Why the UK should commercialise research for social good – not just profit

This blog was kindly authored by Huw Vasey, a Principal Consultant at Oxentia.

For the past six years, I’ve worked across sectors to build an ecosystem that supports the commercialisation of research for social impact – not just profit. While existing schemes don’t exclude social outcomes, they’re primarily designed to attract funding for expensive technological or medical innovations. This often sidelines social value, which rarely offers a high financial return.

Focusing on SHAPE disciplines – Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy – has opened new possibilities. Unlike tech or biomedical innovations, SHAPE commercialisation typically involves service and process innovation, rarely includes protectable IP, and is often rooted in the deep expertise of a small group of researchers. These ventures are quicker to bring to market and require far fewer resources. This creates a unique opportunity: innovations with high social impact can scale sustainably, as long as they generate enough revenue to support themselves, without needing the kind of mega-investment required for a new drug or device.

A common counterargument is that SHAPE academics aren’t interested in commercialisation. They see their work as a public good, not something to be monetised. However, recent programmes have shown that interest grows when incentives shift. Initiatives like the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Healthy Ageing Catalyst, the ARC Accelerator, the  SHAPE Catalyst, and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Food Systems Catalyst have drawn hundreds of SHAPE academics into commercialisation by offering a pathway to scale and sustain the impact of their research.

So, we have a growing pipeline. But why should society at large embrace research commercialisation for social value?

The case for SHAPE commercialisation: real-world impact at speed and scale

• Sustaining and scaling impact beyond grants: Academic projects often deliver significant impact while funded, only to fade when grants end. Commercialisation offers a way to extend and grow that impact. For example, Cardiff University spin-out Nisien provides ethical online safeguarding services, and evolved from the ESRC-funded HateLab, a global hub for data and insight into hate speech and crime. The original lab had great success using AI to both measure and counter hate off and online, but it was faced with a familiar problem. How could it sustain its impact after the funding had ended? In particular, how could it retain key staff members who didn’t have university contracts? The answer they found was to commercialise – bringing in paid customers as well as conducting public research. Whilst this was great for the HateLab team, it was also a big win for both public funders of science and the wider public. Why? Because they get the benefits of research impact (better identification and countering of hate) without being saddled with the costs in the long-term, or losing the impact when an impactful project closes down
• Fixing broken systems: Social ventures can address market failures or dysfunctional systems. For example, One World Together (OWT), a University of Manchester spin-out, aims to reform charitable giving and reshape the aid industry. Its aims are radical, and it addresses system-level change, which is rarely an attractive proposition for businesses. Furthermore, it required the deep knowledge and connections that only come from a long immersion in a problem space. Few outside academia would be able to achieve the type of change OWT seeks to achieve
• Bottom-up social innovation: Other ventures tackle tangible local issues with scalable solutions – like Arcade, which repurposes disused spaces for community development, or Thin Ice Press, which revives forgotten industries to foster creativity and engagement. Developing such initiatives through commercialisation, rather than solely via grant funding, provides social benefits with a lower associated cost to the taxpayer. Furthermore, it brings academic knowledge and networks into bottom-up social innovation, helping to break down persistent barriers between universities and the communities they serve.

Why This Matters Now

This is a powerful mechanism for translating research into real-world change, both at scale and sustainably. Yet, it remains undervalued.

Policy makers and social scientists often focus on influencing policy as the primary mode of impact. While important, this is an indirect second or third-order influence. Commercialisation, by contrast, allows researchers to do rather than merely influence. It provides the practical demonstration that policy makers often demand: “How do I know this will work in practice?”

So why aren’t we harnessing this potential to meet our social challenges? Why isn’t it embedded in the UK Government’s missions or industrial strategy?

We overlook this opportunity at our peril.

How could we better support SHAPE commercialisation?

So, what could be done at a practical and policy level? Here are three recommendations on how to keep the sector developing

Firstly, we need to keep funding SHAPE commercialisation. Few universities have the resources or staff to do this themselves, so this needs to come from elsewhere. That may be funders like UKRI, or it might be utilising models such as shared technology transfer offices (TTOs) to de-risk the cost of SHAPE commercialisation for smaller or less expert institutions. It also means growing and developing the community of scholars and professional support who provide the blood, sweat and tears which get these enterprises off the ground. Whilst the growth potential for SHAPE commercialisation is very high, as demonstrated by Abdul Rahman et al’s latest work, the ecosystem is still at an early stage in its life cycle and is unlikely to grow successfully without nurture.

Secondly, policymakers and practitioners need to keep celebrating SHAPE commercialisation and focusing its power on societal challenges. Events like RE:SHAPE are a great way of bringing attention to the potential of SHAPE commercialisation and showcasing its successes. Aligning commercialisation programmes to societal missions helps focus the power of SHAPE on our most pressing concerns. Not doing so was a glaring omission from the current configuration of the UK Government’s mission agenda.

Finally, we need to truly understand the value of commercialisation for social impact, by which I mean we all (researchers, senior university leaders, funders and policymakers) need to start to see social impact as being on a par with income when thinking about research commercialisation. That’s not just a mindset change, but one which also suggests we need to think about how we measure and demonstrate social as well as financial impact. Whilst some may be uncomfortable with yet more metricisation in research history and experience teach that, in order for a new approach to be valued in policy circles, it needs to demonstrate its worth in a way that is comprehensible for policymakers and that will likely require some sort of impact measurements