A newly-launched University of Edinburgh initiative – the Innovation Career Pathway (ICP) – provides a route to career development for academics wishing to focus on commercialisation and engagement with industry.
Vice-Principal Research and Enterprise Professor Christina Boswell, (below) who spearheaded the ICP, explains what it means for staff.
The University of Edinburgh has for a number of years been committed to expanding our commercialisation and industry engagement – what we loosely refer to as Innovation activity. We recognise the deep value of such activity, alongside discovery research and other forms of impact and engagement.
Innovation can help address pressing societal challenges in areas such as health and climate change; and enable us to play a key role in fostering regional and national growth. It is also an important source of income, which we can re-invest to support our research.
With the support of Edinburgh Innovations (EI), our commercialisation service, we have driven up the number of startups and spinouts linked to the University, grown investment into these companies, increased our industrial and translational income, and benefitted from some impressive company exits and licensing of our IP.
However, we are keen to do more. Last year, our Research and Innovation Strategy committed us to further expand our innovation activity and, to explore how best to achieve this, we convened a group of academic innovators and professionals. Together, we identified a key obstacle: creating the right career track and recognition for academics.
While many of our staff have successfully commercialised their IP or attracted significant industry funding, they have also come up against resistance. For example, they can be discouraged from spinning out their IP by concerns that spending time forming a company will be frowned upon. Early career researchers may worry that a stint in industry will be seen as a deviation from building an academic career.
The Innovation Career Pathway seeks to address this. Working with EI, HR and academics from across the Colleges, we have developed a package of resources to establish a clear, recognised and rewarded academic path for those who would like to focus on innovation.
A key element of this initiative is a new competency framework that sets out the skills, knowledge and behaviours required to advance innovation careers. The framework comprises 10 competencies, from creativity and strategy to leadership, that span the entire range of innovation capability levels, from “potential innovator” to “innovation leader”.
Resources are held within a new Innovation Careers Hub, which helps staff plan their pathways, learn about inspirational innovators, and access 20 development opportunities, including training, leadership programmes and career tools:
The Pathway dovetails with other career routes, allowing a mix of research, teaching and commercialisation activity.
We also appointed a cohort of three-year Innovation Fellows in 2023 and 2024, with support from the Scottish Funding Council, allowing recent PhD graduate researchers the time, resources and specialised support to commercialise.
Crucially, the Pathway also seeks to address the under-representation of women in innovation. The 2023 Ana Stewart Pathways review identified a number of obstacles to female entrepreneurship, including logistical constraints, feelings of exclusion and the absence of clearly defined pathways and networks. We are tackling these issues through the framework’s systematic approach.
Clearly, this path is not for everyone – it will suit some areas of research more than others, and there is no expectation that all of our staff will take this direction. Indeed, as a world-leading research-intensive university, we need a balanced portfolio of activity across foundational, applied and translational research. But, for those academics interested in pursuing innovation, we hope you find these resources helpful. We would welcome your feedback and ideas to clarify and strengthen the Pathway.