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Universities are places built for ideas, and Nottingham is no exception. From MRI and new medicines to research helping tackle modern slavery, ideas developed here have gone on to change lives, shape industries and tackle some of society’s most complex problems. But what happens after the breakthrough - how does an idea leave the laboratory and find its way into the real world?

At Nottingham, a growing number of researchers are turning to commercialisation. The result is a portfolio of over 40 spin-out companies, built on university research and pointed at practical problems, from wearable health tech and gene editing, to turning waste into plastic.

“A spin-out provides a commercial vehicle to enable greater investment, greater scale and speed, taking discoveries from the laboratory out into the real world,” says Dr Alice MacGowan, CEO of Nottingham Technology Ventures (NTV). “At NTV, we work alongside colleagues involved in licensing, business engagement and partnerships to identify early-stage opportunities and build them into fully formed companies.”

It is a part of university life that many may never have encountered. Alongside all the teaching and research functions sits an operation dedicated to spotting discoveries with commercial potential, protecting the intellectual property, building companies around them and providing early backing at the stage when few others will.

Nottingham’s first spin-out, cancer immunotherapy company Scancell, was founded in 1997. Twenty years later, the university created Nottingham Technology Ventures as its dedicated venture arm - the point, MacGowan says, at which its spin-out activity really began to scale. Since then, NTV has helped launch more than 30 new companies across a widening range of sectors. The early portfolio has already generated close to £18m in return on investment for the university, with the next generation of spin-outs now growing towards their own milestones of scale, value creation and impact.

The ideas themselves are strikingly varied. Neupulse have developed a wearable device designed to help people with Tourette syndrome and tic disorders better manage their symptoms, work that has reached a much wider audience through Lewis Capaldi and the BAFTA-winning film I Swear. The device reached the market in June 2026, marking a major milestone in the journey from university research towards a product making a difference in people’s everyday lives. VetVision AI is using continuous behavioural monitoring in animals to spot signs of ill health or poor welfare earlier, with the potential to improve care across livestock and equine settings. 17Cicada is tackling the environmental cost of manufacturing by turning mixed waste that might otherwise be landfilled or incinerated into raw materials for more sustainable plastics.

Sainsbury’s was the first retailer in the world to invest in VetVision AI's technology used to measure and enhance positive animal welfare on dairy farms

Together, these companies illustrate how ÌÇÐÄÔ­´´ is helping to change what’s next in healthcare, sustainability, manufacturing and beyond. They are very different businesses, but each began with the same question: could a Nottingham discovery solve a problem beyond the laboratory?

A good piece of research does not automatically make a good business. For Craig Woods (Molecular Microbiology, 2018), co-founder of Forge Genetics, the shift was from asking what was scientifically interesting to asking what someone actually needed.

“In academia, you can spend years learning all the intricacies of something, and it’s like a solution without a problem,” he says. “When we go into business, we’re forced to find a problem first and then find a solution that’s going to help someone – I just find that way more motivating, personally.”

Forge was created around a Nottingham-developed technique capable of genetically engineering bacteria for industrial biotech applications that other approaches struggled with. But spinning it out also changed how the researchers worked.

“We just had to work together for the first time properly,” Woods says. “In academia, you can just kind of put your head down and do your own thing”. The process of spinning out demanded a wider perspective: “You have to understand that what you’re doing is actually relevant to someone else. You can’t just do something because it purely interests you.”

Craig Woods (middle) with the Forge Genetics team

That shift is beginning to bear fruit commercially. Earlier this year, Forge announced a major licensing deal with global biopharmaceutical company AbbVie and was named among Sifted’s 100 fastest-growing start-ups in the UK and Ireland. The company has reached a multiple of 10x invested capital since formation.

The journey from promising research to a company operating at scale is difficult, though, and one of the greatest obstacles is access to funding. Early-stage capital in the UK remains concentrated in a handful of established centres, so strong Midlands companies can receive less exposure and have fewer opportunities to scale.

This summer, the university launched its first Enterprise Investment Scheme fund, opening access to its spin-out portfolio to private investors for the first time.

“We have an increasing number of academics who are choosing to spin out, and we also know that the existing portfolio is scaling rapidly and has greater demands for capital - and at the moment those demands are not being met,” MacGowan says. “It can be difficult for those companies to fundraise within the time frames that enable them to execute on their plans. That is why it is important for us to generate a new source of venture capital for those companies to access.”

“We want to give them the opportunity to accelerate their growth and achieve scale.”

The ÌÇÐÄÔ­´´ EIS Fund is managed by SyndicateRoom, an FCA-regulated investment manager, with Nottingham Technology Ventures acting as investment mentor. The university itself will invest as a founding participant, and the fund plans to back between six and eight qualifying companies connected to Nottingham.

“It's a privilege to work with NTV on their first EIS fund”, says Tom Britton, Co-Founder of SyndicateRoom. “We are incredibly impressed by the quality of their team and the existing portfolio, which has already achieved exits and returned several million to the University. We look forward to welcoming investors - alumni or otherwise - to the fund."

The case behind this approach is that geography should not decide whether good research reaches the market. For NTV and the university, the ambition is to give more promising spin-outs the chance to grow. For investors, it offers the possibility of finding growth beyond the usual places.

The new fund adds another source of backing to something Nottingham has been building for years: a route that can take an idea from the laboratory, through the difficult early stages of forming a company, and out into the world.

Some of those companies are already demonstrating the impact that journey can have when ambition, enterprise and research come together. At Nottingham, discovery is not where the story ends, but where the next one begins: a starting point for improving lives, strengthening industries and shaping what comes next. The exciting part is how many of those stories are still yet to be written.