Entrepreneurial Campus: report

3 Key components of a "world-class entrepreneurial campus"

This change is large and complex and will take place at varying rates across different campuses over many years. In addition, each institution is starting from a different baseline in terms of sophistication, capability, ambition, and culture. We can, however, look for commonality in approach across institutions which will help accelerate the change required.

We also recognise that we are entering a post-Covid period where our institutions are establishing a "new normal". We recognise the tremendous efforts of our institutions and the impact of the pandemic, and we realise that conversations about Entrepreneurial Campuses may be seen as "a bridge too far" on top of the challenges of the past 2+ years. We believe, however, that establishing the new normal presents an opportunity to continue to evolve how we deliver our tertiary education, particularly in terms of entrepreneurial teaching and support, leveraging the developments in video and collaborative technologies in how we approach this opportunity (which in itself requires new and different ways of working).

In this paper we discuss the attributes of a world-class Entrepreneurial Campus. For convenience we have grouped them into ten key themes:

Align With Regional Ecosystem - Align and interact with your regional ecosystem and external partners to accelerate

Inspire Through Impact - Inspire young people to engage in entrepreneurial thinking through social and impact led activities

Lead From The Top - Establish institutional policies that support the development of an entrepreneurial mindset in students and staff

Transform Curriculum - All students undertake credit bearing courses in support of entrepreneurial development as well as set, and optional, cross-faculty, practical entrepreneurial learning opportunities during their student journey

Enhance Extra-curricular Support - Provide a systematic approach to extra-curricular support for student start-ups

Engage External Expertise - Develop (and engage with) an active alumni network and your local entrepreneurial community

Enhance Spin-out Support - Develop support for academic/staff spin-outs

Align Funding - Provide access to funding for student and staff-led enterprises

Develop A Talent Pipeline - Create a vibrant and developing pre-16 domestic talent pipeline as well as attracting entrepreneurial students from around the world

Deploy A Framework For Change - Establish a framework for change that incentivises our institutions and ensures quality outcomes.

In the final theme (Theme 10) we present a framework for our proposed approach along with actions and recommendations for deployment.

Theme 1: Align and interact with your regional ecosystem and external partners to accelerate

Entrepreneurship requires great people (alongside great technology). Developing an Entrepreneurial Campus (EC) involves a large number of stakeholders, all of whom need to engage and interact for the outcome to be successful, including:

• Students
• The Institution's academics & staff
  • Teaching
  • Research
  • Non-academic staff
• Alumni (particularly those with entrepreneurial interests)
• Large corporates ("Big Business")
• SMEs
• Government (national and local)
• Economic Development/Skills Agencies
• Social enterprises/not-for-profits
• Providers of risk capital/Investors
• Private Sector Venture Studios.

Each of the above have an important but distinctive role to play in the development of our Entrepreneurial Campuses.

In Section 4 Theme 3 below we discuss the importance of ensuring equal emphasis is placed on achievements in industrial collaboration, start-up facilitation, teaching, and research across our institutions.

As a fundamental part of teaching, research, and innovation our institutions are catalysts for initiating collaborations between stakeholders, creating a public space for local, regional, national, and international conversations, setting the direction of travel of technologies and markets.

This should include a focus on industrial collaboration and start-up facilitation. In this context, our tertiary institutions should carry out research on future trends/areas of highest growth potential, advocate on behalf of entrepreneurs, bring together organisations/businesses with a common interest and encourage synergies/cross-sectoral collaboration.

To give an idea of potential scale and maturity reached in the teaching and facilitation of entrepreneurship, if we look at the ecosystem that surrounds MIT in the US, we see over 80 entrepreneurial programmes and 50 or so incubators supporting the start-up ecosystem, with the university itself delivering on average 30 technology spin-outs, and students creating 100+ start-ups each year (we look in more detail at the need for these facilities in Section 4 Theme 5 below). The ecosystems that grow around our institutions are critical in driving the level of innovation and enterprise in a region. In the above example, students don't just go to MIT to learn, they also go to MIT to start a business and in doing so they will leverage the resources of the institution as well as the surrounding region, ultimately remaining in the local area which provides all the facilities they need to grow their business. This is a core aspect of growing a regional economic ecosystem. Entrepreneurial campuses are regional anchor institutions.

The importance of aligning with regional economic development

In Scotland, the Enterprise & Skills Review's twin outcomes of: National Economic Coherence and Regional Economic Diversity are an important backdrop to the development of our ECs. This regional focus on the emerging core characteristics of each of Scotland's nine regional economies, as part of a national collaborative effort will provide the skills which Scotland's economy demands now and will require in the future.

There are nine regional development partnerships:

Northeast Regional Economic Strategy (Aberdeen City and Shire);

Ayrshire Regional Economic Partnership;

Capital City Region - Edinburgh & South East Scotland Regional Economic Partnership;

Forth Valley Regional Economic Partnership;

Glasgow Regional Economic Partnership;

Highlands and Islands Region;

South of Scotland Regional Economic Partnership;

Tay Cities Regional Deal; and,

Moray Growth Deal.

Each region has emerging economic characteristics/focus including:

• Air and Sea Ports of Ayrshire,
• Economic Diversity of Glasgow's Metro Region,
• Decarbonisation of the Forth Valley,
• Capital Effect on and of the City and Region in and around Edinburgh,
• Sustainable Mobility in Michelin Scotland Innovation Parc (MISP) in the Tay Cities region
• Aberdeen's Journey of Transition.

Alignment of the above with the Techscaler network is important. Techscalers are to be established in the following locations:

• Aberdeen
• Dundee
• Edinburgh
• Glasgow
• Inverness
• Stirling
• Dumfries

In terms of regional development themes, there is a high degree of "fit" with the regional development zones in terms of geography. Entrepreneurial Campuses will play a key role in creating a pipeline of potential scale-ups who may take advantage of the facilities provided by the Techscaler network. Indeed, the relationship between the Techscalers and our ECs is critical to get right on a local and regional scale. How a specific Techscaler works with its local EC is important and should be the focus of combined thinking and collaboration.

