Two Spinouts a Year Became Ten. The Fix Is on Page 79.

Buying in someone who has already built a company is ordinary practice at universities that can afford one alone. In January a review told the ones that cannot to share one, and it is the right first move for fewer of them than that sounds.

Faraz Rizvi × Foundry · 5 August 2026 · 23 min read · Markdown

Faraz Rizvi is a UK operator-practitioner writing about the work between a research breakthrough and a fundable company. He runs SpinUp Forge, a single-operator practice that does a UK university spinout's company-building while the founders stay on the science. Foundry is SpinUp Forge's custom agentic harness.

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A survey respondent inside Research England's evaluation of its shared technology-transfer pilot reached for a kitchen to explain what the work had actually bought their institution. The menu was settled, the equipment was in, the kitchen staff were trained. "What we need next," they wrote, "is the time to cook!" Months before that evaluation reached the public, a review for UKRI written by Tony Hickson had put the same point in drier language: universities with fewer spinouts and thinner budgets need people they cannot justify hiring alone, and the honest way to get them is to share. That recommendation exists. Almost nobody has acted on it since. Most of the universities it was written for have something else to fix first, and at the ones it does fit, nobody has settled which budget pays.

What actually happens after a disclosure

An academic discloses an invention to their university. Someone assesses whether it is worth protecting and whether a licence or a new company is the better route. If it is a spinout, someone negotiates the licence terms, agrees an equity structure, and walks the paperwork through incorporation. All of that sits inside what people call a technology-transfer office, or TTO.

Some of that work is identical everywhere a disclosure lands, and universities can pool it without giving anything up. Research England's evaluation of its own pilot programme found exactly this: among the busiest shared activities across the thirteen pilots were "guidance and toolkits" and "jointly undertaken IP audits," the standardised, repeatable parts of the job. Shared decision-making and shared policy were the least-developed activity across the same pilots, and the evaluation is candid about why: that work reaches, in its own words, "into institutional resourcing and policies for technology transfer," and can raise "difficult questions around management, value and resources." A template can be shared. A university's own appetite for risk cannot.

Between those two ends sits a third kind of work, and the evaluation never gives it a name. Every disclosure needs it differently, which is what stops it being a template: the hours spent moving one specific case, one invention, one founder, from an assessed opportunity into something an investor can look at. Nobody's risk committee needs to sit for it. It just needs someone free to do it, the one part pooling and policy both leave alone.

That distinction is what Research England spent £4.74 million testing, across thirteen university consortia and 47 higher-education providers, over six months. Judged on the one thing the funding Call actually asked for, spinning out companies from IP that already existed, not building a pipeline from nothing, the result is exact rather than dramatic: one company created, two deals awaiting approval, three more in what the evaluation calls a "spin-out ready state." That is not a verdict on whether pooling works. Company formation runs longer than six months everywhere; on this series' own reading of UKRI's data, it still runs to 11 months even once an investor has expressed interest. Six months bought the shareable part of the process, and a receipt for how far that part goes on its own.

The same six-month snapshot looks different next to Research England's own commercialisation report, reading a similar formation series: it calls the trend "an increasingly positive trajectory" rather than a crisis. The honest complaint is distribution, not volume.

Who has the backlog

Cranfield University and the University of Hertfordshire ran one of the thirteen pilots between them, under the name STREAMLINE. The evaluation describes both as having "very small TTO teams (two FTE each) managing substantial IP pipelines": two full-time posts at each institution, against everything their academics had disclosed. Their own case study names the shortage: "Problem was not lack of pipeline but lack of resource to process and progress disclosures to the next stage." That is the shape the fix is built for. A backlog, and nobody free to work it.

Most of the cohort had no such record. 27 of the pilot's 47 participating providers reported no new spinout at all across the three years to 2023/24, in the evaluation's own footnote, citing HESA. Pooling the standardised part of the job only helps an office that already has a queue to run it against, and the report carries one direct observation about what the pilots found when they went looking for cases to move. A lead university's own monitoring return, quoted in the evaluation, records "fewer later stage projects than anticipated in the HEP pipelines." One line, from one project, and it does not point where the policy assumed.

Asked whether these thinner institutions can sustain a shared service or whether the pipeline itself is too small, the evaluation declines to answer: "the data to inform this is simply not yet available." I am not going to answer it either. What survives the refusal is smaller, and it holds: these are two different problems sitting in one cohort, and an office cannot reliably tell from the inside which of them it has, because a full week feels the same either way.

So there are two readers here, and the recommendation only answers one of them. For an institution whose disclosure book is genuinely thin, it is aimed past the problem, and the honest first step is finding out what the institution actually holds before asking who should share it. For an institution shaped like Cranfield and Hertfordshire, a real backlog and a named person missing, it is the right answer.

