How Harald Haas is matching industry problems with academic solutions

Over the past few years, the UK has experienced a growing trend of academia moving to commercialise university research by creating and spinning out independent high-tech, scalable, for-profit, market-ready companies. More recently, the trend has been given added impetus by the government’s decision to provide a £2.5bn cash injection to help commercialise AI and quantum technology research and development. The extra money is designated, in part, to help redress regional disparities between university research labs in different parts of the country, a structural fault line that is highlighted in the British government’s Independent Review of University Spin-out Companies. Until 2023, the high-tech spin-out sector was dominated by the wealthy ‘golden triangle’ of the elite universities of Oxford, Cambridge and University College London. Back then, those three seats of learning between them secured 75% of all the UK’s spin-out investments while other universities scrabbled and competed between themselves to secure something from the remaining 25% of funding available. It was messy and inequitable. The review stresses the many economic benefits that will follow as the UK pushes on towards fully realising its ambition to become…