We are cognisant that our Techscalers will also operate on a remote hub and spoke basis as well as being physical entities; however, it is safe to assume that where there are gaps in Techscaler physical and educational network then the role of our tertiary educational institutions and the network of pre-scalers becomes particularly important in providing access to facilities to support scaling businesses.

Alignment and leverage of our Innovation Centres and Technology Clusters

Across Scotland we have a number of Innovation Centres (Digital Health and Care Centre, Censis, DataLab etc.) and technology clusters (Fintech Scotland, Cyber Cluster, Travel Tech for Scotland etc.) that work with academics across our institutions supporting innovation amongst other things.

As we look to develop our entrepreneurial campuses it is important that we recognise the role that these organisations play in the overall ecosystem and the impact of introducing/scaling the activities relating to our entrepreneurial campuses on them.

It is also critical that we leverage the capabilities and funding that already goes to these organisations and understand their relationship with our emerging entrepreneurial campuses and how this might change as activity ramps up.

We need to investigate further the potential to extend the role of our Innovation Centres to further support entrepreneurial activity across our campuses. Innovation Centres have a unique inter-campus view of the activity across academic research. One example of how we might extend this is by identifying and facilitating the interaction between student bodies (e.g. clubs/societies and enterprise organisations) and academic staff. By identifying opportunities and acting as a catalyst between staff and students in bringing together such activity we believe that we will see an acceleration in the number of student start-ups across our campuses.

We can see the opportunity of aligning clusters and academia in countries like Germany where during the late 2000s and early 2010s the German government invested heavily in technology research and innovation. The German government recognised that research and innovation are key in order to remain at the forefront of worldwide competition. To provide new impetus for this collaboration, the German Federal Government developed the successful High-Tech Strategy furthering their comprehensive innovation strategy. A key factor contributing to the success of the High-Tech Strategy is the Leading-Edge Cluster Competition.

Effective cluster management requires an umbrella organisation that can coordinate and align activity across clusters in the tech sector. In Scotland the Scottish Cluster Ecosystem Alliance, managed by ScotlandIS (a Silver accredited organisation from The European Secretariat for Cluster Analysis, ESCA), fulfils this role. With the emergence of ECs, we believe that there is a role for this organisation to work with our academic institutions to ensure that entrepreneurial activity across the tech sector is mapped and coordinated so that best value is gained through alignment of government funding across this space.

We have the opportunity to establish and grow UK-wide clusters. These should align where possible with the innovation priorities (see Scotland's National Innovation Strategy) but should also take advantage of gaps in the cluster landscape. For example, the Travel Tech for Scotland Cluster is the leading travel tech cluster across the UK and therefore might claim the role of "Travel Tech Cluster for the UK". They are also based at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) thus creating a symbiotic relationship with the Edinburgh University.

A good example of the need for greater collaboration between universities and industry facilitated by tech clusters in the work of Fintech Scotland in developing their Fintech Research and Innovation Roadmap 2022-31.

Fintech Scotland has recently been recognised and a leading fintech cluster management organisation in Europe: https://www.digit.fyi/fintech-Scotland-achieves-top-cluster-excellence-accreditation/

Clusters are great at highlighting the opportunity and facilitating collaboration across business, universities, and colleges in the pursuit of innovation. They also provide a mechanism through which to provide tailored and targeted growth support.

The role of "Big Business" and academia in driving innovation

The complementarity of start-ups and big corporations is often misunderstood and underestimated by institutions. We have examined the work of MediaX, Stanford University's programme that brought together business and Stanford researchers for open and mutually beneficial explorations of the problems and possibilities arising from the growing use of information technologies.

MediaX was an industrial affiliate program that brought academics across Stanford and industry together on a range of topics that combined issues of human performance with technological solutions. The program listened to the interests of industry and then cast those interests into a form that captured the imagination of faculty members. The community that resulted then provided thought leadership and engaging exploratory dialogue across faculties to share early results, preliminary findings, and nascent research questions. A significant effort was needed to bring forth faculty members and encourage them to share their research, collaborate with other faculty and with industry. In time faculty members would be allowed temporary secondment to develop the resultant start-ups providing they returned within a 3-year window to distil their learnings. Thus, creating a virtuous cycle of mutual benefit and catalytic impact to take risks to explore new intersections in research. The DNA of industrial collaboration that then resulted after 20 years of effort is now woven into Stanford's day to day programs and has now been published as a playbook.

The success of the MediaX programme over 21 years is testament to the fact that programmes like this act as a catalyst to innovation, resulting in the creation of student start-ups and academic spin-outs. MediaX acted as a gateway for corporations to approach Stanford's faculty experts doing research relevant to the company in question. It addressed one of the key barriers to collaboration – the short termism of businesses vs long term foresight of university researchers. One of the important facts of the programme was the way that academics were given the flexibility to step out of the university and work with the start-ups, but they were encouraged to return in order to bring back the information and learning that they gained, to potentially do the same again.

Collaboration between large corporations and academia to drive innovation is not easy. It requires investment of time and effort on both sides – this is clearly illustrated in the case of MediaX at Stanford.

Venture Studios

We referenced above the number of venture studios and incubators that surround MIT (and similar institutions) that are not attached to the university or funded by the public sector, but constitute a key part of the ecosystem.

We see a growing number of incubators, accelerators and venture studios emerging around the globe with varying business models, all of which support the development of start-ups.

There are many examples including Conception X, a programme that helps PhDs become Venture Scientists launching deeptech start-ups based on their research, connecting with industry experts, and be eligible for innovation grants and awards through training designed for scientists and engineers. Conception X's mission is to help the brightest people move from lab to start-up.

