Since cuts to capital budgets in fiscal 2011, the UK has been developing infrastructure to promote the sharing of equipment and facilities within and across institutions as well as with businesses. Benefits of sharing include savings by maximizing use of existing equipment and providing access to equipment that might otherwise not be affordable to individual labs. Examples of shared facilities include those performing elemental analysis and separation, imaging, MS, NMR, and those with advanced sequencing and array technologies. The UK Research Partnership Innovation Fund has invested £301 million ($482 million) in university projects for long-term private-sector or charity research partnerships. Since 2011, over 25,000 pieces of equipment have been logged in databases to help identify and locate them for sharing.

Source: N8 Research Partnership