Shared technology transfer resources are the future of spin-out formation. That is a deliberately bold claim – and it needs an important qualification. It does not necessarily mean shared TTOs in the sense of one office serving multiple universities. The evidence points to something more nuanced and, I would argue, more powerful: greater sharing of programmes, expertise and resources is the real key to enhancing spin-out formation, particularly for the many universities that will never command a TTO of significant scale on their own. The structures matter far less than the access.
A national experiment in sharing
In May 2024, Research England launched a pilot programme through the Connecting Capability Fund – Research England Development Fund (CCF-RED) to test something the sector had talked about for years but rarely tried in earnest: sharing technology transfer office (TTO) functions across institutions. The call responded directly to recommendation 4 of the government-commissioned Independent Review of University Spin-out Companies (2023), which pointed to latent potential in a wider range of universities to create new companies. Crucially, the £5m opportunity was aimed at universities with smaller research portfolios and a lower critical mass of intellectual property – and it was designed to address system-wide inefficiency by sharing existing TTO capacity rather than building more infrastructure.
The proposition put to applicants was deliberately ambitious for the time available. Each project, led by an English Higher Education Provider, had just six months to “develop sustainable models and steps to implementation for shared technology transfer office functions specifically focussed on more effective spinning out of existing IP pipelines”. Thirteen collaborative projects were funded, with awards totalling £4.74m and individual grants ranging from £158k to £500k. Across them, 81 unique organisations took part: 47 HEPs, 4 research performing organisations, alongside businesses, investor and angel groups, NHS trusts and a mayoral combined authority.
The expectation was not that any single pilot would create a fully operational shared service in half a year, but that collectively they would test different approaches, surface the real barriers, and generate evidence the sector could build on.
From one project to the whole picture
My own involvement began with a single pilot. I worked with the Teesside-led project, “Pathways towards a shared TTO capability for the North East”, which brought together Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria and Sunderland and built directly on the Northern Accelerator partnership established in 2018. It was a strong foundation to start from: the North East already had a maturing ecosystem and a track record of collaborating to deliver shared mechanisms. That meant the project could move quickly past “should we collaborate?” and into the harder questions of how a shared service might actually be configured across governance, performance and delivery, sustainability, and the roles and functions that support spin-out formation.
That work then opened onto something broader. Working with Tamsin Mann at Knowledge Exchange UK I subsequently delivered the independent evaluation of the whole pilot programme for Research England. Moving from the inside of one consortium to an overview of all thirteen was instructive, seeing one experience against a much wider set of approaches and contexts, and to see which challenges were local and which were systemic.
A genuinely diverse set of approaches – and the headline numbers
One of the clearest findings in the evaluation report was just how varied the thirteen projects were. They differed in the types of partners involved, in their sectoral and disciplinary focus, and in their geographical footprint. Some concentrated on health and social care; others on advanced engineering and manufacturing, on SHAPE disciplines, or on digital innovation. One – University of West London’s Virtual TTO – set out to build an AI-enabled product to support the disclosure-to-spin-out process. Teesside’s project sat alongside very different models such as University of the Arts London’s STAGE, which created a shared independent TTO function and a repeatable “document bible”, and the University of Sussex’s Golden Circle, with seven universities involved.
The delivery timeline was “compressed” and this did lead to challenges for projects, yet, the pilots delivered a striking scale of activity. The headline KPIs from across the programme included six spin-outs emerging (one created, two awaiting approval, three in a “spin-out ready” state); over 320 commercial opportunities identified, assessed and progressed, from pre-spin-out assessments and innovation disclosures through to business case development and matching projects with venture managers; and more than 850 attendees at training events focused on commercialisation and spin-out formation, upskilling researchers, TTO staff and students. Running through nearly all of them was the development of shared guides, toolkits and template documentation – a recurring legacy outcome rather than a footnote.
The insights beneath the headlines
The KPIs tell a real story, but they are not the whole story. Some of the most valuable learning sat beneath the figures that featured in the programme’s public communications, and it turned on a deceptively simple distinction. The activity across the pilots fell into three types of “shared activity”, and they are not equally easy to do.
The first is mechanisms – collaborative programmes and initiatives such as joint training, early-stage opportunity assessment, cohort accelerators, access to funding and investor engagement. These have a long history in the sector (think back to the University Challenge Seed Funds of the early 2000s), the additionality is obvious, and they sit comfortably around existing institutional structures. Unsurprisingly, the pilots clustered here: jointly developed training and support for early-stage opportunities were among the most common activities.
The second is shared expertise – the knowledge and experience of one TTO being applied in work for another, through joint review of invention disclosures, access to deep sector or technology specialists, or buy-out and joint-appointment arrangements. This is harder than running a shared programme, it raises questions of confidentiality, management of delivery and because it asks individuals and teams to give time and judgement on someone else’s project. But the evaluation, and the North East work in particular, suggested this is where the nearest-term, most achievable opportunities lie – precisely because no single university can hold deep expertise across every discipline and sector from which a spin-out may emerge.
The third, and most difficult, is shared governance and structures – shared decision-making, joint approval panels, shared TTO functions, the policies and permissions from which spin-outs are actually approved and created. Here the pilots consistently found a longer road. These activities impinge on internal policy and delegated authorities; they require senior approval and institutional appetite for ceding or pooling control. Several projects did valuable preparatory work but ran out of runway before they could implement. The reason shared resources and shared governance are so much harder than shared programmes comes down to incentives, behaviours and permissions: for mechanisms these align easily, but for sharing expertise or governing structures they don’t.
A personal view: access to shared resources is the real prize
My own conclusion, having seen both a single consortium and the whole programme, is this. For most universities – and especially those with smaller portfolios – access to shared or collaborative resources is not a nice-to-have. It is critical to building and sustaining a spin-out pipeline.
Three things matter most. The first is access to seed and early-stage funding, the kind of capital that institutions with strong spin-out records have enjoyed sustained access to over decades, but which is not evenly distributed. The second is access to the breadth and depth of knowledge and experience needed to deliver spin-outs across many different sectors and technologies – no single smaller TTO can credibly hold expertise in medical devices, advanced manufacturing, digital and SHAPE commercialisation all at once, and the pilots showed how powerful it is to share that expertise rather than try to replicate it everywhere. The third is confidence in appropriate governance arrangements: knowing that a spin-out can be assessed, approved and structured properly, with the right scrutiny in a timely manner, is what gives researchers, leadership and investors the confidence to proceed. Where institutions lack any of these, the pipeline stalls long before a company is ever formed.
The toolkits are the foundation worth protecting
If I had to point to the single most durable outcome from this initiative – and from other CCF-funded work (particularly the Impact-IP programme cited in the report) – it would be the toolkits. Across the pilots, partners co-created shared guides, templates, legal documentation, decision tools and online repositories, developed jointly between universities, investors and other stakeholders. For institutions that had never run an investor showcase, or had no IP and commercialisation templates of their own, these are transformational, and they have sector-wide applicability well beyond the consortia that built them.
These resources are exactly the kind of foundation that less experienced universities can draw on, allowing them to access at low marginal cost the infrastructure that took others years and considerable time to develop. My hope for the year ahead is that the sector can bring far greater transparency and open access to this material, so it isn’t locked away in individual consortia but is genuinely available to all. The steps Impact-IP has taken on this over the last year with their deal readiness toolkit is a great example. Knowledge Exchange UK is well placed to lead on that – and doing so would turn a six-month pilot into something with a much longer half-life.
The independent evaluation of the CCF-RED Shared TTO pilot for Research England, was delivered by Knowledge Exchange UK and Research Consulting.
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