Venture Studios are found in various forms including attached to banks, flexible office space etc etc. Another example is Entrepreneur First, a highly selective, 3-month long programme run in 6 cities across the globe. They bring together individuals with the potential to found globally important technology companies, to meet their co-founder and build start-ups from scratch. Alongside that, founders are given access to leading advisors, the opportunity to pitch for pre-seed funding, and a network of the world's best investors to break down the barriers to founding, and move fast.

There are also impact-driven Venture Studios like that founded by Crisis in London. This studio is on a mission to accelerate the end of homelessness for good through entrepreneurship. The studio invests in, builds, and scales ventures that end homelessness for those experiencing it, or prevent homelessness from happening in the first place.

Theme 2: Inspire young people to engage in entrepreneurial thinking through social and impact led activities

Globally we are seeing young people at the forefront of social and environmental impact awareness and change. We are also seeing an increase in the role of business in solving society's greatest challenges.

Social impact and wider impact creation can be used as a 'hook' to inspire young people to consider entrepreneurial activity more generally (See reference to Durham University Game Changer Innovation Programme in Section 4 Theme 5). The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer an engaging and robust impact framework which can ignite entrepreneurial activity. The Impact Management Project's impact norms provide the methodology for entrepreneurs to consider positive and negative business impacts, and impact depth and scale, alongside unintended consequences.

It is therefore sensible (and indeed advantageous) that our ECs support "social" and impact-led entrepreneurship alongside other "for-profit" entrepreneurship activities.

There is an opportunity to elevate and amplify scalable social and impact-led enterprises, and their resulting impact, across our post-16 entrepreneurial campuses. A vision for social and impact-led entrepreneurship in post-16 education should include the following imperatives:

• Social and Impact-led entrepreneurship is taught as a natural part of 'mainstream' entrepreneurship, finance, and business studies activities
• Educational institutions facilitate access to a range of funding mechanisms to encourage and grow early-stage, high risk, emerging social and Impact-led business ideas, and enterprises
• Educational institutions embrace and support the full reach of their networks and governance structures including:
  • those with enterprising ideas from local communities and regions;
  • the student body;
  • alumni; and,
  • staff teams - past and present
• Educational institutions maximise the use of their resources to progress and scale positive social and environmental outcomes.

According to an article by Mario Calderini, Veronica Chiodo, Francesco Gerli & Giulio Pasi in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (June 2021) social-tech entrepreneurship is an important area of opportunity:

"Technology in the service of social entrepreneurship presents many opportunities. It can enable robust new solutions and help scale existing ones. It can also support engagement, contribute to the sustainability of social enterprises, and boost financial investment."

There is clearly an opportunity for Scotland to lead across this space. We already have a vibrant and growing social and impact investment infrastructure that will help us to achieve this potential. Much of this work is driven by organisations such as Social Investment Scotland (SIS) and its subsidiary SIS Ventures, and there is an opportunity to leverage these organisations to embed social entrepreneurial capabilities and practices throughout all stakeholders across our ECs by working closely with such organisations. By doing this we will not only create further positive impact but also attract a cohort of individuals into entrepreneurship who may not have originally engaged directly.

We already see some social and impact-led entrepreneurship activity within the 16+ education sector in Scotland. The University of Edinburgh (UoE), for example, is an investor in the SIS managed Scottish Social Growth Fund; it participates in the SIS Retail Academy connecting UoE procurement and other teams with social enterprises; and with SIS being the strategic impact partner for Converge.

There is a potential to scale this and similar activity through the establishment of a "National Centre for Social and Impact-led Entrepreneurship", supported by appropriate funding mechanisms, that would connect 16+ education partners with social entrepreneurship experts and expertise, facilitating access to knowledge, expertise, industry placements, social supply chains, and dedicated funding mechanisms. Establishing a national resource will allow immediate and dedicated access to sector experts and actors who can co-design curriculums, access appropriate seed and growth funds, collaborate, champion, and guide the sector in harnessing its significant economic footprint for scalable social good. It also contributes to building and growing a pipeline of innovative enterprises fit for local, national, and global marketplaces.

There is interest from the university sector in exploring funding models, driven partly by the wealth of some universities via their own endowments, and student-led pressure to ensure these are invested responsibly. All of this will inspire and support the student body, teaching teams – and others reached by educational bodies – to develop impactful enterprising activities that maximise positive social, environmental and economic outcomes for the people of Scotland, and beyond.

We see further examples of the desire to create impact through programmes like Demola Scotland based at University of the West of Scotland (UWS). Demola Scotland is Demola Global's first UK "home" with the potential to scale this across the whole of the UK.

Intrapreneurship vs Entrepreneurship

Not all students will go on to found their own business. There are many career paths that can be taken following tertiary education. Entrepreneurial skills acquired by students during their education are useful across the total spectrum of student destinations. Students who aim to go on to work for a private company or public sector/3rd sector organisation will benefit by being exposed to both entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship (i.e. acting like an entrepreneur inside an organisation).

It is the people closest to the problems faced by customers who often have the best solutions – but these ideas rarely make it into reality. Intrapreneurship unlocks that potential. Organisations like The Lens help develop the mindset and skills of intrapreneurs, with employees forming a community of change-makers that inspire and influence others to see and think differently. Programmes of this type:

• Harness creativity and builds a pipeline of ideas
• Invest in ideas, turning them into action
• Increase innovation skills
• Build teamwork and new collaborations
• Enhance partnerships, both internally and externally.

These are all skills that might be acquired (or at least seeded) during a student's educational phase.

