Why Lincoln, why now?

The Lincoln DecisionLab will be the national centre of excellence for high-stakes decision-making. It will research to generate knowledge, educate and train to build skills, innovate to create solutions, and enable entrepreneurship and collaboration to grow world leading UK-based companies. We've been on this journey a while and DecisionLab is the next natural step.

We are in farming country with Lincolnshire contributing 10% of England's agricultural output. In 2023 the university's flagship Agri-Food Tech programme was awarded the prestigious Queen's Anniversary Prize for innovation, celebrating an impactful partnership deploying robotics and AI technologies to enhance the quality and yield of farming and food production. All this excellence can now be exploited in other sectors too.

Lincolnshire is host to important UK military bases. With RAF Waddington, Digby and Wyton all close by, Lincoln delivers the airborne intelligence collection and analysis so critical to any UK military operation worldwide. An industrial cluster of national champions, international subsidiaries SMEs and start-ups have grown up locally to support this mission. In July 2023 the Greater Lincolnshire Regional Defence & Security Cluster was launched, one of the first clusters to secure MOD accreditation. This cluster offers the perfect foundations on which to build the DecisionLab.

The Greater Lincolnshire LEP (local enterprise partnership) recently launched a new strategy called "Innovation for Growth". It ......