The one place it is already running

For a university with a backlog, Hickson's review names the fix twice: once as recommendation one, in the chapter on capacity and place, and one chapter earlier, on page 79, in plainer language, describing universities with "limited resources, such as many post-92 institutions" and naming the remedy directly, "hiring fractional positions or sharing such roles" across a regional group. Two different routes, the same reviewer, the same answer.

The fix already has a working example. Six universities in the North East, Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Sunderland, Teesside and York, have been running a version of it for the better part of a decade, under the name Northern Accelerator, alongside Durham County Council and the North East Combined Authority. It runs a version of what the same chapter, describing the model generically a few paragraphs earlier, calls an entrepreneur in residence: someone who has already built and sold a company, paid for six months to a year, working a region's early-stage ideas rather than any single university's own pipeline. The review's own account of the result: an uptick from "producing two spin-outs/year" eight years ago, "to now producing 10 a year."

Buying in an experienced operator is not, by itself, an unusual idea. The evaluation says so plainly: "There is an active market for support services in spin-out and technology transfer." Hickson's review gives entrepreneurs in residence a section of its own, and universities with the budget to hire one have been doing it for years. The review asks for something narrower and harder: several thin-resourced universities buying the same person between them, regionally, because sharing is the only way any of them can justify the post. That is what the North East built. Which leaves the question. Among the universities that do have a queue, why has almost nobody else built one?

One of the thirteen has since formalised it. On 29 June the University of Portsmouth announced a Shared Virtual Technology Transfer Office with Southampton Solent, Chichester, Health Sciences University, Arts University Bournemouth and Winchester. Portsmouth led the Wessex pilot, and four of those six, Portsmouth among them, are named in its project record, so this is not a new region reading the recommendation and acting on it. Portsmouth's own announcement says as much: the partnership "builds on a successful pilot project funded by UK Research and Innovation". It is the group that already did the work, deciding to carry on doing it.

Which makes what they chose to pool worth reading closely. The announcement describes expertise, resources and networks. It does not mention a shared person. An announcement is not a staffing plan, so the silence proves nothing on its own. But these are the people who have actually run the experiment, and the layer they formalised is the one the evaluation had already shown works.

So why not the person as well? Not for want of money, in any simple sense. The same review's chapter on finance separately calls for the UK to "Significantly boost funding for pre-incorporation" and pre-seed funding, cash before a company exists, which is a different stage from the pre-seed and seed money this series has already reported climbing into spinouts that already exist. And what money there is arrives unevenly: formation itself, Hickson notes, is spread across the whole UK, while investment stays "concentrated in the Greater South East." Northern Accelerator's own answer to that was to stop waiting for the aggregate to reach it. Hickson's review also records that the same North East partnership has, only recently, built its own £22.5 million seed fund, arriving alongside eight years of shared operator time rather than in place of it, on the reading of the dates. Whatever produced the climb from two to ten was money and people, from different pots, at different times.

Money is not the whole of it, then. A university's own appetite for risk moves slower than money does, and it cannot be pooled. Underneath even that sits something smaller and older than the review: a line on a form that nobody has decided how to fill in.

Which budget line pays for it

Somewhere between now and the next commercialisation bid, at a university that does have the queue, a paper like this crosses a Pro-Vice-Chancellor's desk: hire someone, fractional, paid for six months to a year, to move assessed opportunities into companies. Follow what happens to it.

Charge it to HEIF, the formula-allocated core budget that already pays most of a TTO's own salaries, in a period the evaluation itself describes as one of "redundancies in both academic and professional services teams" at some of the very institutions it studied, and a TTO director reads the request correctly: as a claim on the same money their own headcount sits in. Charge the identical person, doing the identical work, to project or regional money instead, the kind that funded all thirteen pilots at award values of £158,000 to £500,000, per Research England's evaluation, and the same request reads as something that arrives, does a job, and leaves without touching the base budget. Same person. Same six months. A different verdict, before anyone in the room has said a word about whether the argument itself is any good.

I have spent a few years on the institutional side of exactly this kind of conversation, and I have not seen the pattern break yet: the account decides the reading before the argument gets a hearing.

Call the person operator capacity and the phrase names a capability the TTO already claims to hold on its own books, so the request reads as competition for it, and routes, on reflex, to the core budget the TTO's own salaries already sit in. Name the stage instead of the capability, post-approval company formation, or pre-seed venture building, and the identical request reads as a different job, with its own funding line and its own committee.

Where the money is charged	How a TTO reads the request
HEIF core allocation	Competes with the TTO's own headcount
Project or regional grant	Additive: arrives, does a job, leaves
The company's own cap table	Additive, once dilution and conflict terms are agreed

Hickson's review uses the broader name, and so does almost everything written in support of it.

The survey respondent who reached for a kitchen was not asking for more equipment. They had the menu, the room, the trained staff. What they wanted was somebody at the stove and an account to pay them from. Who to hire has had a written answer since January. Which account pays has not been asked in the rooms where it applies, and in a good many of the others the kitchen is not built yet.

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