SETsquared, the enterprise partnership between the UK-based universities of Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Southampton and Surrey, has always thought big. Launched in 2002, it has held the top spot as the best university business incubator in research firm UBI Global’s international ranking since 2015. Even before becoming the number one globally, it was already the leading incubator in Europe.
Simon Bond, the partnership’s innovation director, and his team make it look deceptively easy. That is, at least in part, thanks to the model on which SETsquared was built. Bond told sister publication Global University Venturing that the incubator was a response to the government’s ambition to create universities in the UK that did what policymakers thought was going on in the US. In particular, they were drawn to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University models.
The universities were looking to operate a network of incubators on a single brand with a common structure, Bond explained. “Some of that was to do with cost-saving,” he acknowledged, “but more importantly, they thought it would give them the scale to make a real presence. That has really borne fruit with the subsequent developments of SETsquared.”
The “fantastic” decision they made, Bond continued, was that SETsquared would focus on spinouts and spin-ins. “That has allowed SETsquared to scale up, long before terms like knowledge exchange had been established,” he said.
The idea came from a trip by the foundation team to the US where they visited ecosystems such as those in Boston and across California.
“It is often forgotten that tech transfer office funding is pretty light in the US,” Bond said. “They get it over the wall and into the ecosystem as quickly as possible. MIT’s university business incubation capabilities are fairly modest compared with this superstructure, this external system that is filled with risk-taking investors, visionary chief executives and people who want to work for them.
Building SETsquared as a partnership between different universities circumvented the challenge that a small city like Bath – whose population stood at an estimated 192,000 in 2018 – does not have the resources of a city like Boston – which counted an estimated 692,000 residents last year.
But “string together five universities that have more than £2bn of income each year, thousands of students and a seven-digit population,” Bond said, “it is still not quite Boston but you are approaching it”.
He cautioned that the SETsquared model was easy to misunderstand: “I do see, particularly within the European context and our heavy state way of doing things, that when people try to replicate our model, they misunderstand it as a closed system, a one-way conduit that takes research from labs through a tech transfer office and throws it out into the entrepreneurial classes.
“We do real labour. If you wanted to emulate the success of SETsquared, it is built on knowledge exchange and genuinely open, on equal terms with entrepreneurs coming out of the universities, wanting to work with the universities or just wanting to work with each other. That is the element worthy of replicating.”
For more on SETSquared, see Global University Venturing’s full article here.
