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Bright ideas: Researchers will be given help to bring products to market
A £3.2 million pilot project has been launched to help research and spin-out firms across the South and West of England to commercialise their products.
Funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and Innovate UK, the Innovation and Commercialisation of University Research (Icure) project aims to bridge the so-called “valley of death” identified by House of Commons science and technology select committee inquiries. The committee defined it as the gap in progress of science from the laboratory to commercialisation.
Icure will see the funding council, Innovate UK and university enterprise partnership Setsquared address issues raised in the government’s response to the committee’s 2013 inquiry into improving the commercialisation of research, including the importance of innovation by universities in managing intellectual property and of attention to the availability of “proof of concept” funding.
Early-stage researchers at the five Setsquared universities – Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Southampton and Surrey – will be given tailored training, mentoring and funds to speed up the commercialisation of their ideas, technologies and products. The project was inspired by Innovate UK’s review of a similar research accelerator programme operated by the US National Science Foundation, called I-Corps.
Don Spalinger, board member of Setsquared and director of research and innovation services at the University of Southampton, said: “Particularly in the field of technology, where everything evolves so fast, getting a product to market quickly can make the difference between creating a successful business and falling behind. The flexibility of this programme will allow researchers to assess their markets much faster, meaning they can potentially seek investment or sell their ideas within just a few months.”
There is a cohort of eight teams set to receive Icure funding, with a total of 50 teams due to join the pilot programme by 2016. The project will be rolled out to the rest of the country provided the 50 teams are able to further develop their ideas or bring them market.
Among those looking to commercialise its technology is a research team from the University of Southampton that has developed an advanced method of laser writing on chemically treated paper for biological tests. The technology is similar to that of a home pregnancy test kit but will be able to isolate and test for potentially hundreds of diseases at a time. The University of Surrey is also hoping to further test its advanced electronic voting system, which securely receives votes via a smartphone or web-connected device and accurately collates the data.
The programme will also benefit teams that do not move to spin-out. Spalinger said: “We do not expect that every team going through the programme will result in a spin-out opportunity. The successful output for some teams will be the licensing of the technology or product idea to an existing company which will commercialise it. Other teams will gain invaluable knowledge of the marketplace, which will be taken back into the research lab to either refine the ideas and technologies or take the research down another path that they have discovered from their interactions with the marketplace.”
Innovate UK is making £6 million available over the next two years to help university spin-out companies to develop faster and be more attractive to private investors.