Written evidence submitted by the Policy Evidence Unit for University Commercialisation and Innovation, University of Cambridge (IGR0073)

Innovation, growth and the regions

1. Introduction

1.1.       UCI welcomes the opportunity to submit evidence to the Committee’s inquiry on ‘Innovation, growth and the regions’.

1.2.       Innovation is a central pillar of the Government’s Industrial Strategy ‘Invest 2035’ and a key determinant of productivity growth and job creation in our economy, crucial to help address the Government’s core ‘growth’ mission. The source of much innovation stems from the research base originating within the UK’s world-leading universities. Once translated, diffused and deployed, these innovations have the potential to transform our lives and generate economic and societal impact.

1.3.       Ensuring this innovation chain and our national and regional innovation ecosystems can function effectively represents a key policy challenge. We must also not lose sight of the urgent need to tackle the significant regional inequalities that hold our nation back and ensure that innovation is delivered inclusively.

1.4.       As these policy challenges takes hold, there is a risk that universities are seen to have little to contribute beyond the generation stage of the value chain (e.g. new venture creation in the form of spinouts and start-ups). Spinouts, in particular, have been the subject of much review and recommendation over the past 20 years. However, this is far from reality, with UCI’s evidence suggesting that universities have a multitude of available levers to play important roles, in helping companies, of all sizes and origins, to innovate and scale, retaining this value within the UK, alongside connecting actors within and developing the capabilities of the wider innovation ecosystem.

1.5.       This evidence submission draws upon research conducted by UCI researchers examining the strategies, capabilities and policies required for universities to contribute to innovation and regional growth.

1.6.       We firstly address the link between innovation and regional growth, then zoom into approaches universities can adopt to play into that, including spinning out, scaling and partnerships, as well as examining how governments can best support universities to deliver this step-change and overcome key barriers.

1.7.       Our response primarily focuses on the following questions:

• What is the relationship between investment in innovation and economic growth, both regionally and nationally?
• How effective are the government’s policies in supporting the innovation ecosystem across the UK’s nations and regions, particularly through commercialisation initiatives?
• How do factors such as the tax system, regulatory frameworks and standards influence the success of start-ups, spin-outs, and other innovation-driven businesses?
• What challenges do innovation-focused researchers and businesses face in spinning-out or scaling-up, such as accessing venture capital, infrastructure and intellectual property rights?
• How well are universities and businesses coordinating efforts to develop and commercialise research, including the role of spin-outs and collaborative R&D projects?

2. Drivers of regional economic growth and innovation

2.1.       In September 2024, UCI hosted a roundtable discussion, on behalf of Research England. Convening world-leading academics, and relevant policy officials and funders, the focus surrounded the data/evidence needs to capture universities’ performance in enabling regional economic growth through innovation and knowledge exchange activities (KE).

2.2.       The discussions revealed that regional innovation has been shown to be highly sticky, often determined by historic dynamics.[1] Where regions have successfully transitioned upwards along the global distribution of innovation capability, they have been shown to align the following factors:

• Total R&D investment: exhibits highly non-linear relationship and strong threshold effect before reaching high marginal returns
• Human capital: exhibits a more linear relationship between investment and innovation than R&D investment, albeit with some quirks (e.g. the mobility of human capital can lead to brain drain effect), and has a strong threshold effect below which regional effects of additional human capital are negligible.
• Foreign direct investment and global connectivity / access to global value chains: often materialises in a compounding effect over time, whereby FDI promotes the generation of new local knowledge, which attracts further FDI.
• Institutions and institutional actors both in the region and affecting it (including governance structures and regional/national policies, standards and regulations).
• Collaboration and knowledge exchange (KE): critical to the success of innovation ecosystems and building links between the knowledge generation part of the system (e.g. universities) with wider spread innovation efforts across industry, public sector and third sector.
• Industrial/innovation commons: the importance of the set and strength of common knowledge, know-how, technical, R&D, and manufacturing capabilities available within a region available to drive innovation across a wide range of sectors/technologies
• Clusters and agglomeration effects in enhancing impacts of investments in regions through the geographic co-location of activities

2.3.       For the remainder of this response, we focus predominantly on the role of collaboration and knowledge exchange. This particular factor necessitates specific incentives and infrastructure but is challenging to capture through data and metrics, meaning its impact can be underrepresented and difficult to trace back to inputs. Using the latest academic evidence, we lay out the key contributions and barriers facing knowledge exchange pathways that government should consider.

