This is the first point of contact for academics to understand what services we provide exist in your institution and is key to making sure their values and concerns are engaged with to ensure impact-led and commercially self-sustaining ventures are developed in the right way. Our CoP covered ways to be visible to researchers that clearly illustrates your role is supporting them, and that commercialisation is not about making money, but how to make impactful outputs scale up and sustain themselves.

In many institutions the same forms and processes developed in traditional STEM-centric tech transfer and commercialisation are how any academic is asked to assess and report their venture plans. This is almost always inappropriately focused on patents or ‘hard’ IP and can be off-putting for the academic. Our CoP explored a case study from Southampton where a dedicated, simplified form that walks the project leader through the key principles of assessing value relevant to their disciplines.