Fostering and encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation in researchers can be a very time-consuming process and can take valuable time away from your primary focus – commercialising technologies and measuring your institute’s impact on society. However, there are several ideas you could implement, that tie into some of your existing priorities and that could help establish a culture of innovation and entrepreneurialism within your institute. Here are 5 ideas:

Many researchers already collaborate with industry within their research, however some are still resistant to the idea. For universities to increase their impact on economic and social development, a tight connection between government, industry and university needs to be established². This collaboration has been described as the triple helix of innovation (Etzkowitz et al. 2000). Encouraging researchers to partner and work with government or industry, helps them consider the wider applications of their research and knowledge and also benefits them by opening other points of view on their research, helping you and your institute clearly show the value they are adding to economic and social development. 

There are multiple industry conferences aimed at introducing researchers to the benefits of innovation and entrepreneurialism as well as helping them to identify and find industry partners to collaborate with. We recently attended one of these conferences, organised by Cancer Research UK. The Innovation Summit included an excellent mix of scientists, who conveyed their recent experiences of commercialising their ideas and business development experts, including tech transfer professionals and investors. 

Encouraging researchers to think beyond the traditional licensing approach and to instead recognise the value of unpatented biological material, such as research tools, can help to encourage a more entrepreneurial and innovative mindset within your institute. Encouraging researchers to recognise the value of unpatented biological materials can provide a new perspective on the value of their work and see how activities they may have regarded as mundane can have significance for the university and the wider research community. Coaching your researchers through either seminars, webinars or newsletter articles, on the different routes that can be taken to innovation, (i.e. Starting from a problem or starting from a solution), will also help foster an entrepreneurial or innovative mindset, particularly if you use examples relevant to them; e.g. developing a solution as a by-product of your planned research path.

Having the facilities and development programmes in place to help support your academics in developing and increasing their understanding of what entrepreneurship and innovation is, will help determine the long-term success of the culture of innovation at your university. According to the Innovation summit, for an entrepreneur to be successful, they need to be able to Pitch, network, carry out market research and have business management skills. For many researchers and academics, there hasn’t previously been a need or an opportunity for them to develop these skills. Working with your institute’s HR and Career departments to offer workshops and training in these skills to students and staff, would be a great way of starting an interest in innovation and entrepreneurship early on and establishing a base level of knowledge and skills for them to access in the future for their research. Using examples as to why these skills are necessary is important, to help convince your academics to develop these skills. 

Ensuring your academics have access to expert help and support at an early stage of their innovation and entrepreneurial journey ensures you are targeting the right audiences and that all aspects of the process have been considered. Promoting yourself and the role of the technology transfer office within the institute can also help researchers understand what you do and how you can support them with promoting and commercialising their research. This could then encourage your academics and researchers to identify other technologies or research tools for commercialisation.

Creating spin outs based on academic research is one of the main ways institutes currently measure the value and impact of their academic’s research. However, as mentioned above, many researchers and creators of the technology lack the necessary entrepreneurial skills needed to run a spin out. In addition, some of these academics enjoy their research roles and don’t want to transfer into a role at the spin out. Understanding the concerns and needs of your researchers, can help you better support your academics during the creation of the spin out and allows you to retain control and awareness of the success and progress of both the research and the spin out as it grows. Collaborating with industry to set up these spin outs, also provides you with a long-term and important way to increase your institute’s scientific and technological conversion rates and helps you realise the industrialisation of your scientific and technological achievements³.