Working with philanthropic and not for profit organisations focused on entrepreneurial (social and mainstream) development

Across the globe we see a growing number of successful entrepreneurs who are keen to support economic growth through entrepreneurship. We touch on this in Section 4 Theme 6 below when discussing the role of alumni but it is worthy of mention here. With a history of entrepreneurial success in Scotland we have a number of individuals, organisations and foundations who are incredibly active in the entrepreneurial space, each providing support and knowledge into the entrepreneurial community. These include:

• The Hunter Foundation, founded by Sir Tom Hunter, who invests heavily in entrepreneurial initiatives in Scotland, from the £5m initial endowment that funded the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at Strathclyde University to the ongoing investment in scale-up activity of Scale-up Scotland. Recent announcements in this space includes a free online resource (open to all) Scale-up.scot and the Scale-up 2.0 Programme. The Hunter Foundation also supports Social Entrepreneurship.
• Entrepreneurial Scotland Foundation (ES) is an independent charity that exists to equip organisations with the mindset, skills, and connectivity to deliver personal and business growth. ES has 20 years' experience supporting 1000s of talented people to unlock their potential by providing transformative programmes that blend experience, world-class teaching and peer to peer learning. They are supported by experience, generosity, and goodwill from their community of 5,000 leaders.

By continuing to align and leverage the resources, knowledge and networks created and made available by these organisations we believe that there is a huge opportunity to accelerate the development of our entrepreneurial campuses across Scotland.

Theme 3: Establish institutional leadership and policies that support the development of an entrepreneurial mindset in students and staff

Entrepreneurialism in tertiary education will only thrive where there is a cultural alignment with the institution supported by policies that ensure a conducive environment. The culture of each institution is unique and therefore it is important to consider under what context an entrepreneurial mindset fits with a particular institution's purpose (or at least ensure that an entrepreneurial mindset would not clash with the existing culture and purpose of an institution). Start-ups/founders should be seen as sector assets that an institution should be proud of.

Culture is the coming together of many facets, but one of the key points is that it is led from the top.

In developing their ECs, successful institutions have recognised the varying levels of student motivations related to the teaching of entrepreneurship. As discussed above, not all students want to start their own business – indeed some may consider a career in "business" as a complete turn off. With this in mind many institutions started their journey by focusing on developing an "entrepreneurial spirit" rather than simply focusing on developing "entrepreneurs" (although this is important in its own right). Enterprise thrives where there is an innovative mindset and the ability to solve problems. These attributes align well with a strong and progressive learning environment.

Traditional career paths are receding; therefore it is a natural imperative that we consider alternatives including a career as an entrepreneur. In addition to equipping those who pursue careers in research/education, small and large corporations, governments and the third sector organisations, successful institutions also prepare students for a career as an entrepreneur. Indeed, the skill sets are not wildly divergent at their core (meta skills) with skills being applied across all sectors, particularly in the form of intrapreneurship (discussed above). Students learn to be agents of change within all organisation types if they are exposed to the skills that underpin entrepreneurship during their studies.

When we look at developing entrepreneurial skills, significant resources are required to launch entrepreneurial courses, as well as extracurricular activities. Entrepreneurial courses cannot simply be copied and pasted from other institutions, they require considerable efforts and deep experiential knowledge that is accumulated over many years.

Those institutions who have developed at pace have senior leadership that have prioritised the development of an entrepreneurial mindset across their institution, funding activities and fostering behaviours in line with their institutions mission. These institutions place an equal emphasis on achievements in entrepreneurship and rewards its staff accordingly, providing academic pathways across Industrial collaboration, start-up facilitation, teaching and research. They encourage and reward academics who gain experience in start-ups, scale-ups and other external opportunities, but strongly encouraged them to return to academia and share the knowledge gained and continue with their research (see Media X example).

Theme 4: All students undertake credit-bearing courses in support of entrepreneurial development including set and optional, cross-faculty, practical entrepreneurial learning opportunities during their student journey

Entrepreneurial education is not simply about preparing students to pitch a business plan. It spans a wide variety of capabilities including the development of meta skills (e.g. creative thinking, problem solving, collaboration & teamworking, etc) as well as specific skills around product and organisational development and, importantly, the practical application of classroom learning.

The most entrepreneurial campuses deliver interventions that stimulate interest in entrepreneurship at an early stage of a student's educational career, as well as training students to deal with the specifics of the entrepreneurial journey. Students are given opportunities to explore their motivations for entrepreneurship and are given help to build both fundamental and specialised entrepreneurial skills. They are also provided with scenarios in which they can apply the skills learned through a multitude of labs, internships and competitions.

A systematic approach to developing entrepreneurial skills is key with the top institutions offering the opportunity for students and staff to engage with various interventions that recognise their starting point and can be summarised as:

Inspire: Inspire students and staff to engage with the entrepreneurial space via innovation and creative thinking – whatever their motivations and potential destination

Explore: Encourage them to explore opportunities to create impact

Learn: Teach the fundamentals needed to develop an entrepreneurial offering

Apply: Create opportunities to apply their learning in a practical way (lab, project, internship, competition)

Accelerate: Support and accelerate the growth of viable enterprises.

Below we show an example of the interventions currently available at MIT to illustrate this approach:

Trust Centre Entrepreneurship Ramp (Source: https://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/)

As an institution, it would be interesting to complete the attached template with the activity at your institution:

Entrepreneurship is a "craft" as opposed to a science or an art (Bill Aulet, MIT) and therefore requires some learning of the basic concepts in classroom settings but also opportunities to learn by doing. The craft analogy also then opens doors to viewing entrepreneurship as a profession like medicine and architecture. Learning by doing is critical. This might be initiated in extracurricular activities in those institutions that have a more traditional approach to learning. Indeed, the more times a person engages with an entrepreneurial venture more likely they are to succeed (Prof Ed Roberts, MIT).

Entrepreneurship is not a spectator sport. Hands-on work and achieving results is one of the tenets of an entrepreneur (Bill Aulet).

Internships, fieldwork, bootcamps and competitions play a key role in teaching entrepreneurship (these are covered in more detail in Section 4 Theme 5 below). This dual track teaching approach also provides relevance whilst not giving up academic rigour.

This approach, however, places increased demands on logistics – not least, access to a pool of great practitioners willing to give up time (see Section 4 Theme 6 below – Develop (and engage with) an active Alumni and/or Local Entrepreneurial Community).

