How Aspect Advances SHAPE Commercialisation

Universities in the UK and globally are turning to Aspect to help commercialise SHAPE research

Arts, humanities and social sciences (SHAPE) have historically not been at the forefront of technology transfer, dominated as it is by the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. A key reason for that reality is the patentability of inventions out of those departments, making a commercially successful route arguably more obvious. But with SHAPE subjects making up a significant part of most universities’ schools, the approach is changing. One project looking to elevate the status of these fields of study is Aspect – an acronym for “A SHAPE Platform for Entrepreneurship, Commercialisation and Transformation” (the “s” in Aspect initially stood for social sciences but Aspect’s remit quickly expanded).

Prof Julia Black, strategic director of innovation and professor of law at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), chairs the Aspect consortium having helped originate the “rather mad idea”, she quipped, after a trip to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University that disproved her hypothesis that LSE was the only institution that had left SHAPE behind when it came to commercialisation. In fact, Black remembered, MIT and Stanford “were doing a lot but essentially nothing in social sciences”. LSE joined forces with the universities of Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester, Oxford, Sheffield and Sussex, as well as venture studio Zinc – founded by a visiting professor at LSE – and won a £5m ($6.5m) award from public body UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)’s Connecting Capability Fund.

Julia Black

Today, Aspect operates on a two-tier structure – the core group accountable for the public funding and an increasingly long list of associate members. “We have different communities of practice to support those working on research commercialisation, on business engagements, on communications and on entrepreneurship. That functions from the bottom up, so members bid to run projects and programmes,” Black explained. Aspect faced “a vast lacuna”, Black lamented. “There is not a wonderful, established landscape with a few holes here or there, which is what I thought it might be when I started. There are a few islands of activity with vast lakes in between and no connections between them.” But, she insisted, “one of the exciting things about Aspect is the network and how to develop that. That is the connectivity between institutions and the individuals – the connectivity between those who are supporting researchers but also between researchers themselves.”

Black added: “The question is to what end are we doing this, because the connectivity cannot be an end. To me, the end lies in the ‘t’ in Aspect – transformation. There are a lot of academics who want to do good with their research and what is important is how they can go out and make an impact. A lot of that effort has been oriented towards policymakers, non-governmental organisations or other people, with academics doing it by adding in their ideas and insights. But there is only so much that policymakers can do.

What we wanted to experiment with Aspect was: is there another way that you can mobilise your knowledge for public good and make it scalable, while developing it in such a way that the research becomes sustainable with an income or data stream? That requires using mechanisms of the private sector.” And the private sector was undergoing a changing zeitgeist, Black pondered, citing the increasing importance of social enterprises, models such as B Corp and a drive towards environmental, social and governance principles. “We are doing this in a very changed environment than it would have been even five years ago. You can start conversations with academics, saying ‘it is not all evil’,” Black declared. “For the SHAPE disciplines it is a messier route partly because of intellectual property that you cannot protect in the same way. You have to find different ways to mobilise and scale, which means academics have to start thinking about the business plan much earlier and the TTO manager needs to move much earlier,” she added.

The ARC Accelerator Project

One of the consortium’s projects to commercialise research is the Aspect Research Commercialisation (ARC) Accelerator, a first-of-its-kind initiative globally to provide entrepreneurial training, ideation, mentoring and practical support to help SHAPE researchers build ventures from their research.

Chris Fellingham

“ARC is funded by the original Aspect bid, a follow-on bid through Research England and the Economic and Social Research Council,” explained Chris Fellingham, Director of the Accelerator and the Social Sciences and Humanities Lead at tech transfer office Oxford University Innovation. The six-month programme was specifically aimed at research commercialisation, Fellingham stressed, with each researcher team following their own institutions IP and equity policy. “We do not just want anyone’s plucky startup – there are other places for that,” Fellingham argued.

