The Royal Academy of Engineering is gathering evidence to produce a guide for academic entrepreneurs who wish to commercialise their research by spinning out. In order that this guide be neutral and balanced, RAEng want to understand the motivations behind each stakeholder’s engagement in the spinout journey, hearing insightful lessons that have been learned, reading case studies, and seeking to comprehend bottlenecks and barriers.

Since launching in 2013, the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Enterprise Hub has supported the UK’s brightest engineering and technology entrepreneurs to help them realise their potential by providing both financial support and exceptional connections to the nation’s best engineering minds.

If you are an entrepreneur, an academic who has sought or seeks to spin out, if you work in knowledge exchange or a technology transfer office (TTO) for a university or are an investor, RAEng wants to hear from you.

This publication will be a guide for academic entrepreneurs on how to work with their TTOs to spin out a company. The guide will include an introduction to all major categories of stakeholders and their respective motivations behind their involvement in the UK’s spinout ecosystem. The spinout process will be mapped and split into stages. Each stage will be presented and discussed, with entrepreneur case studies and stakeholder perspectives featured throughout to bring points of learning to life. Suitable caveats will feature throughout, noting that processes can and do vary between institutions. Each section will end with a checklist of goals/achievements that must be completed in this stage before moving forward.

The guide will not cover the ‘how’ to complete each step as there are plenty of resources available already, but instead will cover:

  • who is interested in each step
  • what are they interested in
  • why they are interested in it
  • how this impacts the entrepreneur
  • when to start each process in the journey
  • what other processes each impacts upon.

The aim is to give the academic entrepreneur a better understanding of the often-competing viewpoints, so that they may better navigate the process and bring the various viewpoints into alignment.