‘TenU Hosts Social Ventures’ in four points
Leading universities around the world are increasingly supporting the creation of social ventures, and funders are announcing new funding schemes to build the capacity of knowledge exchange professionals to identify and support these opportunities. TenU convened an international expert panel to find out why social innovation is a good bet, how best to support and leverage it, and how to measure the resulting impact.
The event was chaired by TenU member Matt Perkins, CEO of Oxford University Innovation. The panel featured from the US Shivani Garg Patel, Chief Strategy Officer of one of the key US impact investors, the Skoll Foundation, and Ian McClure, Executive Director of University of Kentucky Innovate, and Chair-Elect of AUTM. The UK was represented by Analia Lemmo Charnalia, Senior Business Manager of Physical Sciences & Engineering and Social Ventures at UCLB, and Emma Salgård Cunha, Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Project Lead at Cambridge Enterprise. Representing Belgium was Kaat Peeters, Head of the Research Centre for Sustainable Organizations, HOGENT.
The lively discussion offered many thought-provoking insights of which four key points are outlined below.
1. Support to social innovation broadens the pool of potential innovators creating more opportunities for growth and impact.
The panel agreed that by diversifying and broadening the scope of services offered, tech transfer offices attracted a larger and more diverse group of innovators with a broader set of interests. McClure also pointed out that it was important to equip innovators in the humanities and social sciences with the same value generation opportunities afforded to those in the life and physical sciences. This is not to say that social innovation is geared solely towards the humanities and social sciences: Perkins, Lemmo Charnalia and Salgard-Cunha highlighted the growing interest of life and physical sciences innovators in mission-led businesses.
All supported the wider point that by offering this type of support, a more diverse pool of innovators—including women and underrepresented minorities—would feel encouraged and empowered to disclose innovative ideas and so broaden the impact of research. The added benefit, according to Patel, would be a greater representation of different types of lived experience and of understandings of unmet social and economic needs, which in turn would be met by more innovative solutions.
2. Incentives for social innovators include changes in language surrounding innovation and in academic promotion processes.
The panel agreed that the use of alternative language was key to communicating a more inclusive message about research-led innovation and incentivising a wider cohort of innovators to come forward. As Perkins pointed out, this involved phasing out words such as commercialisation, intellectual property and patents and begin talking more about impacting people and addressing sustainable development goals. Peters stressed that these changes were important because many mission-driven innovators did not necessarily describe themselves as entrepreneurs.
McClure added that in order to incentivise the development of innovative ideas, universities also needed to reward these efforts in promotion processes. This is the case for traditional entrepreneurs as well as for social innovators. He shared a paper written with other TTO directors across the US and available here.
3. A strong network is key to developing social ventures and, more generally, to develop the vibrant social innovation sector.
The panel agreed that building and drawing on strong networks was key to creating successful social ventures. Peters explained that networks bring together expertise that founders may not have themselves in organisational, managerial and strategic matters. They may also bring the experience and understanding of likely challenges faced by social innovators. Lemmo Charnalia pointed out that networks can help innovators to understand their markets and how to best build a business model in response. McClure added that customers come in all forms and shapes—they may be individual users but could also be business or governments—and so networks need to be flexible and accommodate each innovator’s needs.
More generally, all called for more collaboration between those in the social innovation sector to learn and draw from each other. These included not just tech transfer offices, but also other university divisions and faculty invested in social innovation, investors, funders and social ventures.
4. Measuring the impact of social innovation requires a mix of traditional and tailored metrics and balancing of economic with social impact metrics.
Peters helpfully distinguished between direct and indirect impact metrics. Direct metrics relate to activities designed to support the creation of social ventures and accelerate their pathway to impact. These include traditional metrics such as licences, social ventures formed, investment raised. As Salgard-Cunha and Patel pointed out, here it is also important to acknowledge the diversity of organisational structures found in the social innovation sector which demand an equally diverse set of success factors tailored to individual missions and business models.
Meanwhile, indirect metrics measure social and economic impacts further down the value chain, such as jobs created and lives improved or saved. These can be claimed by universities to the extent that universities choose to support some projects over others and help them to realise their potential. According to McClure, part of this should involve reframing traditional measures, balancing the discourse of economic achievements with social contributions. A pragmatic approach proposed by Perkins could be to measure the contribution of tech transfer offices to supporting social ventures targeting sustainable development goals.
The TenU Hosts event series offers opportunities for US and UK policymakers, thought leaders and leading practitioners in research commercialisation to hold conversations on topical issues. The next TenU Hosts event will be held in the spring; if you wish to be informed of the date do contact us to join our mailing list.
TenU is a transatlantic collaboration formed to capture effective practices in research commercialisation and share these with UK and US governments and higher education communities, in order to increase the societal impact of research. TenU’s members are the technology transfer offices of the University of Cambridge, Columbia University, University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London, KU Leuven, University of Manchester, MIT, University of Oxford, Stanford University, and UCL.
