Source · Select Committees · Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Recommendation 8
8
Not Addressed
The Government should incentivise complementarities between institutions in London, Oxford and Cambridge and those in...
Recommendation
The Government should incentivise complementarities between institutions in London, Oxford and Cambridge and those in other regions, such as through programmes to help spinout companies to scale up elsewhere in the country. Good practice examples include the partnership between the Universities of Cambridge and Manchester. The Government should put in place a mechanism for identifying these opportunities, setting out the details in its response to this report. (Recommendation,Paragraph 31)
Government response summary AI-generated
The government partially agrees but its response fails to address the recommendation to incentivise complementarities between regional institutions or establish a mechanism for identifying spin-out scaling opportunities, instead discussing existing data transparency and R&D mapping.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Government Response
Not Addressed
HM Government · verbatim extract
Not Addressed
The government agrees with this recommendation and is already acting on it. We agree that collaboration between universities in the Greater South East and institutions across the UK can support spin-outs to scale and drive regional growth. We also agree with the Committee that the Cambridge-Manchester partnership demonstrates how this can work in practice. Through Research England, £4.8 million is being provided over three years to support this partnership. The university-led collaboration is testing new approaches to place-to-place innovation working, sharing commercialisation expertise and supporting start-ups and scale-ups to attract investment and create high- value jobs. DSIT and UKRI will continue to work closely with this partnership, gathering learnings that could be used to build other cross-regional partnerships. UKRI funding programmes provide routes for universities to identify and develop similar collaborative opportunities. Funding streams such as the Research England Development (RED) and Connecting Capability Fund (CCF) support joint commercialisation capability, while sector-led networks such as TenU and SETSquared help spread effective commercialisation practice across institutions. While support is available, we do not seek to direct specific institution partnerships from the centre. Instead, UKRI works to ensure that funding frameworks and programmes create the environment for universities across the UK to build partnerships to support spin-out growth and wider innovation-led development. For example, the Universities of Oxford and Liverpool have recently launched their own partnership because of the complementarities they identified between their innovation capabilities and relevant local authorities’ collaborative ambitions. Over the next year we will particularly focus on how further partnerships could be used to harness the strengths of other universities in the Northern Growth Corridor. Where these can help deliver our Northern Growth Strategy, we will work with universities to support their development.
Read the full response on Parliament ↗