Accessibility Tools
For Aline Miller and Luke Georghiou, it is important to train innovators within universities to bridge the gap between research and societal impact. Here, they highlight how University of Manchester initiatives, as well as efforts to leverage collaboration, regional ecosystems and national initiatives, support innovation and commercialization.
An increasingly competitive and innovation-driven global landscape calls for universities to not only deliver high-quality education and research, but to also drive economic growth and technological advancement and address major global challenges. While these societal demands are increasingly recognised within universities, tangible activities to address them often depend on a minority of staff who have acquired the necessary entrepreneurial skills.
So, how can universities expand the number of staff members who possess these invaluable skills? While many universities across Europe are taking action to provide training and a supportive environment for innovation and commercialization, there is unrealised potential for a great deal more.
One of the most impactful initiatives at the University of Manchester has focused on is training academic staff in entrepreneurship. The pan-university Innovation Academy inspires entrepreneurial activity, helps accelerate the translation of ideas and builds a supportive founders’ community. All of these factors help reduce the risk of failure. They also help staff pivot from a purely academic mindset to a commercial one, and encourage exploration of how their research can solve real world problems.
Consistent engagement and dedicated resources are needed to help staff bridge the gap between research and market needs. Our Innovation Academy achieves this by raising awareness of the different routes to impact and showcasing different academic entrepreneurial journeys through a range of face-to-face and online seminars, workshops and panel discussions. It also educates staff on the pathways to success through masterclasses from external experts and entrepreneurial alumni and a library of online resources, soundbites and webinars.
The Academy is also building a supportive entrepreneurial community, internally through its Founders Network, which meets periodically to share experiences, and through informal networking events with external expert mentors. The latter in particular opens access to further networks and funding and builds connections across the UK.
Our national environment also provides helpful initiatives to support the development of talent in innovation. Most of these are supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the national body comprised of the seven disciplinary research councils, Research England, which is responsible for supporting research and knowledge exchange at higher education institutions in England, and the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK.
More broadly at the University of Manchester, efforts to foster entrepreneurial mindsets are mainly carried out through its innovation infrastructure. Student training is undertaken by the Masood Entrepreneurship Centre, which also provides competitions and start-up support for students and post-docs. Mutual interaction between staff and students, especially at graduate level, is often key to the commercialization of research. Meanwhile, intellectual property developed by our staff is managed through the Innovation Factory, a wholly-owned subsidiary which functions as the university’s technology transfer office.
In addition, these bodies engage with UKRI programmes such as ICURe (Innovation to Commercialisation of Research), which targets academic researchers and their teams (ranging from doctoral to principal investigators) through an accelerator programme including business skills development. In a learning-by-doing mode, Innovate UK supports Knowledge Transfer Partnerships in which a graduate works on a specific innovation problem for a business under the supervision of an experienced academic. Lasting 12-36 months, these projects develop technical and leadership skills, often leading to full time employment with the business partner.
A recent trend has been collaboration with neighbouring institutions in the North of England, including the formation of a £320m venture capital company, Northern Gritstone, which itself provides accelerator programmes for the spinouts in which it invests. Other collaborative features include a shared mentor network and an offer of commercialization services to smaller institutions which lack the throughput level to support a comprehensive infrastructure.
Going forward, the regional ecosystem is being further developed through a joint venture between the University of Manchester and commercial partners to convert the former University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) campus into a city-centre innovation district, known as SISTER. SISTER is already offering no cost and low cost accommodation for early-stage start-ups and spinouts.
The university’s latest initiative, Unit M, will foster connections between the university and the regional innovation ecosystem to promote inclusive growth by powering the start-up and scale up community. To do so, it has kicked off work on catalysing industry clusters, leading future fit skills provision and strengthening partnership with our regions civic partners and its people, as well as telling Manchester’s innovation story.
In conclusion, however much a university and national authorities strive to support innovation, success remains critically dependent upon the supply of people with the requisite skills to create impact from research and an ecosystem in which they can flourish.
