The project explores the barriers to arts-based ventures spinning out from universities. It will identify challenges such as institutional resistance due to unclear intellectual property (IP) structures and consultancy-based business models. The team will engage with academics and professional services to create policies and pathways to encourage spinouts in arts subjects like performing arts and film/media.
How Can Members Get Involved?
Members can participate in surveys, focus groups, and roundtable discussions during the research phase. Outputs such as policy documents and a playbook will be available to guide and inspire further actions in their institutions.
This project is conducting a UK mapping exercise to identify CEOs within SHAPE ventures. It aims to create a database of CEOs who could lead SHAPE spinouts or mentor future leaders. This will address the challenge of finding executives passionate about SHAPE research to enhance commercialisation opportunities.
How Can Members Get Involved?
Members can contribute by sharing information on potential candidates and engaging in stakeholder discussions to refine the database. The final report and database will be accessible for collaboration and mentorship between Aspect members.
The project is developing the groundwork for a comprehensive SHAPE spinout guide. It will identify gaps in current guidance and propose a framework for drafting a SHAPE-specific guide to support universities in spinning out research ventures.
How Can Members Get Involved?
Members can respond to survey questions about the guidance they currently use and where they feel different or additional guidance would help them support SHAPE spinouts, and provide feedback on draft outputs. There will be opportunities to feed into the wider Aspect work to draft and finalise a new SHAPE spinout guide, informed by this testbed project.
Aspect has achieved significant milestones since its inception five years ago. As it progresses towards its latest phase, marked by the introduction of a new funding model, Aspect aims to accomplish three primary objectives:
Showcasing Impact Achievements: Over the past years, Aspect has made remarkable strides in fostering SHAPE commercialisation. Through collaborative efforts with 50 higher education institutions and partner organisations, it has built an ecosystem supporting the emergence of new commercial opportunities from SHAPE research.
Highlighting Future Potential: The programme underscores the existing and potential impact of SHAPE commercialisation. By nurturing relevant capacity and skills, sharing knowledge, and addressing challenges and opportunities in commercialisation, Aspect aspires to ensure SHAPE research significantly contributes to the UK economy and society.
Enhancing Impact Reporting: To reinforce the case for future funding and institutional participation, Aspect seeks to effectively capture and demonstrate the economic and social benefits derived from its initiatives. This entails a shift from focusing solely on activities and outputs to capturing outcomes and real-world impacts.
To achieve these goals, Aspect has undertaken a comprehensive review of its activity over the last few years, encompassing findings, insights, and recommendations across various dimensions. In this report, we go hunting for the strongest set of outcome proof points to ensure Aspect is able to fully demonstrate its impacts to critical audiences, including Members and new potential funders, includinG:
Impact Capture Methodology: Insights into the methodologies employed to capture and assess the impact of Aspect’s initiatives.
Pre-zero Point Impact Assessment: Evaluation of the impact achieved prior to the implementation of specific interventions.
Post-zero Point Impact Assessment: Assessment of the impact realised following the implementation of interventions and initiatives.
Comparison to Mature SHAPE Spin Outs: Comparative analysis with more established SHAPE spinouts to identify trends and best practices.
Lessons for SHAPE Commercialisation: Insights gleaned from Aspect’s experience to inform future strategies and approaches in SHAPE commercialisation.
Impact Reporting Conclusions and Future Approach: Conclusions drawn from the impact reporting exercise and recommendations for future reporting methodologies.
With this research in-hand Aspect aims to provide a robust framework for capturing, assessing, and reporting on the impact of its initiatives, thus paving the way for continued success and growth in SHAPE commercialisation.
A huge thank you to Campbell McDonald and Mark Mann from Divine Ox for conducting this research and producing the report.
The aim of phase 2 was to create a community of engaged academics, professional services staff and business in the games development ecosystem, and study market validation/ commercialisation routes via the the ‘Legally Wed’ project.
The aim of the Phase 3 extension is to increase awareness amongst SHAPE academics and professional staff about the potential and best practice in developing commercially viable outputs through games, through: populating a library of existing and new resources (webinars, game testing, toolkits, survey feedback etc.), facilitating discussion with its members and industry (events, workshops), and creating an online training course for those interested in converting their research into games.
The University of Glasgow split its funding from Aspect to support three initiatives: (1) Innovation Audit, (2) Entrepreneurship/ Challenge-led placements, and (3) Zinc and investor relationship building.
