Explore our resources that aim to improve women's participation in spinout companies at both individual and institutional level
This is a collection of tools informed by our project research findings and designed to support institutions and women researchers to develop inclusive academic entrepreneurship. They are free to use and to download but please acknowledge this project as a source. If you use them we are interested to hear about your feedback.
This document provides a detailed description of the activities used in our focus group workshops with ECRs. This methodology can be adopted to investigate the attitudes and interest of early and mid-career researchers from underrepresented groups towards academic entrepreneurship and generate data that can be used to develop bespoke interventions.
This desk-based review was conducted in order to identify existing good inclusive practice and highlight examples of information and guidance for researchers considering or pursuing an entrepreneurship path.
The findings from our research with women founders highlighted the importance of finding ‘relatable mentors’. These are women who have successfully created a spinout willing to share their experiences with o0ther women researchers going through the process of spinning out or thinking about commercialising their research. A speed-mentoring event could be an effective way of facilitating networking with 'relatable mentors'. Read here about our speed-mentoring event and mentors tips for spinout success.
Our findings show that there can be different pathways to spinning out a company from university research. The journey often starts with a patent, but not in all cases. There might be intermediate steps to commercialisation such as consultancy and licensing. Public funding, such as grants provided by Innovate UK, can offer a helpful financial springboard at the early stages of the process. From the experiences of women and men founders that we have both directly interviewed and undertaken background research on, we have identified a few examples and highlighted key steps which illustrate such diversity.
