As Britain looks set to leave the European Union, the paper offers perspectives from the ‘new European margin’ on changes in the rhetoric and orientation of UK funding for research. Drawing from experiences in a Scottish design institute over 20 years and contemplating mission statements from The Times’ Inter-national University of the Year 2018 (HWU), the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) and the UK’s brand new research funding body UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), it asks how research came to be mentioned (always) alongside enterprise, whether expansion of knowledge could become (a distant?) third behind contribution to economic prosperity and national wellbeing, and how real a much feared shift from basic to applied research is. Special attention will be paid to what kind of bed fellows research and innovation are within recent debates on rewilding versus taming the academic discipline of design.