We also recognise the role of the leadership of both faculties and the institutions as a whole in developing a co-curricular approach to teaching entrepreneurship. It cannot happen without complete buy-in from the senior leadership; however, if we track the evolution of early entrepreneurial teaching in institutions in the US, we see that this was often catalysed by students and alumni initiating activity that was then picked up by the teaching staff.

Theme 5: Provide a systematic approach to extra-curricular support for student start-ups

Student start-ups cover a broad spectrum of types of businesses. They are generally categorised into two types of start-ups:

• Subsistence (small businesses, unlikely to grow substantially or create many jobs)
• Transformational (catalysts for innovation, job reaction, productivity, and competitiveness).

Both categories of entrepreneurship are important as platforms for developing entrepreneurial mindsets, skills and experience, however transformational entrepreneurship has a far greater potential to drive forward economic development than subsistence-based entrepreneurship. Transformational entrepreneurship results in the creation and growth of "Innovation Driven Enterprises" (IDEs). In the context of the EC, these can be student start-ups or academic spin-outs (dealt with below). IDEs are scalable and may lead to enterprises of considerable size and impact. IDEs also tend to serve international markets (supporting a positive balance of payments). For example, a company based in Edinburgh may have its customer base located within 3 hours of its office. For a subsistence business this might mean customers in Inverness, for an IDE it would probably mean Krakow or Vienna!

Subsistence entrepreneurship provides an income and return for the founder but is not generally scalable. Subsistence-based enterprises are however important as they can provide a platform for the development of entrepreneurial skills that may later lead the founder to launch an IDE.

In successful ECs we see strong links between academic teaching and extra-curricular entrepreneurial activities (each feeding off one another). Indeed, in MIT, it was extra-curricular activities between students and alumni that triggered the provision of entrepreneurial education by the institution itself. A list of the activities that support entrepreneurship at MIT can be seen here: Guiding Principles

Start with "Inspire"

As described in Theme 4 above, we need to start with "Inspire". Developing an entrepreneurial mindset can often start with engagement in "innovative and creative thinking", e.g. Durham University "Game Changer Initiative" uses UN SDGs as a trigger to inspire students and staff into action. Not only do UN SDGs provide a call to action, but they also provide a common language (i.e. "impact") between academic curricular and extracurricular entrepreneurial activities. Game Changer is a fast-paced, extra-curricular innovation program that uses 'design thinking' to find impact driven solutions to UN SDG challenges. Its purpose is to foster ingenuity, creativity, and innovative design to deliver environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable solutions. This began as an initiative run by the Student Enterprise Team and is now being embedded across core curriculum teaching at the request of academic staff.

Provide access to a robust and systematic programme of support

ECs that perform strongly provide a wide range of flexible, user centric, extracurricular support (at scale and year-round) to students and recent graduates including:

• A clear programme of inspirational and structured learning opportunities for students
• Opportunities to apply their learning (projects, competitions, internships etc)
• Extensive interaction between students and alumni
• Professional support from experts outside the institution
• Access to case studies (on paper and in person)
• Signposting and access to infrastructure (incubators, labs, communities, platforms etc).

Activity is organised in a user-centric way, often student-led before being absorbed into the fabric of the institution's offering. These interventions can be delivered through the different delivery mechanisms of student enterprise support, societies, academic faculties, or externally organised.

Successful ECs create, signpost, and actively promote systematic and logical entrepreneurial pathways/frameworks for students, staff, and recent graduates, through extra-curricular activities. They:

• Inspire: Inspire students to engage in entrepreneurship via innovative and creative approaches that capture the imagination of students and staff
• Explore: Encourage students and staff to explore opportunities to create impact often though global level challenges, eg. using UN SDGs
• Learn: Teach the fundamentals needed to develop an entrepreneurial offering
• Apply: Create opportunities to apply their learning in a practical way (labs, projects, internships, competitions)
• Accelerate: Provide support to help accelerate the growth of viable enterprises
  • Eg: Imperial Enterprise Lab
  • In MIT Martin Trust Centre we see the following pattern of activity through the year (see diagram above):
    • September: Getting started (Demo Day, "Yes I can", t=0 Festival)
    • Fall: Increase exposure (Low friction events, Classes, hubs)
    • IAP: Starting to Commit (fuse, StartMIT, Internships, $100K pre-Accelerator treks) IAP – MIT ELO
    • Spring: In the race (Advanced classes, competitions, service, independent studies)
    • Summer: Total immersion (Delts V Accelerator, other full commitment options).

National/International Competitions

At national (and international) level competitions provide a platform for new start-ups and spin-outs to demonstrate their capabilities. Examples of competitions include:

• Converge Challenge. Working in collaboration with Scotland's universities, Converge offers Scotland's thinkers and creators the opportunity to test, validate and accelerate their business idea from concept to commercial reality. The programme creates a diverse pipeline of investor ready companies. Converge is open to all university staff, students and recent graduates and the competition offers intensive business training, networking, 1-2-1 support and generous equity-free cash prizes.
• Venture Catalyst Challenge - Imperial Enterprise Lab
• Stage Two is the largest pan-European competition for the best start-ups spinning out of leading universities.

Theme 6: Develop (and engage with) an active alumni network and your local entrepreneurial community

Active engagement with an institution's alumni network and local entrepreneurial community has been critical in ensuring the successful development of ECs around the globe.

Successful ECs recognise the vital role that alumni and local entrepreneurs play in both developing an interest in entrepreneurship and delivering solutions amongst students and staff. This is seen in institutions such as MIT & Stanford where the interaction between students and alumni was a key catalyst for the development of an entrepreneurial culture across their respective institutions. At MIT, much of the current entrepreneurial activity can be traced back to October 1969 when a group of 10 locally based alumni organised a weekend seminar, "Starting and building your own company". We can track continued involvement and leadership of the alumni community through the 70s and 80s in different forms, including the publishing of the MIT Entrepreneurship Registers in 1971/72, listing the resume style information about each participant with the purpose of facilitating networking. The seminars were later turned into a book in 1974 "How to Start Your Own Business" described as follows:

"We think this book is unique because it is not a collection of success stories. Many of the authors are still only a few years beyond the start-up phase. They haven't yet had time to forget the problems of start-up or to romanticise them. It is this quality of immediacy that we hope to communicate to our readers."

