key timelines, reporting requirements, and the support available throughout the project. 
• Funded activities may commence from the agreed start date stated in the application, provided all required documentation outlined in the award letter has been received. 

Project delivery

Funded projects are required to submit two reports during the award period: 

• Mid-Project Progress Report (approximately halfway through the project) 
• Final Project Report (within 2 months of project completion) 

Initial Eligibility Criteria Check: 

Applications are anonymised and the initial eligibility criteria check is completed by the RiSC+ Professional Support team within one week of the call closure. The purpose of this step is to review the applications to ensure they meet the eligibility criteria before formal review. 

Following the initial eligibility criteria check, anonymised applications are forwarded to a Reviewers panel before submission to the Decision Panel.

The Strand 3 RiSC+ Decision Panel will be coordinated by the RiSC+ Network Management Team and will include, at a minimum, senior academics with relevant subject matter expertise, a professional services representative with experience in research partnerships, knowledge exchange, or impact delivery, and an external representative from the industry or public sector who can offer insight into practical relevance, stakeholder engagement, and collaborative value. Each application is assessed based on pre-defined eligibility criteria. The assessment criteria will be made available to the panel, and assessment will be carried out and recorded in reference to those criteria. A common assessment form will be used to select successful bids, ensuring consistency and openness in the selection process. 

Each application is assessed based on pre-defined eligibility criteria. The assessment criteria will be made available to the panel, and assessment will be carried out and recorded in reference to those criteria. A common assessment form will be used to select successful bids, ensuring consistency and openness in the selection process. 

The panel will consider whether any proposed international activity is justified and whether the project’s primary benefit remains to UK supply chains. 

The panel must attend a final group review session, where they will reflect on each of the applications and agree a combined score and the successful applications. 

To read the full assessment criteria, please download the guidance document. 

• Does the RiSC+ Flexible Fund fund projects at 80% FEC?
  No. The RiSC+ Flexible Fund does not operate as a standard UKRI research grant awarded on an 80% Full Economic Cost (FEC) basis. References to UKRI FEC principles are intended to provide a basis for calculating and justifying eligible academic and research staff time. As the Flexible Fund is delivered through an existing UKRI-funded research project, only eligible direct project costs can be supported.

• Can academic and research staff time be included in a application?
  Yes. Academic and research staff time may be included where it is directly required to deliver the proposed project and is clearly justified. Staff time claimed through the project should be supported by appropriate records, including timesheets where required by the host institution.

• Can technician time be included?
  Yes, existing technician time may be included where it is directly required for project delivery and can be clearly justified.

• Can we recruit a new PDRA, Research Assistant or other member of staff through the Flexible Fund?
  No. The Flexible Fund is intended to support existing staff time required to deliver the proposed activity and is not intended to fund new staff appointments. The references in the guidance to academic and Research Assistant time relate to existing staff effort rather than the recruitment of new posts.

• Can estates, indirect costs, infrastructure technician costs or overheads be claimed?
  No. Estates costs, indirect costs, institutional overheads, administrative or institutional fees, and infrastructure technician costs cannot be claimed through the Flexible Fund and would need to be met through the host institution’s own arrangements.

• Are timesheets required?
  Yes. Staff time claimed through the project should be supported by appropriate records, including timesheets where required by the host institution’s policies and procedures.

• Can costs incurred by core RiSC+ staff be claimed?
  No. Costs incurred by core RiSC+ staff are not eligible and must not be included in applications or claims. This includes staff time and associated employment costs relating to members of the core RiSC+ team.

• How will non-staff costs be funded?
  Eligible non-staff direct project costs may be included at their actual cost, subject to the RiSC+ Flexible Fund funding guidance and eligibility criteria.

For any queries or further information about the RiSC+ Fashion Flexible Fund, please contact: riscplus@qub.ac.uk