UCL Innovation and Enterprise launches

Since coming to UCL last year I have been greatly impressed by the many ideas our students and staff have and their enthusiasm in developing the application of those ideas outside the university to make a difference for the good. And we can be proud of our encouragement of enterprise amongst our staff and students, supporting 31 spin-out companies and almost 200 student start-up businesses in the last five years.

I believe it is important to ensure innovation is clearly reflected as being at the centre of our university strategy and to support this I am unifying the teams that report to me at UCL into a single department: UCL Innovation and Enterprise.

UCL Innovation and Enterprise will include teams developing Business and Enterprise Partnerships, supporting Entrepreneurship, and managing Knowledge Exchange funding, as well as UCL Life Learning.

The name change will take effect from 1 August 2016, and the names UCL Advances, UCL Enterprise Operations and the Office of the Vice-Provost (Enterprise) will cease to be used internally or externally from the same date. UCL’s wholly-owned companies, UCL Business, which commercialises research, and UCL Consultants, which facilitates academic consultancy, will continue to exist as separate UCL companies, operating as previously.

Most UCL Innovation and Enterprise staff will be based at 90 Tottenham Court Road – we are moving back there in early August once the office refurbishment has been completed. The refurbishment will increase the capacity of the office and allow teams based in a number of sites to come together.

UCL has been recognised for our encouragement of student entrepreneurship. We were hailed as a “shining example” of support for student entrepreneurs in a recent article in the Guardian about whether universities are doing enough to help students to set up their own businesses. We will be building on this success, expanding our entrepreneurship activities at UCL and focusing our support of start-ups on UCL students and recent alumni, eventually reaching through to our early career researchers. To support this, student entrepreneurship activities will be located at our new incubator BaseKX in Kings Cross. BaseKX has the advantage of being close to UCL, the Alan Turing Institute and the Crick, giving us the ability to host our student start-ups in an excellent and appropriate environment.

You may have seen that earlier this month bio-bean, a clean technology company co-founded by Arthur Kay while he was a student at UCL, won the Virgin Media Business Voom 2016 award after pitching to Sir Richard Branson and his judging panel in a competition with a £1 million prize fund. Congratulations to them and all our student enterprises.