3. The multi-faceted contributions of universities to support innovation and regional economic growth through knowledge exchange

3.1.       There are many pathways that link universities to the innovation efforts of regions. These include knowledge spillovers arising from core teaching and research activities, as well as export income from international students, attracting tourism and associated soft power effects. Furthermore, universities can contribute to regional economies even in the absence of a specific regional engagement strategy by acting as a source of procurement and direct employment within the region which can have multiplier effects in terms of indirect and induced employment. Some of these pathways have been quantified and monetised in Universities UK modelling estimating the impact to the UK economy of the higher education sector in 2021/22 was more than £265 billion.[2]

3.2.       Beyond this, there is an important role for the knowledge exchange process to connect knowledge and expertise within universities with the wider world to deliver impactful innovation. These contributions span well beyond creating new ventures and licensing IP, which have attracted significant policy attention in recent years.[3] Drawing on the academic literature and insights from practice, Figure 1 presents a characterisation of five key knowledge exchange functions universities can perform to deliver for their regional economies. Each role is described in turn in more detail below.

Figure 1 | Knowledge Exchange Roles of Universities

Source: Adapted from Kelleher, L. and Ulrichsen, T.C. (2024).

3.3.       1) Generate: Universities create new ideas, technologies, expertise, and approaches, typically through basic, use-inspired, applied research and prototype development activities, and commercialise these through, for example, technology transfer or partnerships with local firms which generates economic value directly.

3.4.       2) Support: Universities can apply their knowledge-bases and assets to support firms in the region in delivering their innovation and other business activities. This can range from providing access to university facilities and equipment to helping partners develop and test prototypes, to training and workforce development, identifying new innovation opportunities, providing support for accessing export markets, and solving technical problems hampering partners’ existing innovation or business activities.

3.5.       3) Connect: Universities can enhance the capacity of a region to collaborate by acting as boundary spanners or intermediaries within regional innovation systems, e.g. facilitating relationships and network links between organisations within the region and between regional and national/international organisations, equipping organisations with the skills to collaborate, or by acting as honest brokers to mitigate power imbalances.

3.6.       4) Develop: Universities can actively engage in the economic and social development of their regions to create and capture more value locally by strengthening regional innovative, entrepreneurial, absorptive, collaborative, and institutional capacities. This also includes helping to build up the capital stock of the region, for example regional innovation infrastructure, strengthening the regional skills base, facilitating access to finance for regional firms, and working to improve the quality of life and attractiveness of the region for talent and investment.

3.7.       5) Transform: A relatively nascent and evolving role where universities can contribute to place-based system transformations via KE. Transformative innovation lies at the heart of efforts to address the complex challenges of our time, from climate change to digital disruption. Roles here include: building regional transformative capacities and capabilities to develop and implement transformative innovation policy; participating in cross-sectoral partnerships to tackle (supra-)regional sustainability challenges; supporting transformative governance arrangements to mobilise and coordinate regional activities aligned with collectively agreed directions (e.g. the Sustainable Development Goals).

3.8.       It is important that universities are not considered as a homogenous group, capable of performing all of these five functions equally. In practice, internal factors such as the institution’s strategic direction, research specialisations, and resource availability, as well as external factors including the characteristics (e.g. demography, geography, governance) and needs of the local area will determine the innovation specialisms of each institution and the roles they choose to assume within the region. For example, while universities like Cambridge and Oxford pursue large amounts of more fundamental research that push the frontiers of science to ‘generate’ breakthrough inventions, other specialist institutions, for example Cranfield, have much greater capabilities in applied research, provide ‘support’ solving manufacturing challenges, and delivering product development or engineering solutions.

