Five minutes from our offices on the University of Nottingham Innovation Park, the 10th Business of Science Conference unfolded yesterday with a question that the UK innovation community has been chewing on for at least a decade: how do you turn world-class research into world-class commercial outcomes, and why, despite knowing the answer in principle, do we keep struggling with it in practice?
The day produced no shortage of warning signs. Harry Swan, CEO of Thomas Swan Ltd, told the room the European chemical industry is “at five minutes to midnight,” with UK industrial energy among the most expensive in the Western world. Lewis Stringer of the British Business Bank reminded the commercialisation breakout that the average Midlands spinout raises a fraction of what its Golden Triangle equivalent does. And the host institution itself, two days earlier, had announced one of the largest university restructures of the current wave.
But the most striking thing about a day designed to surface these tensions wasn’t the diagnosis, which was very familiar, but the consistency of the prescription.
Collaboration, not as a slogan
“Coalition of the willing” was Professor Catherine Ross‘s phrase, the Chief Scientific Officer for Scotland. She used it in response to the morning panel’s question on how cross-sector collaboration actually happens without waiting for government intervention. Her line – that the artificial walls between sectors are often less solid than they appear, and that getting people in a room is itself part of the work – set a register the rest of the day kept returning to.
Professor Tom Rodden, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Exchange at the University of Nottingham (and previously Deputy Chief Executive of EPSRC), made the same point from the academic side. “Team game” was his repeated framing, for the East Midlands, for university–industry partnerships and for the regional spinout pipeline. The 14.5% of UK spinouts that originate in the Midlands, he argued, are not the product of any single institution but of a critical mass that has slowly accumulated and now needs scaling. His “whole system” framing of UKRI’s evolving role – from grant-maker to investor in a coordinated industrial strategy – captured a shift that the research-policy community has been tracking for two years and is still digesting.
Harry Swan characterised innovation as a “garden” requiring multiple inputs (money, curiosity, necessity, the occasional accident) and patience. The four-driver framework is a useful taxonomy, and the garden metaphor sits well alongside Ross and Rodden: nobody on stage was selling the lone-genius-with-an-idea theory. Everyone was describing ecosystems, networks, partnerships, and the unglamorous coordination work that makes them function.
Inclusive growth as economic strategy, not afterthought
Claire Ward, Mayor of the East Midlands, opened the day with a framing that deserves attention beyond the regional audience it was pitched to. Her argument was that writing off 80% of the country – those outside the prosperous core, those in poor health, those without skills connections to the modern economy – is not a defensible growth strategy. Inclusive growth, in her telling, is not a softer alternative to “real” growth; it is the path to productivity gains in regions that have lagged for decades.
Universities and research-intensive institutions sit awkwardly in this conversation, as sources of intellectual capital and the largest civic anchors in regions like the East Midlands. The University of Nottingham’s positioning as “a university for Nottingham,” in Rodden’s phrasing isn’t just sentimentality. It’s a recognition that the social mission and the research mission are increasingly hard to separate, particularly when devolution is concentrating economic decision-making at the regional level.
Yet the Mayor’s words, and the Jesse Boot quotation that Rodden showed above, landed with some irony given the news announced on Monday that 609 full-time-equivalent posts will be cut over three years, with 2,700 staff now at risk of redundancy. The university-industry compact at Nottingham was central from the start, but one has to wonder how much weaker it will be once this cost-cutting exercise has run its course. I spoke during the day to people directly affected by the announcement, and have many friends and former colleagues across the institution – Nottingham has been part of my professional life for nearly three decades. The fact the existential challenges facing the University went unacknowledged throughout the day was odd, given the far-reaching implications they have for the city and region.
However, perhaps this reflects a disconnect that the higher education sector must grapple with more broadly. The struggle for international students, REF results and research funding is far removed from the concerns of most people in the East Midlands and the UK. These priorities sit alongside a much messier set of regional commitments and partnerships, and how universities account for and demonstrate value and legitimacy in that second register is becoming a strategic question, not a peripheral one.
The commercialisation gap, again
The morning commercialisation breakout – sponsored by EMCCA and convened by Alice MacGowan of Nottingham Technology Ventures – surfaced the most uncomfortable structural points of the day. Tehseen Shahid of Infinity Tech described the journey from TRL 1 to TRL 9 as nine train stations, with TRLs 6–8 – the mid-stage where research-translation organisations operate – characterised as the “chasm of death.” Lewis Stringer noted that 99 in 100 early-stage investments fail in some form, and a substantial share of the remaining 1% never reach scale.
Geography compounds this. The British Business Bank’s regional funds and Midlands Mindforge, the £250 million patient capital vehicle established by eight Midlands universities (Aston, Birmingham, Cranfield, Keele, Leicester, Loughborough, Nottingham, and Warwick), exist precisely because the ecosystem advantages enjoyed by the Golden Triangle become structural barriers everywhere else. Mindforge has taken a long time to get off the ground, but made its first allocations in late 2025; it is one of the more ambitious bets that regional coordination at scale can shift the gradient.
Nottingham’s three-decade spinout density – from Scancell in the late 1990s through to recent companies like Cerca Magnetics, Blueskeye AI, and MiDx – is a promising answer to whether a regional ecosystem outside the Golden Triangle can produce sustained commercial output. The slide deserved a longer look than it got.
What Research Consulting will be thinking about
At Research Consulting Limited, the conversations at BoSC26 connected directly to questions our clients are increasingly asking: how do universities account for impact and partnership in ways that are credible to industry, to devolved authorities, and to citizens; how do funders structure programmes that survive the chasm of death between mid-TRL research and commercial deployment; and how do we strengthen the coordination work – the convening, the partnership-building, the ecosystem-tending – that no single institution is paid to do but on which the whole system depends.
The line worth taking home
If there was a single thread connecting Claire Ward’s regional pitch, Tom Rodden’s team-game framing, Catherine Ross’s coalition of the willing, and Harry Swan’s garden, it was this: the UK does not have a science problem. It has a coordination problem. Intellectual capital is abundant but the connective tissue that turns it into outcomes is patchy, geographically uneven, and chronically under-recognised.
This is where the redundancies announced on Monday sharpen the argument rather than blunt it. Coordination work – the convening, the relationship-building, the partnership-tending – is done by people, in posts, over years. It is exactly the kind of activity that doesn’t appear cleanly in any line of the financial accounts and is therefore most exposed when those accounts come under pressure. Nottingham is not alone in this. Sector-wide, the institutions being asked to anchor regional growth, deliver inclusive economic strategy, and bridge the chasm of death are simultaneously being asked to do it with fewer people. The maths is difficult, and the timing is worse.
The mayors, the universities, the chief scientific officers, the British Business Bank, the trade associations, the manufacturers in the room are all doing the connective tissue work. None of them can do it alone, and the sector cannot afford to lose any more of the people doing it. A coalition of the willing is not a fallback when the state isn’t moving. It is the actual mechanism by things start to happen – and right now, it is also the part of the system most at risk.
With thanks to my colleague Frances Palmer for taking the detailed session notes that this article draws on, and to Steve Bennett FRSC FCIM FIoD FRSA and the Business of Science team for ten years of convening the conversation.
Research Consulting works with universities, funders, publishers, and learned societies on research effectiveness, scholarly communication, and research policy. Get in touch if any of the questions above resonate with your organisation’s strategic priorities.
