Overhauling research commercialisation at UK universities

ABSTRACT

UK universities face two existential threats: (1) sources of income are critically undiversified from international student tuition fees that recent global health and conflict crises have put at risk; (2) academic departments in the arts and humanities face cuts in many institutions over unprofitability. This article argues that research commercialisation may represent a useful tool to address these threats to different extents. An overview of current research commercialisation in the UK precedes a framework of aims and principles to govern overhauled research commercialisation efforts. Most importantly, it is argued that departmental business development staff should be employed to collaboratively determine commercial research opportunities with academics, which should then be retained and developed within universities to maximise institutions’ eventual share of the gains. It is concluded that a vastly expanded research commercialisation wing of university administration would empower more world-leading discovery and strengthen the long-term business model of UK higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• HE policy; research commercialisation; student recruitment; COVID-19

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Outsourcing can become a net positive: engaging with local businesses and the wider society in which a university is based can be beneficial for local economies, for instance (Čábelková, Normann, and Pinheiro 2017; Lancaster 2022). What is important within the context of an overhauled commercialisation system, however, is ensuring that control over ideas, and thus the potential revenue to be made from commercial projects, can remain with universities and their academic staff inasmuch as possible – in line with the second main aim of this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

T. R. Williamson

T R Williamson (Tom) is a PhD candidate in the Brain, Language, and Behaviour Laboratory and an Associate Lecturer in the Bristol Centre for Linguistics at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His research involves designing language tests for awake craniotomies in the context of neuro-oncology treatments, with a special focus on the motor-linguistic system in the brain. He is also affiliated to the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics at the University of Oxford on the Oxford University Press-funded project ‘The Effects of Syntactic Operations on Cognition’, to the Centre for the Neuroscience of Embodied Cognition at the University of Southern California, and to PSI Services LLC, where he works in the English testing department.