William Putt 1974

It is noteworthy that we are revisiting this statement 50 years later to draw insights on the role and importance of entrepreneurial alumni in developing our ECs in Scotland.

From the above, we see the importance of engaging with an active alumni/local entrepreneurial community in starting and growing entrepreneurial activity across an institution.

The motivations of alumni with an entrepreneurial background to engage with their university or college are different to alumni who may have remained in the employment of others. This difference needs to be recognised in terms of how an institution reaches out to alumni who might support the development of their EC. Entrepreneurial alumni are often more motivated to spend time supporting student start-ups in terms of providing advice and support as well as identifying potential investment/non-exec opportunities, over and above simple philanthropic activity. As individuals they often have more flexibility to "get involved" (portfolio career, more flexibility in how they choose to spend their time, less corporate governance preventing them holding other roles etc). Those institutions that retain connections with their entrepreneurial graduates immediately after they graduate by offering access to the university's resources both socially (e.g. sports etc) and to support their entrepreneurial activities will, by definition, maintain closer ties. It is therefore beneficial for institutions to offer ongoing support to graduates as described in Section 4 Theme 5 above "Provide a systematic approach to extra-curricular support for student start-ups".

It is also not all about engaging with iconic founders. It is often the case that institutions focus on the very successful founders and entrepreneurs that have connections to the institution. Whilst this is understandable in terms of "crowd pulling" and potential philanthropic support, there is much to be learned from founders who are still on their journey and for whom the challenges and learnings are still very fresh in their minds (see William Putt's quote above). They may not know they have something to say, but should be sought out and encouraged to share their experience. Tapping into these communities and this knowledge is vital.

In addition to engaging with the alumni of an institution to develop entrepreneurial activity, engaging with the local entrepreneurial community is a key part of driving up levels of entrepreneurial activity across our institutions. In his book, The Start-up Community Way, Brad Feld states that "Entrepreneurs must lead start-up communities" for them to be successful. We rarely see this across our institutions with entrepreneurs being invited in to speak with students, rather than the entrepreneurs themselves actually driving the direction of travel when it comes to our institution-based start-up communities. Where it does happen/has happened (e.g. Boulder, Colorado) we see dramatic growth in these communities through collaboration with local academic institutions.

In terms of use of funding, successful institutions channel alumni funds into specific programmes of activity that encourage entrepreneurial behaviour amongst students, including competitions, hackathons, internships etc., rather than the money being handed to the university for more generic activities/works.

Theme 7: Develop support for academic/staff spin-outs

Although there are some overlaps, there are significant differences between

	Student Start-up	Technology Transfer
Technology content	Lower	Significant
Time horizon	Shorter (months)	Longer (years)
Resources	MVP – lowest cost and iterative	Often capital-intensive R&D
Development approach	Identification of a need and development of a solution to that need	Often a solution in search of a problem
Aim	Usually commercialisation	Often primary education, learning to commercialisation
Customer input	Benefit from early customer input	Benefit from early customer input

It is understandable therefore that the conditions attached to spin-outs are different from those that might be applied to student start-ups. However, these conditions may have longer term consequences on the success of the spin-outs, hindering their growth and stopping them reaching their full potential. Institutions provide support to potential spin-outs; however, it can be the case that institutions, by trying to ensure a value return from their spin-outs (e.g. by taking significant equity stakes against intellectual property or taxing them relative to royalties), end up incentivising the founder to found an SME rather than grow an IDE. Those institutions that have adopted a successful technology transfer function create the conditions for the spin-out to thrive and scale resulting in the long-term return of value through various means including ongoing engagement of the founder with the institution over decades.

The relative performance of Scottish Universities (in terms of the number of spin-outs) compared to the rest of the UK was highlighted recently in Spotlight on Spin-outs report published by Beauhurst and The Royal Academy of Engineering.

Top origin universities by total number of spin-outs tracked since 2011 - Top 40 (Jan 2022)

1 University of Oxford 193

2 University of Cambridge 137

3 Imperial College London 106

4 University College London 88

5 University of Manchester 73

6 University of Bristol 66

7 University of Edinburgh 58

8 Royal College of Art 58

9 Queen's University Belfast 50

10 Swansea University 48

11 University of Warwick 45

12 University of Strathclyde 45

17 University of Glasgow 34

21 Heriot-Watt University 24

22 University of Aberdeen 23

25 University of Dundee 17

35 University of St Andrews 12

It is difficult to gauge comparative figures for outside of the UK. In an overall sense, when looking at Pitch Books tables of colleges that produce the most successful entrepreneurs (measured by the number of venture capital backed founders in their alumni) we see Oxford University leading Europe at number 47 in the list for Undergraduate Programmes (there are no Scottish universities in the top 100) and University of Cambridge and University of Oxford leading Graduate Programmes table for Europe (7th and 8th respectively) with University of Edinburgh 81st.

The above table also gives no indication of quality or ongoing performance of individual spin-outs. Whilst the overall number of spin-outs is a useful indicator, the number of successful spin-outs is a more robust indicator. A spin-out might be created but fail to achieve its ultimate potential for several reasons (lack of business training of founder, limiting commercial terms etc.).

Theme 8: Provide access to funding for student and staff-led enterprises

Access to appropriate levels of funding at specific times is critical for scaling businesses. Funding is available in many different forms from multiple sources. It is the lifeblood of a scaling business and enables the deployment of other resources such as talent while the business grows to a level where it can generate its own independent revenue streams.

