How to innovate in collaboration with universities

We are delighted to announce Future Space as Innovation Partner of Growth Forge 2025.

To celebrate their involvement, we asked Centre Director Professor Matt Freeman to share his top tips for how to innovate with universities.

Working with universities is a bit like dancing: when the right people find each other, sparks fly. 

It’s almost elegant in the way that a business can benefit from insight, an academic can benefit from commercial impact, and a student can serve as the bridge between it all. But when that pairing of minds is amiss, it’s often pretty awkward.

And yet, to create a culture of genuine innovation, you must think and act differently. You need a whole host of big ideas, creative processes and new people at your fingertips – and all should emerge from minds very different to your own. This is why universities are so critical to innovation: we know that the higher education sector is filled to the brim with research to drive new ideas, facilities to drive new processes, and a sea of student talent to drive the people needed to fuel innovation. But really it’s about recognising that universities specialise in different ways of knowing and doing that makes them such invaluable partners along the innovation journey.

The truth is that everything is there for businesses at universities – there’s different support in different areas, be it high-end funding or low-end clinical support. And yet it’s how businesses access this support that is often the challenge. Here, then, are my two key points to understand when approaching universities as innovation partners:

Undergraduates are your early validators

Picture this: you need to run trials for your R&D to find out if your product works. But as a start-up you can’t always afford expensive trials, certainly not at the beginning. It’s a catch-22: without the trials, and thus the proof, no one will give you investment.

Universities are great at facilitating an environment suited to this early-stage R&D challenge. The student project – the kind of short-term brief that undergraduates are often required to do as part of their degree – can thus really help with that early-stage validation. Working with a student, start-ups can steer research projects, simple trials, new use cases, product evaluations, and so on, providing a good proof case for small businesses, not to mention a valuable stepping stone in the student’s own career.

At Future Space, one of the things we do is partner with the Bristol Business School, the School of Engineering and the School of Applied Sciences, offering up R&D Consultancy Projects as part of a student’s final-year project, giving our companies the chance to address precisely these kinds of early-stage R&D challenges.

The PhD student is your R&D playground

Looking beyond undergraduates, how should a postgraduate fit into the innovation journey – and how is this calibre of academic skillset best utilised in the growth of a tech start-up? For me, working with undergraduates is indeed best saved for those early-stage trials, whereas PhD students become most valuable for mid-stage trials when a company is looking to develop its products through longer-form research. It makes sense: after you’ve done some of the R&D and proven your early needs, now you’ve got your investment and you’ve got a product, so now it’s time to go bigger.

A PhD student can step in here, conducting advanced research that is rigorous but commercially focused. For a company, admittedly, it can be hard to wait three years for the novel outcome of a PhD, but what you can do is build in research models with the academics that allow you as an industrial partner to say, “okay, your overall goal is to figure out x or y, and in between the broader research ambitions of the PhD you can test certain things for us.’ This model is great for the student because they learn new skills, and it means that as a company you can engage with university facilities.

Arguably, all these kinds of projects are typically best suited to aspects of R&D that are not necessarily business critical and aren’t needed instantly, but instead feed into your longer-term innovation strategy. In other words, what are the side projects you need to do that you can’t do in-house? Those are the ones you should hand over to university students. Almost by definition, universities should be understood by businesses as sandpits of infinite research and development – as R&D playgrounds designed to push boundaries and encourage a trailblazing innovation mindset.

Future Space is excited to be working with this year’s Growth Forge companies, helping them with their innovation needs. We’ll have academic and business experts to support in areas of AI, R&D and indeed all things university-business collaboration.

For more insights into growing your tech business, and to benefit from engagement with Future Space, join Growth Forge: techsouthwest.co.uk/growth-forge