3.9.       The diversity of universities in the UK and in specific regions can be an important asset for improving economic fortunes and tackling specific innovation needs of the economy, particularly where needs are larger and more complex requiring a combination of the functions above. Combining strengths through partnerships has the potential to provide a more complete and integrated set of support that can help (local) government partners not just seed new sources of value through innovation, but help them solve critical scale-up challenges and build the capabilities to anchor more of the value here in the UK and in a particular region. In investing to strengthen the university system to drive innovation, this diversity is a strength that should be celebrated and nurtured.

4. The role of Government funding in supporting the innovation ecosystem

4.1.       In section 3, we showed that universities have a clear role to play in supporting the innovation ecosystem, both at a national level and regional level – noting some will have more influence towards the latter rather than former (and vice versa).

4.2.       To enable universities to undertake the functions mentioned above, a notable source of government funding, in England, is the Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF). Totalling £260 million per year - with an additional £20 million supplement designated specifically to business and commercialisation activities – the fund is allocated through formula to Higher Education Providers (HEPs) in England. Note that HEIF is not available for universities in devolved nations. Alternative funding for knowledge exchange and innovation may be available dependent on the nation e.g. Knowledge Exchange and Innovation Fund in Scotland.[4]

4.3.       Whilst not intended as a place-sensitive funding instrument[5], Table 1 presents a regional analysis of the HEIF allocations from the 3 most recent academic years. HEIF allocations to each region have remained relatively stable in nominal terms. However this effectively represents a real terms tightening, owing to high inflation during the period.

Table 1 | HEIF Allocations by English Region (2022-23 to 2024-25)

Note: Includes the Total recurrent HEIF (£260m) and the business and commercialisation supplement (£20m). Excludes allocations for the Open University. Totals may not sum due to rounding.

Source: Author’s own analysis using Research England Grant Allocations for 2022-23, 2023-24 and 2024-25.

4.4.       The regional distribution of allocations are as we would expect, in line with the distribution of different types of universities across English regions. English regions each have a diverse range of institution types[6], including at least one large research institution – that typically qualifies for the highest level of HEIF.[7] Regional allocations broadly match this. For example, whilst the North East receives the lowest proportion of HEIF allocation (4%), they have the fewest number of institutions, the majority of which are research intensive[8]. Consequently, they receive the third highest average allocation per institution. The reverse is true for London, a significant beneficiary of HEIF (receiving over a quarter of the total funding during the period). However, when we account for the number of institutions in the region (varies year-on-year, 2023 = 43), London universities have the lowest average annual HEIF allocation. This is a result of a greater proportion, compared to other regions, of smaller, specialist institutions[9]. These institutions typically qualify for lower HEIF allocations.  

4.5.       HEIF invests in English HEPs, enabling them to “support and develop a broad range of knowledge-based interactions between HEIs and the wider world, which result in economic and societal benefit to the UK”.[10] Figure 2 identifies seven key categories of activities supported by HEIF, in addition to leadership and strategy and internal capability building.[11]

Figure 2 | Framework for categories of HEIF support

Source: Ulrichsen (2020)

4.6.       In 2022/23, across all institutions in receipt of HEIF, the largest proportion of spending (38%) was allocated to ‘Research exploitation (non-Tech Transfer)’. This is followed by 20% to ‘Commercialisation’; 11% for ‘Knowledge networks & diffusion’; 10% for ‘Skills and human capital development’; 9% for ‘Enterprise education’; 8% for ‘Community and public engagement’ and 5% for ‘Exploiting assets’.[12] However, there are considerable differences in spend patterns across institution types[13], as well as varying degrees of cost recovery[14]. Whilst some, e.g. technology transfer, can be income-generating, other activities, e.g. working with SMEs, may be more reliant on public funds or cross-subsidisation.

4.7.       Past evaluations of HEIF have highlighted the significant advantage of the flexible design of the recurrent pot, allowing for HEPs to deploy HEIF according to their own/local needs, strengths, capabilities, existing partnerships, and strategic ambitions (see paragraph 3.8).