As Aspect was free to join, universities could in theory become a member only to gain access to ARC, but the future model for Aspect and ARC was still a matter of discussion, he clarified. “Longer term, we are looking at financial sustainability for Aspect and there is a question mark as whether to it is a membership-funded organisation, which would cover the cost of ARC, or whether ARC seeks Research Council funding. My personal preference is the latter because ICURe is funded to the tune of £4m per year and ARC would be a fraction of that – it would also mean the Research Councils are covered for social sciences and humanities commercialisation. It seems like the logical thing to do, certainly to me, to get more value out of the research they are already funding.”

ARC did not take stakes in companies because that would not make sense, Fellingham argued. “One, every university has their own IP policy and that would be a mess. Two, there is no legal entity for Aspect to hold the equity. Three, if we held equity, someone would need to manage that equity and that would add to the cost. And four, it would make it harder for researchers and universities to engage with ARC.” He added: “I do not think it would even work particularly well as a model because of the type of companies we work with – there are going to be fewer unicorns than you get in STEM, so an equity realisation model is less likely.”

Development of the ARC Accelerator’s Programme

The programme offered was evolving quickly, Fellingham said. “Initially, we divided it into three parts. The first part was one-on-one entrepreneurial training, not wildly different from that which you would get on most accelerators. Market validation is the centrepiece, similar to ICURe. Then there is a pitch at the end with pre-seed funding that we included as part of our grant because it is a little harder for some of these projects to source funding. We pivoted in two key ways. One, we now link them with mentors very early on, and the mentors are responsible for dealing with the market validation and value proposition.” Mentors were a key part in trying to make the experience more bespoke, Fellingham added, and “giving SHAPE researchers one-to-one support as well as helping them on the entrepreneurial journey, which is harder for them because they are not as socialised to the idea that they could be entrepreneurs”.

The other part that was changed, Fellingham elaborated, was the move to a multimodal model where “maybe a third will be a startup with a digital product”. “One third will be a service provider, like a consultancy,” he said. “For example, Prof Roberta Guerrina at University of Bristol helps large companies with equality and diversity initiatives. How do you do it as a large company? How do you embed it? How do the stakeholders work? Which policies work? There is no product she can use, it is her going in, working with them and helping them implement it. Over time, she will build that as a consultancy. That is not a tech company, she cannot go to a VC. We needed people who knew how to build a consultancy, and instead of building a product where you try to find the market fit and scale it, it is more like a sniper bullet where you tailor your offering to exactly what the client needs. Slowly, you can standardise it and scale it, but it is a different pathway.”

The third change was slightly different, he said. “About half of them are social ventures, so we wanted to provide more support around that. What kind of financing might you access? It is obviously going to be more impact investment or debt financing, so again, different from the VC model that most accelerators guide you towards.” Fellingham, who described his personal philosophy as trying to “do public policy outside of government”, added that a distinct advantage of commercialising SHAPE research was that, generally, capital requirements were much lower. “A consultancy really does not need much to start,” he deliberated. “In theory, you can incorporate and go off to your first client. That is a big advantage. If you are a life sciences business, there is no way to start without capital.” Beyond the low capital requirements, there were also significantly fewer to no regulatory hurdles, he added.

The Differences and Similarities of SHAPE and STEM Research Commercialisation

Black mused that people would often ask her why SHAPE research was not being commercialised. “It is, but it is done by Bain, McKinsey, KPMG, Deloitte, law firms and so on,” she argued. “You need to find ways to figure out what is scalable – such as measurement, data-driven methodology, tool kits – and the academic can then get income from someone using their tool but also access the data to understand how it is used, which means it feeds back into the research. It is a different business model, much more bespoke. In STEM, the tech transfer office has a patent and then they have two choices – it is a spinout or a licence, and both are well-trodden paths. Success also looks different and that is the next nut we have to crack. It might not be return-on-investment and it will not be 20 years of work paying off with a blockbuster deal. Even income or investment metrics will probably not be the same. It will be impact on society, but we need to devise acceptable metrics for this. We are working in the right space now though because the rest of the private sector is trying to capture social impact metrics. There are more than 600 standards for ESG investing, so we are not short. It is shifting the understanding of the nature of capitalism.”

You can read the full Global Venturing article and related content here.