Designing a dashboard of indicators to track the health and performance of University Spinout Ecosystems
Background
Spinouts play a vital role in the commercialisation of innovative university intellectual property and the development of robust regional economies. Nonetheless, there remains a significant knowledge gap when it comes to improving the performance of these companies and their respective ecosystems, and there is a substantial and widespread interest in gaining a deeper understanding of the obstacles and drivers associated with the commercialisation of innovative university intellectual property via spinouts.
A key ‘data product’ that the newly-developed Spinout Register enables could be a dashboard of metrics to visualise the health and performance of university spinout ecosystems. A dashboard could facilitate evidence-based decision-making by offering granular insights into the factors driving success or underperformance.
Project Aims
This project will ultimately look to provide advice to Research England on suitable suites of indicators and prototype designs for the presentation of these as a dashboard to monitor and assess the performance of university spinout ecosystems. To do this there are three main phases of work:
- Develop a conceptual understanding of appropriate metrics to measure the health, functioning and performance of spinout ecosystems.
- Explore data linking options for the Spinout Register to understand what other data source on spinouts and their surrounding ecosystems can be unlocked and used within a dashboard.
- Provide advice on meaningful types of indicators and presentation of these in potential designs for prototype dashboards.
Key Research Questions
- Does the life course of spinouts vary depending on the universities from which they originate?
- What are the most meaningful metrics for assessing university spinout performance, such as turnover, exit type, exit value, or employment effects?
- What is the influence of different local and regional institutional settings on the trajectory of spinouts?
- Does the local and regional economy benefit from university commercialisation via spinouts?
- What are the characteristics of spinouts that geographically relocate, and where do they tend to move to?
- What opportunities are there for linking the Spinout Register to other data sources (e.g. ONS data)? How complete and representative is data coverage of spinouts across different universities in external data sources?