4.8.       HEIF has also provided a stable source of funding for universities, of key importance in the current challenging financial environment for HEPs.[15] The flexibility, stability and breadth allow HEPs to invest in longer-term capacity, support & environment to enable KE. In other words, HEPs have funds to build critical mass, experiment with new approaches, and leverage other sources of funding.

4.9.       HEIF has been demonstrated to exhibit high returns: latest evaluation figures estimate that for every £1 spent on HEIF, £8.30 is returned in economic benefit.[16]

4.10.   Further, analysis of HEIF accountability statements show that this funding is designated for use towards the delivery of government strategies and policy priorities with all universities referencing these as motivating factors for undertaking programmes through HEIF.[17] Sustaining and maintaining HEIF will therefore be crucial for mission-led government seeking to incentivise universities to actively contribute towards their core missions.

4.11.   Alongside HEIF, there are other government funding programmes available which can support universities and develop the innovation ecosystem. For example, Innovation Accelerators[18], the recently announced proof of concept funding[19] and the upcoming Regional Innovation Funding programme announced in the Devolution White Paper[20]. In developing effective funding programmes, considerations need to be given to:[21]

• Neutral or non-neutral funding:
• Whether funding programmes and allocation approaches should be ‘neutral’– i.e. incentivising innovation in general without prioritisation of technologies, fields, sectors or populations of firms where it is regarded as insufficient – or non-neutral
• How to deal with the significant complexity of regional economies and the many ways through which universities, often working with partners, can contribute. Universities should be incentivised to leverage and combine their unique strengths, through partnering or otherwise, rather than specific behaviours they may not perform well in.
• Directionality and alignment with ultimate policy goals/missions
• The relative benefits and disadvantages of adopting place-based, place-sensitive approaches, or other approaches.
• How a regional growth-focused KE funding programme is dependent on, aligns with, and enables, other policy domains and government priorities.
• Policy lock-in and capture caused by influencing actors
• Ensuring that approaches mitigate against policy lock-in and local policy capture by groups with misaligned interests. This might be particularly important where the university operates as the sole anchor institution in the region.
• Ensuring measurable impact & incentivising strategic learning and improvement
• How to monitor and evaluate the effects and impacts of KE funding programmes in this space, given the significant complexity and interdependencies that exist.
• How strategic learning by universities and within the system can be incentivised.

5. Spinout production – a success story

5.1.       UCI’s research has provided important contributions to understand the current reality of the spinning out process, approaches to managing equity distribution and the wider structural challenges that exist.

5.2.       Spinning out companies from universities can be a challenging and lengthy process to negotiate. Spinouts are initially characterised by high levels of risk spanning technology, production, market, financial, team-related, and other aspects. Success requires mitigating these risks to attract investors and secure customers. The journey from idea to commercialised venture involves a wide range of stakeholders, who all contribute to and benefit from the process, for example researchers, universities, public funders (/taxpayer), angel investors, venture capitalists, and accelerator programmes. Negotiations determining the terms and conditions that shape the risk and reward dynamics associated with launching the venture and generating commercial value can therefore be complicated through diverse objectives and capabilities of stakeholders involved.

5.3.       A survey of senior directors within university technology transfer offices (TTOs) identified a wide range of issues faced when negotiating spinouts deals.[22] These included:

• Ensuring a fair distribution of equity between contributors that reflects effort, as well as managing expectations of founders, funders, investors and universities;
• Considerations post-spinout and how to calculate appropriate provisions that ensure inventors and founders who remain with the business are appropriately rewarded;
• Negotiating non-equity terms, for example license fees, ongoing costs and access to university expertise; and,
• Navigating and applying university IP policies and legal obligations correctly.

5.4.       Contrary to theory and common policy discussion, equity distribution was the least frequently identified barrier relative to other more structural factors with only 30% of directors identifying this as a barrier.

