Spinout incubators: How UK universities are nurturing startups

At every university, in every laboratory, researchers are feeling the pressure. While pure research is a laudable goal, the true prize is increasingly seen as converting science into money; identifying commercial opportunities for the techniques and technologies developed at the benchtop. Government initiatives, industry bodies and university chiefs all seem to agree developing a ’knowledge economy’ and shifting the UK’s economic activity towards manufacturing depends on developing new products, and the university lab is the ideal place to look for the technologies to enable the industry sectors of tomorrow.

But building a business out of academic research isn’t easy. How do you spot which particular strand of research is heading towards a promising technology? How do you then create a business around that? How do you attract investment, find customers and keep it running so that it generates income?

These are questions that, as has been pointed out on television recently, many engineers are not naturally equipped to answer. It’s the task of universities’ commercial divisions to help researchers to realise the commercial potential of their work. One particularly successful organisation is SETsquared, which operates as a commercial advisor and spin-out incubator for five universities in the south of England: Southampton, Exeter, Bristol, Bath and Surrey. In the past eight years, the Southampton branch alone has spun out 11 companies, of which four have since been launched onto the stock market.