HM Treasury (HMT) has today announced the findings of an independent review of the UK’s spin-out landscape to identify best practice in turning university research into commercial success.
Two leading university and investor experts, Professor Irene Tracey CBE and Dr Andrew Williamson, were appointed earlier this year to evaluate performance across universities and identify best practice in spin-outs and licencing deals for university intellectual property to promote the continued growth of the sector.
The University of Liverpool places high importance on research commercialisation and welcomes the interest in this important area and the detailed work of the review.
The University is an institution with enterprise and entrepreneurship at its core, ensuring resources, capability and funding are available to support growth in this strategic area in order to provide a basis for a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem within the University, across the Liverpool City Region and beyond.
Research England’s latest Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF3) results recognise our high engagement in IP and Commercialisation, and the University ranked top in the North West for Entrepreneurial Impact in Octopus Venture’s league table of spin-outs.
Our spin-out portfolio has gone from strength to strength, from developing new approaches for materials discovery, finding solutions to the climate emergency and transforming healthcare through accelerating diagnostics and new drug discovery. 20 spin-out companies have been formed in the last five years with a healthy pipeline of opportunities.
The University has committed over £4 million in University Enterprise Investment funding since the fund’s re-launch in 2018. This has been used primarily as investment in our spin-out companies and to provide funding to de-risk technology projects in our pipeline. To date this fund has leveraged £21 million of investment, industry and grant funding into the University and our spin-out companies.
We continuously look at ways to build on our good practice, for example the current review of the University’s IP and equity sharing policy, and now that the report has been issued, we will be reading it closely to identify opportunities to increase the impact of this important area of our work.