Full piece by @isaacbarbosa1.bsky.social and me here:

3. While there was general consensus that funding for discovery research should remain centralised, @jessicacorner.bsky.social, of Research England no less, suggested there could scope for more localism "Some of it could be strategically positioned in strong places", she said

2. Jim O'Neill, unofficial "friendly adviser" to Burnham, said a "simple formulaic approach" to devolution including R&D funding was not "necessarily the right thing to do” He said not all mayoral authorities have the right "capability and capacity" to handle devolved funding

Followed up with the even better quip: "So there we are, London's proved that place-based innovation funding works"

UKRI response added to this story. They said UK universities produce more spinouts that any other country in Europe and are second only to the US in value generated. “Raw numbers of spinouts do not adequately capture the quality, impact and growth potential of the projects we have supported.”

New quote on this story:

Gah, €250 million not €250,000! Friday afternoon maths...

And the UK could soon have wider access to both the scaleup fund and the €4bn EIC fund, both of which are up for negotiation ahead of the EU-UK summit, which the Cabinet Office confirmed will happen before Christmas. Perhaps every university spinout is across this, but it was news to me. More here:

I did confirm it with the Commission, and the UK (and indeed any non-EU country) can access up to 5% of the Scaleup Europe Fund. That’s a chonky potential €250,000 addition to the UK’s own planned £1bn scaleup fund, with the added advantage of the EU version already existing

This is despite lack of access to capital being raised as a massive problem at pretty much *every* R&D policy event I’ve been to in the last…er…5 years?? (And I've been to a lot) It came up repeatedly at the Labour Party conference this week, where ministers were laser focused on commercialisation

When I contacted BIST after it was first reported by Sifted, they told me to confirm it with the European Commission, and said “no decisions have been taken while we explore options”

Surprisingly, it turns out the UK already has access to the EU’s Scaleup Europe Fund, which is on track to be worth €5 billion. Even more surprisingly, this fact doesn’t appear to be widely known, even in government.

And she thinks universities need to change much more on commercialisation, because “we have not modernised in terms of what we allow our professors to do” Darlington said universities tend to look at how they can make money out of commercialisation rather than incentivising academics to do it