Focusing on the UK's growing but highly fragmented home care (HC) market, this fellowship aims to strengthen and enhance HC businesses' offer of sustainable quality HC services, by addressing skill levels in lagging areas and encourage growth across the UK care economy and understanding current business models. Advancing business innovation and skills development in the HC sector has the potential to contribute to Pillars 1 (Investing in Science, research and innovation), 2 (Developing Skill), 4 (Supporting Businesses to Start up and Grow) and 9 (Driving Growth across the Whole Country) of the Industrial Strategy. Pillar 1: There is an opportunity to increase competitiveness in the home care sector by understanding the current business models and developing more sustainable ones that will attract investment and commercialisation. The effective adoption of new business models is just as important as new technologies to improve competitive advantage in the sector. Pillar 2: Health and social care employers report a comparatively large skills gap in their workforce (19%, compared with 15% in all sectors). Skills in communication, mathematics and technology have become essential for the HC worker's role, yet these are lagging in many areas of the UK. This research aims to help businesses assess and understand the skills needed in their workforce and raise the skills level of social care staff. Pillar 4: The ability of businesses to innovate and grow depends on creating the conditions for companies to invest for the long term and developing the management skills needed to capitalise on these opportunities. This research aims to build understanding of what motivates, assists and hinders HC businesses to start up, establish and grow and help businesses identify and address their need for management and other skills, e.g. in assessing technology needs; working with care partners; advertising, marketing and costing their HC offer to people needing care and their families; building teams, managing quality, and organising their workforce. Pillar 9: By studying businesses operating in different places (e.g. urban/rural; affluent/deprived), this research will build knowledge on the flexibilities and variations HC sector businesses need to recruit staff and build their customer base throughout, or in target regions of, the UK. By working with organisations operating UK-wide, it will examine how they manage and adapt their approach for different localities, e.g. in regions facing lower levels of inward investment, with low productivity, or lagging skill levels. Implementing the innovation-oriented research and engaging industrial partners. The research will include several short periods placements with different home care provider businesses, to build trust and a holistic understanding of its vision, strategy and operational constraints. Working with HC industry bodies and with specific partner companies (selected for their potential to yield insight into their business model and offer to customers, and to how this has been configured and experienced as part of their growth or expansion strategy), the fellowship aims to: (a) analyse the challenges these businesses face in developing, extending and sustaining their business models and configuring the provision and delivery of quality care services; (b) assess how they change in response to forces and conditions affecting the HC market; (c) examine how they evaluate and address workforce and management skills needs; (d) produce a robust understanding of the business environments in which quality-orientated innovative HC businesses are operating, set out in concise reports accessible to key industry stakeholders; (e) examine different industry perspectives on the business benefits of innovating in the wider care economy, with the aim of building a 'business case' for extending innovation to long-standing, as well as start-up, HC companies.