Is the glass half full or half empty for UK research commercialisation, asks Mike Rees in a lecture for National Centre for Universities and Business.

“Ubiquitous, mobile supercomputing. Intelligent robots. Self-driving cars. Neuro-technological brain enhancements. Genetic editing. The evidence of dramatic change is all around us and it’s already happening at exponential speed,” wrote Klaus Schwab in The Fourth Industrial Revolution. “The world is undergoing a technical revolution, which is of a scale, speed and complexity, unprecedented, with the fusion of technologies that is blurring the physical, digital and biological world. We need to be clear where our distinctive advantages lie, building on our existing strengths from cybersecurity, machine learning, microelectronics design, biotechnologies such as genetics and cell therapies. We must do this as a partnership between businesses, scientists, investors, educators and policy makers,” argued the 2017 UK Government Industrial Strategy white paper. Against this very dynamic but challenging backdrop, how is the UK doing and specifically how is the partnership between businesses, academics, investors and policy makers working? My focus today and the recommendations in my review are on the businesses, academics, policy makers and investors. The wider issue of commercialisation of research was looked at by Prof Trevor McMillian with his work with the Higher Education Funding Council for England on university knowledge exchange. I would encourage you to read his excellent report and the proposed Concordat for Universities. I also will not be covering student startups, which were outside the scope of my review, but are a very important part of the university entrepreneurial ecosystem. In my review I focused on three key questions: What are the traditional strengths of university research that the UK is leveraging? Is the UK capable of translating research into commercial value or is it true that “Britons discover and the rest of the world cashes in” ? What can be done to build on current trajectory and to realise the future ambition? In answering these questions, I will refer to data you can find in Tomas Coates Ulrichsen’s report issued by UKRI in July 2019. Let me start by maybe focussing on the first two questions together. One of the UK’s great historic strengths has been as a global leader in research of science and technology, consistently topping in measures of research excellence and home to three of the top 10 global research universities. On a head-line basis, Arm, DeepMind, Darktrace, Improbable, Autolus, Oxford Nanopore, Ceres Power, CMR Surgical, Quell Therapeutics, to name but a few, are great examples of what is possible. These companies, based on deep science and technology, are essential to improving productivity and solving major…

Subscribe to go deeper

GCV subscribers get access to all our proprietary data and deep-dive articles, as well as the global directory of CVC investors.



Not sure if you have a subscription?