New Enterprise Initiative to Boost University Spin-Outs

An 'Enterprise Campus' initiative, backed  by the Scottish Funding Council and led by Edinburgh Research and Innovation at the University of Edinburgh, aims to boost Scottish university spin-outs over the next three years. The new £2 million pilot project aims to support the formation of 90 new technology companies with high-growth potential at Scotland’s universities.

A partnership of three universities, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Strathclyde will act as regional hubs for every university in Scotland as part of the wider Innovation Scotland strategy. The hubs will offer a structured suite of complementary enterprise support services to local campuses, such as one-to-one advisory clinics, workshops, mentoring and support in raising finance to maximise opportunities for start-up and spin-out companies from Universities that will have big impact on Scotland’s economy.

Grant Wheeler, ERI’s Head of Company Formation, comments; “The economic need for Scottish universities to improve and accelerate the company formation process is clear. This initiative provides an opportunity to share valuable expertise and resources in the highly-specialised area of high-value knowledge-based company formation to produce more sustainable companies, from the Scottish university sector. The proposal is workable because it builds on what is already happening around Scotland.

The initiative aims to address variability in support mechanisms at both the institutional and regional levels across Scottish universities and will focus on high-value start-up projects led by PhD and Masters-level students, a group which experience suggests contains entrepreneurs with the genuine potential to create companies of scale based on more market-ready knowledge and technology.