This article explores the understandings of academics who carry out unfunded research and the nature of their academic identity, in a context where research funding is realigned to government and corporate needs, and the academic career is recast as an entrepreneurial project. It draws on in-depth interviews with academics working in UK universities, at different career stages in a range of disciplines. Main findings include that research is 'self-funded' rather than unfunded, and that participants often decided not to apply for external funding. A major reason for this was a sense of resistance motivated by intellectual creativity and flexible autonomy. At the same time, unfunded research also could be compliance with a neo-liberalised university agenda, viewed as entrepreneurial. Unfunded research can be viewed as a way of managing tensions between wanting and needing to do research, throwing light on the identity of being a contemporary intellectual-entrepreneurial academic in the neo-liberalised university.