5.5.       There have been significant changes in equity policies over the past decade with many universities choosing to adopt lower equity positions than previously. This was accelerated in part, following the recommendations made by the Tracey-Williamson Review of University Spinouts in 2023[23]. As of November 2024, 49 universities stated adoption of ‘best practice’ template guidance.[24]

5.6.       Yet, a remaining evidence gap surrounds the impact of best practice adoption, for example the impact on other aspects of the deal (e.g. the terms of the licensing agreement) and the success of the spinout at attracting investment. UCI’s data-driven analyses on spinout equity and investment suggests only a very weak and limited relationship between the equity taken by universities at the foundation point of their spinouts and the scale of investment that they are able to raise.[25]

5.7.       We hope this type of evidence development can be properly addressed with the development of a spinout registry – another recommendation of the Tracey-Williamson Review. UCI has worked in partnership with Research England and the Higher Education Statistics Agency to develop a Spinout Register to be published in 2025. This provides a comprehensive dataset of all university spinouts in the UK. Prior to now, without being able to identify spinouts in core administrative and company datasets, it has been very difficult to quantitively evidence their economic contributions and identify other unique features of their success relative to other types of innovative companies.[26]

5.8.       Whilst progress has been made specifically around the equity arrangements, government and other stakeholders involved in the spinout process should now turn attention to other structural barriers. In UCI’s survey of TTO directors, access to facilities and (technical, managerial & entrepreneurial) expertise and ensuring a suitable investment environment were most frequently mentioned (74% and 65% respectively). [27]

5.9.       Other barriers mentioned were:

• The time availability, motivation, and entrepreneurial capabilities of the founding teams (52%)
• The technology and commercial readiness of the venture to spin out and raise investment or generate revenues (48%)
• The university resources and processes and wider environment to support the spinout (39%)

5.10.   These in part require private finance and capital to be leveraged, as well as a combination of other types of interventions, for example entrepreneurial training, more lab space for development and testing, and HEIF to underpin university resources (see paragraph 4.8).

5.11.   Despite the aforementioned challenges, spinout production in the UK is largely a success story. Over the 10-year period 2013/14 – 2022/23, the UK produced over 1,600 spinout companies and in 2021/22, the active university spinout population collectively raised £5.7 billion.[28] As shown by Figure 3, once controlling for the size of the research base, the median spinout production is broadly similar to the US for larger research universities[29] dispelling common anecdotes that the US, typically with lower initial equity stakes, but with anti-dilution protection, perform better on this metric.[30]

Figure 3 | Spinout production normalised by the scale of the research base for universities of different sizes, US-UK comparisons

Source: Figure 14; Ulrichsen and Roupakia (2024) using HESA HE-BCI survey and AUTM licensing survey

5.12.   Pan-Atlantic comparisons of the ability of spinouts to raise funding across their development trajectory is still an open question, which requires further data and analyses.

6. Scale-up challenges

6.1.       While there has been much policy focus and developments around spinout production, evidence points to there being emerging challenges in scaling these spinout companies in the UK. As UK spinouts scale to become globally competitive, there is growing influence of oversea markets and investors, which has implications for the long-term value capture for the UK economy.

6.2.       The wider scale-up problem faced by the UK has been recognised by a number of recent sources including the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee inquiry on Engineering Biology.[31]

“All too often we hear that when companies reach a certain size, they move abroad for better investment and development prospects, taking most of the economic benefit with them. Our inquiry found that engineering biology was often an illustrative case study of wider issues across the UK economy. This failure to scale in the UK is a long-standing issue across many sectors of technology which requires an urgent,

concerted, cross-government approach to fix.”

6.3.       Furthermore, a recent Financial Times report[32] highlights a reduction of British companies in the global rankings for R&D spending, with Carlos Lopez-Gomez, co-author of the UK Innovation Report 2024[33], warning that the UK is at “risk of becoming the lab of the world, having all these new technologies” that when scaled “deliver high-paid jobs overseas”. The UK is also slipping further behind others like the US on key scale-up metrics like business-funded R&D, patents, venture capital and the creation of unicorns.[34]

6.4.       Below, we introduce UCI’s framework for thinking through scale-up challenges, specifically in the context of spinouts. However, this framework could be applied more broadly to any innovative firm seeking to scale.

