Enterprise Academy: Can universities spin-out social enterprises?
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
By Tim Thorlby
5 min read
This is a blog about how a university has been trying a unique experiment to spin-out social enterprises for greater social impact.
A very interesting pilot programme has been running for the last couple of years in London which I have been keeping my eyes on. It is the first serious attempt to support social enterprise spin-outs at any scale from UK universities.
As the project comes to the end of its pilot phase, now is a great time to take stock. I think it deserves wider attention.
Scribbling with a purpose
I often write about social enterprise – I used to run one, I think they are great and I think they could be making a much bigger contribution to the UK.
My recent scribblings on this include a few blogs:
More Risk Please (on the need for more equity investments in social enterprise),
Good Debt, Bad Debt (on the potential of loans/debt for charities and social enterprises)
The Rise of Social investment (the story of how the sector has grown in the last 20 years and where it should go next)
I also wrote a rather geeky Policy Lab Paper on how little we really know about the size and growth of the social enterprise sector in the UK - and why this matters.
My preoccupation with social enterprise is not just that I think it is a Good Thing, but also that I have a growing frustration with the national institutions which lead the sector.
After 20 years of growth and progress, it seems to me that the sector as a whole still needs to grow up a bit and take a bit more responsibility – being less reactive and more proactive, doing less pepper-potting of funding and more strategic investment, taking the long view. That sort of thing.
So, this is why I have been particularly interested in the pilot work being done by London Social Ventures in some of our universities. It has tried something new, possibly unique, which I think is worth a good look - and has national potential.
Higher education is a motor of change
Firstly, let’s just attune ourselves to the world of universities.
The UK’s universities – between them – are a significant engine of change within our society and our economy. Yes, they certainly have issues and are far from perfect, but they are important for many reasons.
The UK’s Higher Education Sector as a whole has some 260 different institutions, with the majority being universities, complemented by a plethora of HE colleges and other specialist providers[1].
Between them, they employ 400,000 people (only half of whom are academics, by the way), they educate 2.9 million students each year and they have a combined income of £44 billion. Huge.
Their total economic impact on their local areas is much bigger than this. In many of our towns and cities, the local university may well be one of the biggest employers and most significant economic players.
Over 800,000 students graduate each year in the UK with an undergraduate or postgraduate degree or diploma of some kind. This is fundamental to our ability to keep upgrading our nation’s education and skills and to remain competitive in a global economy.
Nearly half of the formally rated research undertaken in the UK’s HE providers is graded as ‘internationally excellent’. The UK leads the world in some fields and makes key contributions in many others – from medicine to biotech to engineering to arcane corners of history, geography and the arts.
And, of course, whatever the business analysts might say, universities remain places where young people learn to follow their curiosity, explore obscure questions, develop new understandings, make friends and, occasionally, change the world.
Spin-outs!
In recent years there has been a growing interest in how to help staff and students at our universities commercialise their research findings and create ‘spin-out’ companies that can apply this new intellectual property and build new companies and industries with it.
This can be very exciting and sometimes big companies are created, particularly in the worlds of science and technology.
On the whole though, it turns out that the UK isn’t actually great at this, so successive governments have reviewed how this process works and tried to find new ways to support it and secure investment. The most recent review in 2023 for the Sunak Government set out a whole series of recommendations for changes and funding[2].
None of this work, however, has included any reference to research and spin-outs that might be driven by a desire for social impact.
So, here’s a question for you.
What if we could take the same sort of principles that commercial spin-outs are using and apply them to social questions instead? Could we spin-out social enterprises from our universities? Not just to make money or create jobs but to innovate and fix tricky social problems. Could the UK’s ‘boffins’ contribute to the creation of a generation of social enterprises?
Well, this is exactly what London Social Ventures has been trying to do.
London Social Ventures
In 2024, a unique experiment was launched to see if it is possible to create an ecosystem to ‘seed, sustain and scale’ new social enterprise spin-outs from our universities.
