Ideas to impact public sector support for research commercialisation: strengths, ambition and progress report

Looking Ahead

Whilst we have begun to address barriers to progress, we have more work to do. Our plans for the year ahead as a public sector reinforces our commitment to our vision for Scotland.

Proof of Concept Funding

Following a successful pilot, the Scottish Government aims to re-launch its £3 million Proof of Concept Fund, a competitive fund that will support early to mid-stage commercialisation activity to de-risk technology and attract follow on investment. It will further strengthen the pipeline of Scottish research capable of generating economic value. This funding will support research commercialisation activity across Scotland increasing the pipeline of commercialisable opportunities in Scotland, generating highly skilled jobs and directly contributing to economic growth.

Partnerships and Collaboration

Over the next two years, the Scottish Funding Council are providing additional funding via a £3 million R&I Shared Services Collaboration Fund to pilot a new way of supporting Scottish universities to work together for efficiency and sustainability toward R&D activity. The Fund has been specially created to address the challenges of the current challenging financial climate, and augments the sector’s capacity for closer collaboration and innovation.

Scottish Innovation Fund

The Scottish National Investment Bank, in collaboration with the Scottish Universities and the Scottish Government, is developing a dedicated investment initiatve, focussed on university spinouts and early stage, IP-rich startups across Scotland.

The Bank is working to strengthen the pipeline of innovation-driven companies emerging from our world-class academic institutions, and grow the investment available to support their future scaling and growth.

Scotland’s entrepreneurial ecosystem is strong and growing, and additional capital will further fuel this growth. This will allow businesses to move from their early beginnings and pre-seed funding through to the growth capital required to allow high-potential businesses to scale. Our universities are already producing world class research in fields such as life sciences, quantum computing, robotics and AI, and this additional capital source will allow this research to create world-class businesses that can achieve global scale, while anchored in Scotland.

The Bank will utilise its deep market connections to work alongside private investors, and crowd further investment into the sector. It will also work with existing structures such as the Research and Commercialisation Directors Group and Universities Scotland to ensure investment is available to high potential business seeking to grow out of any of our universities.

Spinout Pipeline Development

Over the next year, Scottish Enterprise will pilot a new transformational approach to university commercialisation by bringing together all the essential elements of commercialisation into a Venture Creator, aligning significant global market opportunities with Scotland’s highest calibre research interests.

The Venture Creator aims to address several system level challenges currently limiting Scotland’s ability to fully realise the scale of opportunity from its world-class research base. This includes understanding the strengths within Scottish universities, encouraging proactive collaboration, reducing time taken to translate research into commercial opportunities, improved curation of the pipeline and embedding commercial skills and talent into founding teams resulting in the creation of top-tier companies.

In addition to the Venture Creator, Scottish Enterprise will focus on partnership programmes and commercialisation pathways that maximise economic and innovation outcomes. Through the Commercialisation Pathway and Partnership Programme SE will seek to capitalise on Scotland’s excellence in the photonics and quantum research by generating a strong pipeline and thus, portfolio, of sector-specific companies cementing the cluster further. The pilot programme seek to leverage external funding, to accelerate the creation of high growth companies. Delivered in partnership with UKRI, Innovate UK ICURe, the universities of Glasgow, Strathclyde, Heriot Watt, and St Andrews, as well as Converge, the programme will coordinate a sector-specific suite of activity supported by comprehensive commercialisation expertise.

In addition to the thriving photonics and quantum sectors, commercialisation pathways and partnerships are being reimagined for other vitally important areas such as medtech and healthtech. This approach leverages deep partnerships not only with universities, but also with industry and the NHS to support improved patient outcomes and to position Scottish companies for adoption across global healthcare systems.

Infrastructure

Scottish Enterprise will lead a programme of activity to stimulate private sector investment into life sciences accommodation in key locations. The programme will strengthen the pathway to growth from early-stage enterprises. Aligned with this, the publication of regular updates on demand levels for lab space will provide timely intelligence to increase confidence that Scotland is an attractive location for investing in new life science accommodation. Scottish Enterprise and the Scottish Government will also jointly publish a Life Sciences accommodation guide to help early-stage companies navigate the complexities and costs of accommodation and fit out.

Diversity

There is a lot more work to do in Scotland to more effectively embed diversity and inclusion into our evolving commercialisation landscape, building on existing pockets of public sector-supported projects to address this issue. The Scottish Government, with support from the Chief Entrepreneur, is undertaking work to develop policy to support female founders to raise investment, engaging with the investment and founder communities.

We are also committed to continue to improve the monitoring of diversity data and filling data gaps where identified to help redress imbalances in the system, and have built in monitoring elements into this report’s metrics.