Innovation communications: campus, cluster and country

My first taste of university innovation came at the Open University (OU).
A former journalist who had gone to ground in Milton Keynes, I was involved with FutureLearn, OU’s take on a UK-led effort to replicate the massive open online course movement catching fire stateside at the turn of the decade.
“A platform for teaching anyone anything anywhere for free?” I asked myself. “Sounds great. I wonder what else is out there?”
Once I scratched the surface, I quickly became addicted. I bid OU a fond farewell, launched Global University Venturing, and spent the next few years finding university innovation stories from around the globe.
Immunotherapies and regenerative medicine, hydrogen-powered cars and wireless energy transfer technology, robotics and artificial intelligence – every day, I would wake up and find out how tomorrow was going to look.
Discovering this world was and remains endlessly stimulating, but I soon began to wonder: “Why isn’t anyone else doing this?” Granted, you have regional university innovation trade magazines such as the fine Spinouts UK. But in mainstream tech mags or business sections of nationals there was barely a mention, if at all. To the outside world, the whole process was essentially magic.
The reasons are quickly apparent. Consider the evolution of university innovation. It is a sector started by scientists and engineers and progressed by business people and financiers. These professions clearly have many strengths, but a natural affinity for storytelling generally is not one of them.
Also, the average university innovation office tends to be understaffed and overstretched. As a result, communications are considered nice to have, but not a core requirement. Furthermore, there are few storytellers either side of the tech transfer office. On one side, you have university press offices that are not usually engaged with these stories – if they even realise the university has an innovation arm at all. On the other, you find cash strapped spinouts and startups which often prioritise almost everything else over getting professional assistance to tell their stories.
The result is that communication of university innovation has the same valley of death facing the concepts we work with. There is a vertical cliff edge after the underpinning research has been published, there are scant resources to help stories make it across the barren wasteland, and the only rides out of there charge exorbitant sums for the pleasure.
It is easy for us collectively to look at this and brush it off as not much of a problem. University innovation offices still license tech, we still pop out the odd spinout and the various numbers and metrics we collect at the end of the year look okay compared with the last ones – so what is the big deal? The issue is that we can beat people until we are blue in the face with our facts and metrics, but it is compelling storytelling that makes the difference.
Our messaging as a sector continues to miss its mark. In his recent editorial on the Autm 2019 annual meeting, GUV editor Thierry Heles wrote on the invisibility of tech transfer – and this is from a trade magazine for the sector. Research conducted by University of Oxford’s news office in 2016 demonstrated that, even with Oxford’s brand recognition, sizeable research funding and strong success in innovation, numerous groups, from the general public to MPs, still see Oxford as students and humanities – Oxford University Innovation and our many spinouts were barely on anyone’s radar at all.
The human brain has evolved to understand story over fact. The very concept of a fact, an undeniable proven truth, has only emerged with scientific method. This is why climate change is still treated as debatable by many. The facts are stark and brutal, while the narrative of “the planet is doomed and it is our fault” is unpalatable for many. As a consequence, anyone saying “you are not at fault, your family are safe, the scientists are wrong, burn all the oil you want” will probably find a market.
In contrast, using narrative as a force for good is what has inspired my three C’s for innovation communication – campus, cluster and country.
One takeaway from a recent Oxford-Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) event is that at MIT, the saying goes that you are not at MIT until you have done a couple of spinouts. This attitude comes from a culture geared up to embrace innovation, with over 90% of the institute working with MIT’s innovation arm. This sort of culture comes only when you have a strong enough narrative to inspire it. In a similar vein, we can use narrative to shift internal perception of the tech transfer office away from intellectual property stormtroopers pestering academics who just want to do research, to facilitators who catalyse research into reality and help academics make a substantial positive impact on society.
This can be done through targeted internal communications across a university, but it works more effectively when it is done hand in glove with the cluster, using spinouts and prominent examples of entrepreneurship as news hooks to drive wider culture-changing narratives.
During my time at GUV, one thing I found is that the more a cluster communicates and collaborates within itself, the stronger it is. Silicon Valley is recognised the world over, and much of that success comes from the draw the Bay Area has from its messaging, and there is a similar story in Cambridge, Massachusetts, too.
You can see this difference between Oxford and Cambridge in the UK. Both have similar research bases, attracting world-class talent to work in equally fantastic settings. Yet even though Oxford receives more funding for research, it is Cambridge that is known for doing something with it. The same MPs who align Oxford with humanities and Harry Potter recognise Cambridge’s scientific and technological achievements, and the innovation which stems from them. This is no fluke, but the consequence of a concerted cluster-wide effort to articulate the entrepreneurial strengths of Cambridge.
Working in tandem with the Oxford Local Enterprise Partnership, OUI has begun to pull together Oxford’s first cluster communications group. The idea is that whether you speak to me, the vice-chancellor of Oxford Brookes University, Williams F1, or a startup on the Harwell campus, we will all be saying the same things about Oxford in a bid to create a tide that raises all boats.
Consisting of a group of universities, corporates, research institutes and investors, we are working on shared messaging that showcases innovation excellence in Oxford. We are sharing data, research and opportunities across the network, and implementing a far more integrated collaborative approach to communication in general across the region.
Our first project is a cluster map. Taking a page from Oxford’s JRR Tolkien, who drew the map of Middle Earth before he began to tell its stories, the cluster map is all about taking the currently ethereal concept of the Oxford tech cluster and making it tangible. Drawing inspiration from similar projects in the two Cambridges, this will be both an interactive map of everyone who is here, and a who’s who of Oxford’s innovative residents.
While organisations across Oxford may have different and even competing agendas, there is significant overlap. We all need talent, we all want to attract investment of some kind, and we are all looking for partners to collaborate with. The cluster communications project and the forthcoming map provide all comers to Oxford – be they potential hires for a spinout looking for a community, investors looking for the next unicorn, or journalists and politicians looking to understand better what we do here – with a single clear window into Oxford.
From my point of view at OUI, cluster communications allows us to tell deeper more engaging stories beyond the four walls of our Botley Road office while positioning us as a lynchpin in fostering innovation around Oxford. It sells the concept of Oxford to the talent we are looking to attract to work in and lead our spinouts. It showcases the potential of what we have both regionally and nationally. And, crucially to OUI, it brings interest to our “invisible” activities, enhancing our ability to encourage ideas from the university and develop methods, such as university venture fund Oxford Sciences Innovation, to support them.
There is much talk of the OxCam Innovation Arc, an attempt to marry the innovative outputs of both clusters with Milton Keynes in the middle. But for this to be a success, the outside world needs to be excited by the prospect, and that will come only when the narrative is as compelling as the metrics charting the impact of innovation from Oxford. From my perspective, ensuring that this project and others like it work is key to the UK retaining a competitive edge in the years ahead.
More than anything though, communication exists to inspire. This is a sector filled with wonder and excitement, and it should be viewed as such. We should have academics bursting into our offices who cannot wait to turn research into reality, we should be stealing talent from tech giants and hedge funds, and have investors and corporates banging on our door to get involved – all of them here to help us build the future.
My mission is to inspire as many people to do as I did all those years ago at OU. But that only happens when we speak about it. If scientists and engineers were the first wave, financiers and business people the second, I see creativity and communications as the third step in the evolution of university innovation. Let’s put this sector – figuratively, and quite literally in my case – on the map.
– This article has been republished from LinkedIn with permission from the author. It originally appeared in Spinouts UK.