Simonetta Manfredi, Professor of Equality and Diversity Management and Director Research, Innovation and Enterprise at Oxford Brookes University.
It has been said that the translation of research into profitable and impactful businesses is one of ‘Higher Education’s best-kept secrets’! University spinouts can bring to market cutting-edge research and technology, create jobs and contribute to economic growth. No matter which party wins the next general election, they will want the sector to grow its capacity for spinout creation.
However, if we want more successful spinouts we need to talk about people: the founders and the pipeline of talented researchers who could become the next generation of founders. At Oxford Brookes University we carried out a project, funded by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), to promote gender inclusion in spinout leadership. We interviewed women and men who created spinouts to learn from their lived experiences, what motivated them, and what challenges and enablers they encountered along their spinout journey. We also explored the pipeline of potential founders through focus groups with Early Career Researchers (ECRs) in STEM, including PhD students. Here are some of our findings.
All the spinout founders we talked to share the same motivation for spinning out. They wanted their research and discoveries to make a real difference and benefit society. Female and male founders respectively said: ‘It is every academic’s dream to have your technology applied to products’ and ‘I want to see the research that we are doing have an impact, not just necessarily for REF’. Autonomy and flexibility were also important drivers, especially among the younger generations of founders. One man said: ‘I did not like the 9-5 environment, I wasn’t motivated enough… so it’s really having the flexibility with my time, it [is] really important to me’.
