Knowledge Exchange and GenIP

The great British mathematician G H Hardy is supposed to have had a toast “Here’s to pure Maths and may it never be applied.” I remember meeting Robert Aumann, who received a Nobel Prize winner in Economics for his work on game theory. He told me he had originally formulated mathematical accounts of knots entirely out of personal curiosity and expected that his work could not possibly be of any practical use. He thought he had achieved this purity until a grandson phoned from university to say “Grandpa. You remember that Maths you did on knots. It’s just been cited in work I’m doing on the structure of DNA.” All research is adding to the coral reef of knowledge.

There have been significant shifts in policy on how to promote the application of research emerging from our universities. After the War the National Research Development Corporation was set up to own and commercialise all their research. It scored some successes and also some missed opportunities. That influenced Margaret Thatcher’s thinking and we are marking now the fortieth anniversary of the key decision to end the NRDC’s monopoly over the IP in university research. It began with a letter from No 10 in May 1985. I was working in the No 10 Policy Unit at the time and remember some of the discussions about it though it was not my policy area. The NRDC lost its monopoly and instead universities were allocated the ownership of the IP developed from publicly funded research programmes - our equivalent of America’s Bayh-Dole Act of 1980.

Not much happened at first but then there was a surge of policy engagement at the start of the Millenium.

Knowledge exchange was allocated its specific pot of funding, the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) in 2001. It is still thriving and funds knowledge exchange in universities, notably technology transfer offices. It now stands at about £260m a year. A recent qualitative evaluation of HEIF by PA Consulting shows it is highly effective because of the flexibility in how universities can use it, together with the long-term stability in the programme. A separate quantitative evaluation by Tomas Coates Ulrichsen at Cambridge shows a £10 return on investment for every £1 spent: that is made up of £7.7 for core monetised knowledge exchange and £2.4 for other activities harder to monetise.

Shortly after the creation of HEIF the Lambert review of Business-University Collaboration of 2003 promoted more standardised agreements on how to do collaboration. Subsequent reviews led to the creation of the National Council for Universities and Business (NCUB) in 2013 during my time as minister. NCUB provide excellent advice and reports on the state of the crucial relationship between universities and business.

Praxis was created by David Secher in 2002 to provide practical advice and support to technology transfer offices. It has since grown and became Praxis Unico, then PraxisAuril and is now Knowledge Exchange UK (KEUK). The new name is excellent. It conveys the value of the exchange of ideas in clusters. Knowledge exchange is a social process. The infrastructure to support it comes in many shapes and sizes from new labs to conversations between people from different disciplines over a coffee. KEUK and its predecessors have a crucial role in training and promoting skills in commercialisation.

Universities are the key place for all these exchanges. We tend to think of the university role as above all generating spin-outs. There is a lot of activity promoting investment in them now. University partner funds to invest in spin-outs started with Oxford Science Enterprises and Cambridge Innovation Capital. More recently we’ve seen Northern Gritstone and Midlands Mindforge.

New data on spin-outs has just been published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) for Research England. For the first time we have an authoritative spin-out register showing 2,269 unique spin-out companies. 160 unique spin-out companies were founded in 2023-24. This a healthy performance. It is very useful to have this evidence. But we must avoid the danger of counting spin-outs as the overwhelming metric of university performance in promoting innovation and commercialisation. Universities can also promote commercialisation and application of research in other ways. University researchers may do work under contract for a business user. IP can be licensed. Outside organisations may be able to pay to use university equipment and expertise. Just the publication of research can itself promote innovation – though Open Innovation initiatives have not always yielded as much as hoped.

There are other risks. If universities feel under pressure to get on with converting academic research into a company it might be spun out too soon, long before it is viable, and collapse or get stuck in a zombie entity without the resources to grow. There are also dangers in universities taking large equity stakes. Paradoxically they may afraid of success - being criticised for not making a big enough profit from the sale of a successful spin-out so they take large stakes as a defensive operation. That can put off private investors.

These issues were covered in the Independent Review of University Spin-out companies of November 2023 led by Irene Tracey of Oxford and Andrew Williamson of Cambridge Innovation Capital. (I sat on their advisory board.) There was a very lively discussion of whether universities were taking excessive stakes and whether their stakes should be diluted in subsequent investment rounds or not. The Treasury were clear that the real gains for the economy came from successful spin-outs not from very large university stakes. It is good to see these stakes falling – from 25% before the review to an average of 16% on the latest figures.

These systemic challenges point to the need for practical, scalable solutions that support policy goals and recognise day-to-day realities. The Spin-out review set out some of the challenges facing Technology Transfer Offices which I hope a company I chair, GenIP, can help tackle. Here are the relevant quotes from the report:

“Universities should have clearly stated expectations on time to complete the stages of the spin-out process by both the university and founders. University approvals needed for a standard spin-out should be delegated to trusted individuals and not taken by committees that meet infrequently.” (p6)

“We heard significant praise for the work TTO staff do, but also were repeatedly told that TTO staff are overworked and that bottlenecks can develop. This is not solely due to funding. It can be due to decisions on priorities, a lack of standardisation, or high staff attrition because of uncompetitive salaries compared with the private sector. Smaller research universities may only have one or two staff responsible for licensing with less than one spin-out per year. This may mean that employees and the university are less exposed to the market, less specialised in individual sectors, and less able to refine and streamline their spin-out processes. It may also mean that there is potentially under-exploited IP in smaller universities.” (p21)

“Decisions on who gets funding are often taken by committees of academics who may lack experience and expertise on what research project has genuine commercial potential. We think there is a clear opportunity to review funding timelines to address the misalignment described above, and to consider including investors in funding award decisions to help ensure funding is directed to the research projects with the most impact potential.” (p23)

We at GenIP believe in the power of intelligent tools to make knowledge exchange more effective and more inclusive. As we move into a more complex innovation environment, it is vital that institutions have access to timely, expert-informed insights to guide decision-making. GenIP supports research institutions and innovation-focused organisations in commercialising new technologies. It offers two services: Invention Evaluator, which provides fast, expert-reviewed assessments of emerging technologies, and Vortechs, which helps organisations recruit innovation leaders and scout opportunities. What sets GenIP apart is its hybrid model: it uses Generative AI to enhance speed and scalability, but every output is reviewed by a domain expert before reaching the client. This ensures that quality and judgment remain central, even as we leverage automation to support faster decisions. I see this kind of model playing a significant role in the future of knowledge exchange, where scalable tools and human insight come together at low cost to help institutions commercialise smarter, faster, and with greater confidence.

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Knowledge Exchange via our universities is already a British success story. We should celebrate it and do even more to promote it.