Jessica Corner: we need a “third age” for research commercialisation

Speaking at the Universities UK conference in Nottingham this week, Research England executive chair Jessica Corner suggested that it was time for a “third age” in the commercialisation of research and innovation – one structured around sector-wide collaborative work to convert research into “durable national value.”

Corner set out a way of thinking about how the commercialisation landscape has changed in the past few decades, starting from an initial period where universities were “not particularly held account for commercialising,” even if patents and other forms of intellectual property were understood as useful markers of research output.

This then gave way to the “second age” of commercialisation – where the research sector now finds itself, she explained – which is characterised by efforts to professionalise commercialisation, establish and scale tech transfer offices, and improve processes more generally. Funds such as HEIF have played an important role here – but there is still more to do:

“Really what this age has been about was the individual institutions in competition in a marketplace of getting capital investment in… They’re doing the best they can with that, with the outcome being a great spin-out. If you’ve done that and it’s going well, that’s kind of the job done.”

But the journey beyond acquisition or licensing, she noted, isn’t being measured in a systematic way. In this context, it should come as no surprise that there continues to be plenty of conversation about the UK supposedly being a “factory of ideas which are then applied elsewhere” (as argued in a recent Financial Times opinion piece which she referenced).

As Corner put it, these weaknesses with the current model – both institutional competition and the need to account for the longer-term commercialisation journey – spoke to the need for the third phase of activity, “where we work collaboratively to convert research into durable national value.”

“It’s from commercialisation as the objective to value capture, and it’s one that optimises the support for founders, companies, the end-to-end journey. It creates the conditions in which we actually think about how you anchor those companies into the UK as a first principle, not as a “happy accident” endpoint that we like if we see it when we get there. So we need to create a joined-up environment in which they can grow and scale.”

The answer, she felt, lay in university collaboration rather than competition: the shared tech transfer office model, for example, being much more efficient than “everybody trying to build their own.” But it was also about institutions such as the British Business Bank and the National Growth Fund stepping up with later-stage growth capital.

She also observed that the UK did not need more incubators and accelerators per se (“I think there are 440 incubators and 180 accelerator programmes – there are loads of them”) but rather that they needed to be better, and targeted in a more effective way.

Corner concluded by highlighting Research England’s freshly launched Collaboration for a Sustainable Future programme, saying that she expected to see “very imaginative projects” come out of the funding opportunity.