In world-class entrepreneurial campuses, we see access to, and a balance between, government, institutional and private funding (PE, Alumni, VC etc).

UK and Scottish Government funding remains essential as core research funding in driving innovation, the foundation of a significant proportion of the entrepreneurial activity of an institution (potentially with years of lead time). Measuring the impact of funding is vital and, as such, we should focus on the level of socio-economic impact generated. We should include in our impact assessments the level of entrepreneurial success as a measure of research success, thereby incentivising academia to increase their focus on research which has potential for entrepreneurial success.

In addition to core research funding, in successful entrepreneurial communities and campuses we also see coordination across the ecosystem of funding bodies, providing access to funding aimed at various stages of business development including:

• Micro grants
• Proof of Concept/Prototyping grants
• Competition prizes
• Seed and Series A funding for growth.

By this we mean businesses (and in particular, IDEs) have access to grants and funding of appropriate amounts at key stages of development, e.g. micro funding at early stages of ideas testing, support pre and during development, incubators (see Civtech model) as well as access to patient capital for spin-outs and deep tech.

Over the past 2-3 years, funding has been made available to protect businesses though the pandemic; however, we now need to ensure that funding gets to the right organisations at the right time in order to support rapid economic growth.

It is critical to map performance and impact back to funding programmes so that we can continue to learn about where funding should be applied in the future. Recording funding and its impact was the subject of a recent CivTech Sprint Challenge, the output of which should be noted.

Building on the recommendations of the Muscatelli Report "Driving Innovation in Scotland - A National Mission" 2019 we agree with many of the recommendations made in this report and hopefully our thinking builds on these recommendations. In terms of funding, we agree that the Scottish Government via its agencies (SFC and Enterprise Agencies) should look to attract more funding from UK wide funders as well as from the private sector. Indeed, we hope that this paper articulates the clear common purpose of driving forward tech entrepreneurialism and that this will help in the alignment of funding and activity. Coordination of UK and SG funding by sector, location or purpose is critical and we believe that greater impact can be gained in the entrepreneurial space in doing this.

In the recommendations and actions listed in Section 4 Theme 2 we describe the potential for our institutions themselves to invest in developing their own entrepreneurial teaching and activities needed to support their individual entrepreneurial agendas. This can be both in the form of investing in interventions (education, infrastructure etc.) as well as directly (via individual funds) in start-ups and spin-outs similar to the Northern Gritstone investment vehicle in England Northern Gritstone – The value of ideas (northern-gritstone.com).

The Scottish National Investment Bank (SNIB) was established in 2020 as the development investment bank for Scotland delivering patient, mission impact investment to the Scottish Economy over 10 years (£2bn). Its three core missions are:

Place Mission - Extending equality of opportunity through improving palaces by 2040

Net Zero Mission - Achieving a just transition to Net Zero

Innovation Mission - Harnessing Innovation to enable our people to flourish.

Whilst the Bank's minimum investment size is £1m (far too high for start-ups) we believe that there is an opportunity for SNIB to facilitate funding of start-ups via a tertiary education focused fund that, for example, supports start-ups and/or by funding the Summer School Programme/Incubator in a similar way that Tranzfuser has done with UK government funding.

Under the Bank's Investment Strategy we see:

1.1.1 Investment in Tertiary Education

Scotland has a strong and enduring reputation as a leading provider of tertiary education. It is expected that the Bank will be able to support the Scottish tertiary education sector with investment in specific capital projects in Scottish universities and colleges to ensure they maintain their reputations as internationally leading tertiary education and research providers; and, in supporting the development of university-developed and incubated innovative businesses and projects.

Funding approaches are the subject of other STER addendum, and we propose that their lead is followed and aligned across the tertiary education sector.

Theme 9: Create a vibrant and developing pre-16 talent pipeline as well as attracting entrepreneurial students from around the world

The focus of our report to this point has been the activities during and immediately after attendance at one of Scotland's post-16 institutions (colleges and universities). However, it would be wrong to think that entrepreneurial activity in the education system should be limited to the activity of 16-year-olds and over. The student's entrepreneurial journey starts at preschool. Indeed, if we look to countries like Estonia, we see that investment in STEM and introduction to problem solving etc. starts at a very early age.

Raising a Tech Savvy Nation: In Estonia - even Kindergartens teach robotics

More than half of schools and a number of kindergartens in Estonia teach children programming and robotics through play, so that they would – without too much effort or screen time – pick up IT skills.

It is not only sensible but also effective (in terms of developing core meta skills) to start to think about developing an entrepreneurial mindset at an early stage. We have, after all, taken a user-centric approach to this paper and by starting their entrepreneurial learning journey at school, pre-16-year-old students would arrive at college and or university better prepared for activities offered during their tertiary education phase (indeed with an expectation of being able to continue). This would create an elevated starting point for students arriving at our colleges and universities, with students arriving with similar and enhanced levels of interest and capability.

Similar frameworks apply to pre-16 students as they do to students post-16, maybe with slightly different emphasis.

There is still a need to engage students in the opportunity that entrepreneurialism offers, so we can still apply:

• Inspire: Inspire students and staff to engage with the entrepreneurial space via innovative and creative thinking - whatever their motivations and potential destination
• Explore: Encourage them to explore opportunities to create impact
• Learn: Teach the fundamentals needed to develop an entrepreneurial offering
• Apply: Create opportunities to apply their learning in a practical way (lab, project, internship, competition)
• Accelerate: Support and accelerate the growth of viable enterprises.

We see a number of interventions relating to pre-16 years education which we have included here. Some of the examples listed are delivered within our colleges as well as our high schools:

Young Enterprise Scotland

Young Enterprise Scotland (YES) runs a series of well proven and inclusive challenges and programmes across Scottish schools and colleges helping young people to discover who they are and what they are good at. YES has a broad programme portfolio covering many aspects of education including enterprise, teamwork, circular economy, creative thinking, financial literacy and employability. Their focus on enterprise inspires and teaches young people the basics needed to engage in this space as they grow.

