Research infrastructure is a small world.
It has its own rules.

Technology vendors build excellent tools and then lose every research tender because they don't understand how research institutes actually procure, govern, or fund things. They pitch to the wrong people, mis-frame their value proposition, and get filtered out before they're evaluated on merit.

Smaller institutes and national nodes have real infrastructure challenges — legacy systems, data governance gaps, the need to become EOSC-compatible — but no one senior enough on the inside to make the architectural calls or write the technical sections of a grant application without guessing.

Startups building for the research market are solving real problems, but they're doing it without understanding the culture, the procurement logic, or why their roadmap will hit a wall six months in.

These are expensive mistakes. They're also almost entirely avoidable.

I'm Head of IT at Instruct-ERIC, the European Research Infrastructure Consortium for structural biology — a distributed infrastructure operating across multiple European countries, navigating EOSC compliance, EU funding cycles, and the operational realities of research data at scale.

I've spent years building and leading digital services inside this world — not advising from the outside. I understand the gap between what EOSC says on paper and what it means in practice. I know how research procurement decisions actually get made. I know what a grant panel is looking for in a technical work package, and I know why most vendor pitches fail before they're finished.

I also understand the software side: legacy codebases, data governance, service reliability in under-resourced environments, and what modern infrastructure tooling looks like when your constraints are real instead of theoretical.

"Research infrastructure is a domain where relationships, trust, and deep contextual knowledge matter more than almost any other sector I've worked in. The people who navigate it well have spent years inside it — not reading about it."

— Marcus Povey, Practical Alchemy

I run Practical Alchemy — strategy, technical leadership, and consulting at the intersection of software engineering and research infrastructure. I write about software, AI, and the research technology landscape at marcus-povey.co.uk.

I'm transparent about the fact that I hold a senior role at Instruct-ERIC alongside this consultancy work. I take on advisory engagements that draw on my general domain expertise — not on anything proprietary to my employer. I'm happy to discuss where those lines sit before we start any engagement.