In this blog taken from a speech given by Director of Midlands Innovation (MI), Dr Helen Turner, at the Universities UK's Research and Innovation Conference 2025, Helen explains how MI is strengthening the commercialisation ecosystem across the Midlands.
When I tell people that I work across eight universities in the Midlands, I often get two reactions. First, the classic “herding cats” joke. And second, a sympathetic comment about how difficult it must be to get the East and West Midlands to work together.
However, Midlands innovation geography is far more complex than an east–west divide. Our research strengths, supply chains, and industrial clusters flow across political boundaries every day. And that’s exactly where universities come into their own: as the mature collaborators able to look beyond lines on the map and work at the scale required to solve real problems.
At Midlands Innovation, that is precisely what we focus on — creating the structures, partnerships and shared platforms that allow our universities, founders and investors to operate as a cohesive innovation ecosystem.
Aligning Research Strengths with Regional Strategies
The Midlands has become a live testbed for place-based innovation policy: the end of the Midlands Engine, the rise of the West Midlands Innovation Accelerator, and a patchwork of Innovation Zones and Investment Zones. But these areas are political geographies, not economic ones. They rarely map neatly onto our research strength or industrial clusters.
This is why Midlands Innovation takes a different approach. We don’t simply respond to regional strategies — we help shape them. Through MI, universities have:
• Pushed for the creation of regional Innovation Boards
• Provided the evidence base behind new strategies
• Convened pan-regional networks of civic, industry and policy partners
• Positioned research strengths as the backbone of regional missions
The result is strong, intentional alignment between what our universities are excellent at and what our regional economies need. Advanced manufacturing, clean energy, aerospace, med-tech, hydrogen — these are areas where research excellence and industrial strength reinforce one another across the entire Midlands.
Building a Pan-Midlands Spinout Pipeline
Commercialisation is where the need for scale becomes clearest. Although each university has its own tech transfer operation, we operate in a shared ecosystem. Founders move across it. Investors look at the Midlands as a single market. Spinouts grow wherever the right support exists.
Yet the structural challenges remain stark:
• Only 1% of UK spinout VC investment since 2010 has come to the Midlands
• Midlands spinouts raise 15p for every £1 raised in the Golden Triangle
• A Midlands spinout that relocates elsewhere raises three times more than one that stays
This is why Midlands Innovation created Midlands Mindforge, our patient-capital investment company. By bringing together the collective pipeline of all eight universities, Mindforge offers investable scale that we could never achieve institution-by-institution. In doing so, it is driving convergence in data-rooms, standardising terms and conditions and agreements, investment readiness and trust between TTO teams.
Capital alone is not enough. Through MI we have also brought together 15 universities via our Research England-funded programme Forging Ahead. The programme tackles ecosystem challenges on a regional basis — strengthening TTO capability, developing a shared senior executive talent pool, showcasing regional spinouts collectively, and creating the Midlands Dealroom platform to give investors transparent access to the pipeline.
Our guiding principle is simple: Treat spinout formation as a regional ecosystem, not eight separate institutional outputs.
Sharing Risk and Resources Across MI
One of the most important shifts within Midlands Innovation has been cultural: a move from institutional problem-solving to shared problem-solving. From that shift, three lessons stand out:
1. Trust takes time
Collaboration only works when relationships and understanding are built deliberately — across universities, combined authorities and industry.
2. Pooling activity creates headroom
Joint investor roadshows, shared commercialisation training, shared evidence. Pooling activity frees each institution to focus on delivering commercialisation itself.
3. Governance must enable, not constrain
MI’s model is intentionally light-touch and pragmatic, allowing activity to flex with leadership changes and financial pressures.
Innovation Is a Team Sport — and Government Has a Role Too
When universities work together at the right scale, they become more visible and more investable than any single institution can be alone. Midlands Innovation exists to make that possible, but we also need government to play its part — by actively showcasing regional spinouts and by recognising university spinouts as a coherent, investable asset class. Recent steps in this direction are encouraging.
The Midlands has the talent, the industrial base and the research strength. Through Midlands Innovation, we are building the shared infrastructure that enables that potential to translate into investment, jobs and long-term regional growth.
