Ahead of the Budget, the chancellor is grappling with how to address a significant fiscal black hole while driving up Britain’s economic growth. One answer can be found in Labour’s election manifesto, which commits to supporting universities to create spinouts — companies formed from academic research. UK universities produce groundbreaking research with the potential to transform industries and society. Since 2014, 1,300 spinouts from 91 UK universities have generated more than £20bn in investments and created nearly 29,000 jobs. Yet, many of these ideas fail to make it to market, trapped in the so-called valley of death. This funding gap occurs between the point where researchers exhaust research grants and the point where technologies are viable enough to attract venture capital. It poses a serious threat to the UK’s economic prospects as a home for innovative companies. Proof-of-concept (POC) funding is the bridge that can help researchers cross this valley of death. It allows academic inventors to test and demonstrate the viability of their ideas as marketable technologies. It provides the insights needed for decisions to be taken on further investment. In the UK, however, this type of funding is alarmingly scarce. Without adequate POC support, we risk losing our competitive edge. Other nations, notably the US and Belgium, outpace us in translating university research into commercial success. Only universities with generous endowments or steady IP income are in the strong position to carve out dedicated initiatives to get the process right. And they readily do so. Research-intensive universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and UCL have established funds to support academic innovators, which explains why they lead nationally in terms of spinout success. But most UK universities do not have this privilege.
Full story: How to get UK university spinouts out of the ‘valley of death’
