The transdisciplinary engineering project aims to transform the practice of engineering for more social benefit, and be agenda driven. For this to work, a key community of non-engineering actors needs to be effectively engaged: those working in public policy. Through data gathered for a project exploring interested in a career development scheme for policy officials offered by the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering, we explore the opportunities and barriers to better engagement between engineering and this community. An explorative online survey with policy actors gathered views on the importance of (non-transdisciplinary) engineering to policy in different policy settings. While those who regard technical expertise as crucial to their policy are keen to engage with engineering, others find it more difficult to engage. We suggest this is down to three factors: narrowness in what ‘engineering’ is (so a failure to understand the ability to apply engineering concepts, e.g. systems thinking, in a variety of areas); organisational arrangements that split policy practice that might more readily connect to engineering from those who do policy design; policy analysis rooted in standard microeconomic forms of analysis. We suggest ways in which these issues might be addressed through education and research to enable the effective deployment of transdisciplinary engineering practice.

This paper presents findings from an analysis of seven multidisciplinary national research funders’ responses to COVID-19. We posit that while some parts of research and innovation funding responses to COVID-19 were ‘pandemic responses’ in the conventional biomedical sense, other parts were thematically far broader and are better termed ‘societal emergency’ funding. This type of funding activity was unprecedented for many funders. Yet, it may signal a new/additional mission for research funders, which may be required to tackle future societal emergencies, medical or otherwise. Urgency (i.e., the need to deploy funding quickly) is a key distinguishing theme in these funding activities. This paper explores the different techniques that funders used to substantially speed up their application and assessment processes to ensure research on COVID-19 could commence as quickly as possible. Funders used a range of approaches, both before application submission (call design, application lengths and formats) and after (review and decision-making processes). Our research highlights a series of trade-offs, at the heart of which are concerns around simultaneously ensuring the required speed as well as the quality of funding-decisions. We extract some recommendations for what a generic ‘societal emergency’ funding toolkit might include to optimally manage these tensions in case national research funders are called upon again to respond to future crises.