INNOVATION AUDIT
The Innovation Audit set out to uncover and develop existing research for innovation activity. The University IP & Innovation team ran these ‘audits’ in the STEM colleges regularly and began to look at how to adjust the model to work for SHAPE disciplines.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP/ CHALLENGE-LED PLACEMENTS
This part of the project aimed to empower SHAPE researchers to deploy entrepreneurial skills to short-term placements around specific challenges for business partners to develop the depth of private sector relationships with strategic partners alongside building innovation confidence in keen researchers.
ZINC & INVESTOR RELATIONSHIP BUILDING
Across SHAPE disciplines, the team recognised the need to grow a base of investors who understand the nuances of early-stage investment and how that differs from our STEM counterparts (i.e., often earlier stage and potentially lower growth but high societal good, different business models, etc), while helping shape suitable business models that excite investors. This part of the project enabled travel for both academics and professional support staff to attend Zinc events in London, providing a variety of options to catalyse innovative growth from research.
Seeding University Collaboration for Commercialisation and Enterprise in Social Sciences
The SUCCESS programme (now ARC) is a first-of-its-kind opportunity designed to help social scientists with innovative and marketable research ideas. This programme provided them with the training, support and funding to transform those ideas into a business or social enterprise. Successful applicants benefitted from support to build their idea, including a three-day bootcamp focused on imparting entrepreneurial skills, expert speakers and mentorship as well as the opportunity to pitch for up to £50,000 in prize money and investors.
Bringing Bristol’s professional services teams together to deliver support for SHAPE using a shared framework.
Project dates:
November 2021 – October 2022
Why is this needed?
At the University of Bristol we try to significantly increase the impact at scale from academic research. However, we believe we identified challenges such as
Social science academics usually are not part of large groups that can spend years developing patents and technologies and therefore, generate soft IP that is more challenging to commercialese.
Culture means academics are less excited about commercialisation and the terminology
Lack of transitional resources and limited coordination between different professional service functions.
Inefficient processes for obtaining advice, slowing projects and funding bids
Siloed knowledge and lack of reaching out to other academics with complementary knowledge.
In order to address some of these challenges the University of Bristol established a “translational impact hub” that includes all professional service functions meeting on a monthly basis to discuss certain projects.
What did the project achieve?
Aspect funding enabled the Bristol team to take a more coordinated approach and hire an impact acceleration officer to help expand the activities by doing the following:
Map existing pipelines and challenges
Conduct and test additional activities to stimulate more projects (talks, events etc.)
Build on our IAA activities and further accelerator existing projects within our impact pipeline.
Develop and test a framework to allow us to track projects and outcomes.
Produce a project report to be shared with Aspect members on how to best set up a hub and get the most benefits for each institution.
What was the output of the project?
A short report available to Aspect members on the Aspect Members Platform was produced summarising how the Hub was run, what sort of training and support was provided, how the tracking framework works, and including case studies of applying the framework to real projects. (The report is available to Aspect Members only.)
The project ran in parallel to the Aspect Translational Impact Acceleration Hub project, which also deployed the tracking framework across a group of Aspect members, and developed some of the support offerings with input from the Hub team.
This project allowed researchers to engage with the relevant commercial stakeholders (specifically AI firms, law firms, and arbitral institutions) to ensure the careful and ethically appropriate integration of AI technologies into commercial arbitration processes through the application of the academic research conducted by the authors.
MicroSEM was a project led by a team at the University of Sussex Business School, which aimed to understand how to better engage with the UK’s smallest businesses, micro and small businesses (up to 49 employees), for supporting their transition to Net Zero.
In the UK, small and medium size businesses (from zero to 250 employees) collectively emit around half (43-53%) of UK’s business sector carbon emissions, however 76% of SMEs are yet to implement decarbonisation strategies with only 3% having measured their carbon emissions to set reduction targets. The existing literature on SME and Net Zero argues that 34% of businesses are more likely to not be prepared for transitioning to Net Zero, suggesting these are often the smallest businesses.
Current academic discussions on SME decarbonisation in the UK suggest that micro and small businesses (up to 49 employees) remain an understudied area of research. Outputs of this project including a video and tools for better approaching micro and small businesses in relation to Net Zero are available on the Aspect Member Platform.
