Evaluating the Vortex: Measuring the Impact of University-Partnered Innovation

Over the past 12 months, the mission of Future Space - UWE's innovation centre for high-tech startups - was remarkably clear: we aimed to grow not just in size but in the scope of our ambitions. What exactly does that mean, you ask? Simple: we opened an additional 10,000 square feet of new office and space lab, and we looked to improve the ways through which all those companies occupying this new space could grow their business through engagement with the insight and talent across the University of the West of England.

The mission itself might well be clear, but – as I’ve said before – the two worlds of startups and higher education are just that: two worlds. And bringing these two worlds together is one thing, but understanding the impact of doing so is something else entirely. After all, the metrics by which the higher education sector measures success are rarely the same as those familiar to a startup. Even the word ‘impact’ has become loaded in academia to mean all kinds of intangible social and cultural changes – hardly the same quantifiable measures of economic growth as those who speak the language of gross value added.

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This month’s Innovate Together will capture my current thinking around the challenge of measuring the impact of a university-partnered innovation centre like Future Space – a centre whose targets are as much about fulfilling the demands of the knowledge exchange framework as they are about creating new jobs for companies. And it’s a good time to share this thinking, too, mere days after hosting our Expansion Launch Event – a big celebration that shared our new approach to nurturing university-partnered innovation with 200+ people. For the first time, this event saw me publicly announcing our full offering in front of a packed audience, an offering that now includes R&D consultancy projects with UWE’s postgrads and academics and in-house marketing support through UWE’s Business School.

The delivery of such university-partnered innovation is what Future Space is all about, but what form does impact take when you sit in the middle of economic development and educational support? Does the integration of the latter in the nurturing of the former truly work to further the missions of both parties? Could academia ever be a barrier to growth?

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Regardless of which side of the debate you stand on, what’s clear is that developing better methods for understanding the impact of university-business collaboration is essential – both for the startup community and the university sector, both of which are currently beaming with creativity but burdened by financial instability. Some of you will have seen the latest report from London Economics, which showed the total economic benefit of?the UK’s higher education sector in 2021/22 to be ￡265 billion, most of which stemmed from either the impact of teaching (￡95 bn) or that of research and knowledge exchange (￡63 bn).

These are impressive figures for HE to shout about, but what is the mutual impact of bringing businesses and universities together? How can we assess whether facilitating collaboration between, say, founders, academics, students and technicians provides equal and two-way value? What does equal even mean when the meaning of success takes wildly different forms across the borders of an educational institution and a commercial entity?

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At Future Space, we’ve been developing a model that attempts to not only implement but also measure precisely this question. I’ve said in previous editions that our centre can be best understood as a vortex between the university and the tech ecosystem – a space where research, students and facilities pour in one side and business steps in the other, colliding in the middle to form a genuinely distinctive and dynamic innovation model.

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And the model itself is straightforward in its messaging: we’ve put in place a set of products that sit under three services – workspace, R&D and business support – each of which drive collaboration, innovation and growth for our resident businesses whilst feeding university agendas around income generation, knowledge exchange and graduate outcomes. Under each of these values to businesses and the university, we have a set of measurable KPIs.

The thinking here is partly a push for transparency. Founders of startups and leaders of universities use entirely different metrics to measure the impact of their priorities and activities. But feeding two seemingly different philosophies of impact really doesn’t matter as long as the activities being run on the ground are carefully designed to ensure that both philosophies are being fulfilled. Because as different as the worlds of startups and universities may seem, both are ultimately focused on the creation of the new and on maximising the value of that newness, be it a methodology or a life-saving product.

In fact, you could argue – and I absolutely would argue – that what a startup is looking for isn’t much different to what a university is looking for: only language separates the two. Which is why it’s totally okay to look to the left to measure innovation in a startup through metrics such as, say, the amount of investment raised or the number of new products produced whilst, at the same time, looking to the right to measure how said innovation is also feeding university metrics associated with the knowledge exchange framework, such as income from collaborative research or the use of on-campus facilities. Terminology aside, there is often very little difference between looking left and looking right in this instance: all that really matters is that, when universities and startups work productively together, new stuff enters the world, and the creation of that new stuff is what both sides want and need.

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Much the same point can be made about how startups speak the language of ‘talent’ and universities prefer notions of ‘graduate outcomes’: it really doesn’t matter, because what both sides care about in this case is finding and training young people for future careers. Broadly, the trick to evaluating university-partnered innovation is to step back from the rhetoric and focus on ways of counting creativity, be it around people, products or process.

And so, what we’ve ended up with at Future Space is a vision rooted in the shared value to be gained from our unique position at the heart of the proverbial university-business vortex. It's a public recognition that what we do is designed to support two vast ecosystems in the form of the tech sector and an enterprising university, and a set of KPIs that whilst looking both left and right, as it were, all recognise that what matters is the nurturing of the new.

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The below visual illustrates our latest approach to measuring the impact of what we do at Future Space, both for our companies, the university, and indeed everyone in-between.

When the time comes to evaluating the effectiveness of this model, what I hope to see is a reciprocated increase in both the university’s targets and our business’ ambitions – by which I mean, if our products and services result in an increase in the number of student projects facilitated, interns appointed and graduates employed within Future Space companies, then I would like to think that there will be a positive correlation for those Future Space companies in more commercial ways, such as the amount of improved products launched, turnover generated or investment received. It may be impossible to draw a direct line between one of these specific metrics and another, but we will still look to understand whether a rise in success for one end of the vortex brings a rise in success for the other.

One other interesting question to ponder before I let you carry on with your day is whether or not there are times when the bringing together of startups and universities not only fails to benefit one side or the other, but perhaps hinders both sides in their respective goals. In other words, when is it time to not collaborate? When are startups better off without the input of universities, and when should universities look beyond businesses for their impact?

I’m not sure that anyone has enough data on the subject to properly answer this question. Still, having an answer will be important if the higher education sector wants to better assess not just the impact of what it does with businesses, but when it does it, how, and why. Properly evaluating the how and the why as much as the what in this scenario will help both sides of the vortex to grow - not just in size but in the scope of their ambitions, too.