6.5.       As spinouts enter the market, effort and resource needs to be invested to enable ventures to scale-up. These resources stretch further than just mobilisation and deployment of financial capital. Each of the key elements – technology, production process, operations and supply chains, human capital, and business model - present different operational and technical scale-up challenges.

• Technology Scale-Up: Moving from lab prototypes and testing facilities to full-scale production involves overcoming technical uncertainties and achieving various readiness levels.
• Process/Production Scale-Up: Apart from product innovation, significant R&D is needed for new production technologies, with demonstration infrastructure supporting scalability.
• Operations and Value-Chain Scale-Up: Industrialising emerging tech requires new value chains and collaboration across the industry, facilitated by technology diffusion mechanisms and roadmaps.
• Human Capital Scale-Up: ability to attract and retain the right types of skills and talent (managerial, entrepreneurial, R&D, administrative) matching the stage of the scale-up journey.
• Financial Scale-Up: ability to access to public and private capital, to overcome associated ‘valley of deaths’ risks

6.6.       Furthermore, the spinout journey does not take place in a vacuum. The spinout is influenced by, and interacts with, the wider innovation system. Referring to the depiction in Figure 4, market conditions (e.g. the maturity of the market, industrial structure, demand conditions and dynamics, access routes and barriers) shape the scale-up potential for the venture. In addition, the actions of the spinout will be shaped by the institutional environment – for example the legal and IP system, regulations and standards, labour market policies, R&D and innovation policies, and the financial system. Collectively these institutions set the ‘rules of the game’ that shape the choices of actors in the innovation system e.g. where to locate. The scale up journey is also conditioned by the availability, dynamics and ability to access the supply-side of the innovation system. Here, we are referring to the importance of world-leading specialist facilities, equipment, and office spaces, as well as improved transport and connectivity links, networks of skills and expertise companies can draw on.

Figure 4 | Key dimensions and factors influencing the spinout development and scale-up journey

Source: Ulrichsen, Roupakia & Kelleher (2022).

6.7.       When developing nascent fast-moving technologies (e.g. AI), spinouts may face narrow ‘windows of opportunity’ which they need to hit to gain market traction. Too early and customers may not be ready or able to absorb, integrate, and deploy their product or service; too late and the product or service may be obsolete. Identifying valuable market opportunities that match their value propositions is also a significant scale-up challenge and one policymakers should be aware of when considering the urgency of their intervention to ensure the UK remains globally competitive.  

6.8.       Scale-up brings a number of challenges, however it also opens up a key opportunity to harness the UK’s regional strengths and assets ensuring value is captured in the UK and the potential of the UK’s regions can be unleashed. Universities already have suite of KE services at their disposal to support companies with innovation challenges (see paragraph 3.4). Hence, they can also deploy these towards the development journey of their own linked ventures. Partnerships leveraging complementarities could be crucial to this with examples of emerging partnerships between university cities for example, Cambridge and Manchester, Oxford and Birmingham, to scale their spinout companies.

7. Effectiveness and coordination of university partnerships

7.1.       University partnerships bring together the many resources and expertise of universities – from research to training to specialist facilities and know-how – to support R&D and innovation activities along the innovation value chain, in addition to helping partners build up their capabilities to innovate over the longer-term. There are many types of partners universities can interact with including: other universities (as in paragraph 6.8), companies (of all sizes and origins), local or national government, and charitable organisations.

