Powering Ideas to Innovation: New UCI report provides flagship analysis of the new UK Spinout Register
10th June 2025
Tomas Coates Ulrichsen and Joscelyn Miller
Download the full report here
Contact the authors:
- Tomas Coates Ulrichsen: tc267@cam.ac.uk
- Joscelyn Miller: jzm22@cam.ac.uk
University spinouts have an important role to play in driving science and innovation-led economic growth and national competitiveness, strengthening national security, and in delivering solutions to some of the world’s most pressing societal challenges. However, prior to now, we have been held back by a lack of systematic and complete data on spinouts required to help us better understand the contributions that these companies can make to these important agendas.
Last week, this changed. The launch of the Spinout Register, developed by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA, part of Jisc) with expertise from UCI and Research England, represents a key milestone of Research England’s national knowledge exchange metrics programme. For the first time, we have information available at the company-level for the population of UK university spinouts, all collected to a common definition.
Using the data behind the Spinout Register as our starting point, UCI have carefully further curated the data and linked in additional information about each spinout from a number of external data sources to develop a powerful dataset to drive our analytical work on spinouts. The new report published today presents our findings. We showcase how the information provided by the Spinout Register can be leveraged to unlock new insights, focusing here on the significance of university spinouts for the UK economy, the structure and dynamics of the spinout ecosystem, and the scale of success.
Key findings
Crucially, our analyses of the our dataset developed from the data underling the Spinout Register shows:
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Significance of spinouts to the UK plc. Spinouts are key drivers of entrepreneurial activity and success in strategically important sectors and markets for the UK economy, including pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, healthcare devices, advanced manufacturing, and semiconductors (amongst others). They are also prevalent amongst the top UK artificial intelligence and machine learning start-ups raising the most investment.
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Spinouts emerging from universities across the breadth of the nations and regions of the UK. Following our further curation of the data underlying the Spinout Register, we identified 2,111 unique spinouts emerging from universities based across the breadth of the UK’s nations and regions, with the geographic distribution of spinout activity broadly similar to that of research funding.
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Concentration of spinout activity in the largest research universities, but wider group of larger, research intensive universities produce spinouts at a similar rate, at around 1.5-2.5 spinouts per £100 million of research income.
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Significant growth of university spinout ecosystems amongst larger research-intensive universities beyond the largest institutions traditionally celebrated for the scale and success of their entrepreneurial activity. This group of universities – with research incomes between £100-300 million – have seen both spinout production levels increase significantly, and their spinouts raising increased investment to drive their development.
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Powering ideas to innovation through spinouts must be treated as a portfolio for success. As is typical with IP-rich, deep tech start-ups, investment success is dominated by a relatively small number of spinouts, while others will struggle to gain commercial traction and investment. It is important we treat building spinout ecosystems as investing in a portfolio where success will be driven by a relatively small number of companies.
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Signs of some worrying headwinds. Following increased spinout activity during the pandemic, in recent years, we have seen a weakening trend in annual spinout production levels. Furthermore, while pre-seed/seed investment continuing to grow – indeed bucking the trend for the wider UK company population – early stage venture capital investment has fallen from its pandemic peak to levels now lower than pre-pandemic. With the Register now in place and our analysis surfacing some of these headwinds, we now have the tools necessary to support further investigation and monitoring. |
Moving forward
Moving forward, there is a lot more we can do to build on this work, and we hope the Spinout Register can help us and many others to leverage the increased information available to find ways of building the ecosystems across the breadth of the UK that are needed to seed, nurture and grow spinouts, and better support these companies to grow, thrive and scale for the benefit of the UK and the world.
Reflecting on the report launch today, Tomas Coates Ulrichsen (co-author of the report, UCI Director, and Research England’s National Knowledge Exchange Metrics advisor), said:
"University spinouts represent an important mechanism for ideas, technologies and expertise to be translated into applications that power innovation, unlock new sources of economic growth, and generate solutions to pressing global challenges. Our flagship analysis provides the evidence confirming the significance of spinouts in driving entrepreneurial activity and successes in strategically important sectors for the UK, outsizing the wider start-up population in terms of attracting investment. It is also great to finally be able to dig into the diversity of university spinout ecosystems across the UK, explore where these ventures come from and where they seek to deliver impacts, and investigate key trends – both positive and more worrying.
Prior to now, our ability to dive into and interrogate these types of issues has been held back by a lack of a publicly available, granular data on university spinouts. With the new UK university Spinout Register in place, we now have the baseline data necessary to unlock rich and strategic insight in many areas. I’m hugely grateful for universities and their innovation offices for supporting this critically important data collection endeavour, and for the Higher Education Statistics Agency and Research England in bringing this Register to life. I hope through the report that we have started to demonstrate the exciting potential of the Register to unlock more robust insights on university spinouts. There is still much more that can be done; by us at UCI and many others. We look forward to working alongside the wider community to leverage this new national data asset in robust ways to promote evidence-led discussions on this topic."
Joscelyn Miller, UCI Policy & Impact Lead, and co-author of the report, said:
"It’s been a fantastic opportunity to be involved in the development of this new and novel dataset on university spinouts, right the way through from its vision and conception, to our analytical report that we publish today, showcasing the richness of the insights this data is able to unlock. The neatness of the Register’s design means that it can tell us a lot about the diversity of the UK spinout ecosystem even before leveraging the unique company-, university- and regional- identifiers within it to link in other datasets. This data linking has allowed us to bring to the fore a deeper story about the ecosystems that surround spinouts, the role they play in strategically important sectors for the UK, and the increasingly challenging investment environment they are having to navigate in pursuit of scaling.
Our analysis scratches the surface of what we can do with this data now it is in place, and we’re already working towards making further advances such as developing methods to better classify spinouts and investigating the feasibility of linking the register to other data sources. It is also critical we recognise that the development journey does not stop here: the data is novel and while it is in its initial phases may yet reveal a few anomalies as it is more widely used. While we have attempted to account for these in our analytical work, it is possible we may have missed some issues. The incredible value of making information on spinouts public is that these can be surfaced rapidly, and, over time, can be rectified to further improve the quality of the data and evidence of university spinouts. I’m incredibly excited for this development journey to continue, as well as see how the Register is used as a valued national asset by the university sector, policymakers, funders and others with interests in university spinouts to better evidence the unique contributions that spinouts make to the UK. Please do get in touch if you have an interesting use case!"