Queen Mary, University of London and University College London have led the project, creating London Social Ventures (LSV) as a new team to deliver it. The pilot project has been funded for two years by Research England.
The team at LSV have designed and tested a programme to support university staff and students in creating new social enterprises. They have worked with some 15 university institutions across London. A handful of private and public sector partners have worked with them too.
A carefully designed programme of support takes people from having an initial idea or opportunity through testing to launch. It recognises that simply giving people a grant is not enough – they need support through a staged journey of development.
The aim of the pilot is to show that a steady pipeline of social ventures can be created from our universities with the right support. The team have run a number of different activities to make this possible:
Spark - workshops to make contact with new people and introduce the concepts
Build– a month-long programme to help people develop their ideas
Validate – a six week sprint to help people test out their ideas in the real world
Catalyst – to help new social enterprises to develop and grow
Small grants have been available at key points.
As the pilot now draws to a close, their work had been evaluated.
So, what happened?
Impact
Drawing on the economic impact report by consultancy Divine Ox[3] it is possible to see how the pilot has worked.
In 2 years, the pilot has engaged 15 university institutions in London. It has met with 215 different potential social entrepreneurs through its Spark Workshops and other channels, gone on to provide support to 94 ventures and also provided nearly £300k of grants in total.
The social enterprises have been diverse in their focus, including health, education, environment, employment and equality.
Some 69 ventures went through the Build stage and 16 ventures went through the most advanced Catalyst stage. Of these 16 ventures, the evidence shows that they were able to grow, take on more employees and earn more revenue as a direct result of the support they received.
Overall, the economic impact report outlines the social impacts and social value delivered by the growth of these social enterprises. Investing in them won’t make an investor rich but would create jobs, deliver extra tax revenue to government and deliver long-term social value. (The report has lots of numbers in it, which you can read for yourself, but this is the gist of the story!)
Perhaps the best way to illustrate what the pilot has achieved is to consider a couple of the ventures it has supported:
RecycleLab was founded by Danielle, a scientist who had witnessed the amount of waste in her university labs and wondered if there was a way to make use of it. This venture collects and recycles single-use plastic waste from university labs into plastic pellets which can be sold to manufacturers to make new plastic products like test tube racks, etc. RecycleLab has so far secured 30 customers and diverted over 35 tonnes of waste plastic from landfill or incineration, to be used again.
START is a venture which focuses on providing support for those people who are caring for family members with dementia. It has developed an evidence-based intervention for carers, using an 8-session therapeutic course to help carers manage their own mental and emotional health. The venture is piloting how this can be scaled by training facilitators to deliver these courses in different settings.
These were good ideas, springing from the day-to-day experiences of university staff and students, looking for support to help them develop new ventures and grow.
The future?
The future for London Social Ventures is no doubt to find new funding to scale up and continue. I wish them well.
More broadly, this kind of programme highlights how a more organised, pro-active approach to social enterprise could pay significant dividends.
Imagine a national venture, working in all of our major universities, to identify, support and scale up good ideas into social enterprises in every city? A properly funded national ‘ecosystem’, able to build momentum and establish itself could not only generate hundreds of new ventures each year, but also do so in cities where social ventures are thin on the ground.
Such a permanent presence in each of our universities may also feed back into university departments and academic teams to raise their awareness of the importance of considering how their work might have positive social impacts. It might even change the culture of our universities.
If you are a social investor or a charitable foundation with ambition, I would suggest this is the kind of thing that the UK’s growing and increasingly mature social sector should be doing.
Pro-active, strategic, investments for the long term.
That’s a good idea isn’t it?
This blog was written by Tim Thorlby. Please sign up if you’d like to know about future blogs, usually published once a month, all free.
Notes
[1] Data provided by HE Statistics Agency
[2] For 2023 spin-out report see: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-review-of-university-spin-out-companies
[3] Report: London Social Ventures: pilot outcomes and impact analysis - Building London’s university social venture pipeline: evidence from the LSV pilot, 2025