7.2.       Regarding partnerships with business, over the 10-year period 2013/14 – 2022/23, UK universities secured almost £20 billion from commercial partners to support their innovation and wider business activities through these many and varied mechanisms.[35] Furthermore, a business survey by Hughes et al. (2022) showed that over 80% of companies indicated that interactions met or exceeded their expectations.[36]

7.3.       Universities and companies have to overcome a variety of barriers to develop successful and valuable university-industry partnerships. Constraints reported by senior university and firm leaders, in order of importance, include[37]:

• Agreeing and aligning objectives, setting and managing expectations around timescales and outputs, and securing buy-in of senior leaders
• Negotiating contracts and navigating the rules and internal bureaucracy of large organisations, particularly acute when IP negotiation is involved
• A lack of resources to allocate to, and previous experience (thus acquired learnings), of managing and supporting partnerships
• Difficulties to navigate interfaces and relationships between partners (e.g. lack of mutual trust between parties, ineffective collaborative working practices, communication and cultures)
• Difficulties for organisations to adapt practices and integrate into the other partner organisation’s incentive structures and objectives
• Wider external environment (including restrictive regulations, public funding not being conducive to supporting partnerships and competitors forging links with the same universities)

7.4.       Improving mutual understanding between academia and industry, by increasing the porosity between academia and industry and fostering mobility, targeted incentives, and better IP frameworks are some examples of how these barriers may be addressed.

8. Assessing the health of the UK’s innovation ecosystem across the nations and regions

8.1.       Throughout, we have detailed a range of factors that affect the UK’s innovation ecosystem. The sheer variety of influencing factors - many of which are outside the control of university ecosystems and span policy areas across government departments - makes it difficult to pinpoint a definitive set of variables that directly predict success. Different combinations of variables may lead to impactful outcomes depending on the unique context and maturity of the ecosystem. For instance, the relative importance of funding, mentorship, or physical infrastructure may shift depending on the maturity of a spinout, its sector, or its broader economic and cultural environment.

8.2.       The diversity, complexity and independencies of contributing factors reflects the richness of innovation ecosystems. However, it also poses a considerable risk for policymakers as there is no clear catalytic ingredient that will trigger success in all cases, indefinitely. Therefore, identifying ‘what works’ in this domain often relies on experimental pilot approaches underpinned by adaptable and context-sensitive frameworks, with data collection core throughout to assist in the evaluative process.

8.3.       UCI’s ongoing work programme on KE data and metrics, in collaboration with Research England, looks towards developing new frameworks, conceptual tools and data products that help to understand the health of the university innovation ecosystems.

8.4.       In paragraph 5.7, we mentioned UCI’s role in developing the Spinout Register, a comprehensive dataset of all university spinouts in the UK. This represents an important and novel first step in upgrading the data and evidence base in this domain, identifying spinouts and unlocking more robust quantitative evidence about their economic contributions and other unique features of their success relative to other types of innovative companies.

8.5.       Furthermore, other ongoing projects towards this joint work programme with Research England will support them to develop data, metrics and evidence that can capture the health, functioning and performance of university ecosystems. This includes:

• Using the newly created Spinout Register, we hope to develop a prototype dashboard of university spinouts allowing us to assess key metrics pertaining to factors related to spinout success. We are currently working through the conceptual model for metrics that robustly capture spinout success. A narrowly designed framework may fail to capture the full spectrum of variables and interactions that contribute to spinout success, leading to incomplete or misleading assessments.
• Developing the evidence base around regional innovation ecosystems and the role of universities. From this work so far, we are bringing together the latest academic insights and thinking on: approaches to fostering regional economic growth (drawing on latest international practices); types of regions and how these shape the role universities should play in enabling economic growth through KE; key pathways to economic impact and actors required to deliver these pathways; type and scale of capabilities and resources needed within universities to deliver endeavours aimed at supporting regional growth; and, developing metrics to assist in allocating KE funding and monitoring/evaluating performance.
• With the rise of new funding models e.g. ARIA, understanding what needs to be done to enable multi-stakeholder partnerships involving universities to accelerate the development of breakthrough innovations aimed at tackling urgent and complex grand challenges and missions. And analyse how this differs from traditional types of university-industry partnerships.

8.6.       As outputs of these projects materialise, we would be happy to share these with the Committee and provide further evidence to support this particular ongoing inquiry and others that proceed in future.

24 January 2025

References

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