Fuel Change

Fuel Change runs a series of programmes aimed at young people at both schools and colleges. Their aim is to engage the next generation within the workforce to drive a positive transition to Net Zero. As well as their successful programme "Challenge for Workplace" they run a programme for schools, "Challenge for Education", where students take on real world climate challenges set by industry. As well as developing a strong understanding of climate impact and challenges, the students engage in an environment of teamwork, decision making, problem solving, Creativity, leadership and innovation and feedback.

In the same way that we advocate in our post-16 campuses the importance of "purpose" and "inspiration" as the motivator to act, we see programmes such as those mentioned above as critical parts of our education that, in some instances, will lead to direct entrepreneurial activity – and in others, will provide the young person with the tools that they need to flourish whatever their chosen career path.

Theme 10: Establish a framework for change

and a robust quality assurance approach

We recognise that this change will happen over an extended period of time and therefore the impact of the change will need to be measured over several years if not multiple decades. To help ensure that the change is successful we are proposing an approach where we:

Understand your current maturity in terms of entrepreneurial activity

Adopt a change framework that provides a common language and approach

Identify key measures and KPIs

Establish a Quality Assurance approach that focuses on the quality of the inputs rather than purely measuring the outputs achieved.

Understand the current maturity in terms of entrepreneurial activity

On any journey we need to establish the start point and have an idea of the ultimate destination (recognising that this will change over time). We can then measure the distance travelled as each institution progresses along its pathway. It is this distance travelled that is important to track within each institution/region as a comparison across and between institutions/regions is fraught with issues (this does not, however, mean that we cannot learn from each other and share best practice etc.).

We are proposing a simple three tier system to help an institution understand where it is on its individual entrepreneurial journey.

Bronze: The institution demonstrates significant progress and achievement in at least 5 of the actions/recommendations listed above (with at least one from Section 3 Theme 3: Establish institutional policies that support the development of an entrepreneurial mindset in students and staff)

Silver: The institution demonstrates significant progress and achievement in at least 10 of the actions/recommendations listed above (with at least three Section 3 Theme 3: Establish institutional policies that support the development of an entrepreneurial mindset in students and staff)

Gold: The institution demonstrates significant progress and achievement in at least 15 of the actions/recommendations listed above (with at least five from Section 3 Theme 3: Establish institutional policies that support the development of an entrepreneurial mindset in students and staff). In addition, plays a significant role in leading the development of Entrepreneurial Campuses both regionally and nationally.

We believe that the accreditation gained will also help to support the external-facing activity of an institution (student recruitment, business connections etc.) – providing a data point of the capability and outcomes of the institution in terms of entrepreneurial activity.

This accreditation framework will be further developed during the implementation phase.

Adopt a change framework that provides a common language and approach

We believe that a change of this magnitude requires a change framework to support its implementation. Changes of this scale are complex and often difficult to achieve. However, with a framework that helps to identify and address the barriers to the change that we see in a "multi-organisational" change, we believe that there is a better chance of a successful implementation. We outline a high-level framework in Section 4 below.

For each stage and part of the change we need to understand the commitment to, and readiness for, the change across each of the stakeholder groups as well as the culture and belief sets that make up the environment on each campus/organisation. It is critical that we have commitment and drive from the leadership teams of each of our institutions and delivery organisations to ensure that this change is successful. All of the above needs to be supported by a robust and comprehensive communications plan that addresses the concerns and potential resistance to the change.

Identify Key Measures

Tracking this sort of change, and the impact thereof, is not easy, partly because the change has so many moving parts and partly because the indicators and measures are tracked across several years making it difficult to course correct in a timely fashion.

We do however need to establish relevant KPIs that can be used to monitor the direction of travel of the change itself and also provide an indicator of the socio-economic impact of delivering a successful entrepreneurial campus.

Tracking of progress should NOT be seen as a competition between institutions. Measurement should be focused on "distance travelled" in a specific region/community/institution over time, rather than between (what might be) very different regional conditions.

The measures should also be closely linked to the funding of the specific inputs/ interventions to ensure that we continue to fund only those activities that achieve the impact that they are intended to achieve (in a particular region).

We believe that we should look to the interventions that others have adopted to achieve success and follow their lead. We should focus on the quality of the individual inputs to the system rather than simply wait to measure the outputs of any interventions. In doing this we are moving the agenda forwards without having to wait for specific KPIs and lagging indicators to measure progress. As institutions we should be asking ourselves how many of the recommendations in this paper my institution have already implemented.

To begin the journey, ask: "Does my institution...?":

Seek out international best practice and bring it to Scotland and implement it?

Create an environment that celebrates entrepreneurial success and normalises the entrepreneurial journey?

Have a student incubator?

Have an appropriate number of Entrepreneurs in Residence on the staff?

Search for founders in the institutions and equip them for their foundering journey?

Take a reasonable equity stake in spin-outs that enables the ongoing success of the business and encourages follow on investment and inspires future founders?

Integrate entrepreneurial teaching across the curricular into all the non business school subjects?

Take business school students, technical students, and creative students and align them in start-up simulations?

We outline some further thoughts on measurements in Section 4 below.

Quality Assurance of inputs rather than measurement of outputs

We recommend that a strong quality assurance regime is established that supports the spread of best practice. This will greatly improve the likelihood of success by ensuring the quality of the inputs to the system. An example of this might be:

Establishing the role of Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) is recognised as having a positive impact on the quality of entrepreneurial teaching and support in an institution. The impact of the individuals appointed into these roles will only be as good as the capability and experience of the individual EIR undertaking the role and the time that they are able to spend delivering. It is vital therefore that the right calibre of person is appointed and that the role profile of a potential EIR is developed, and shared, and best practice is baked into the role.

For example, we would propose that successful candidates might have the following attributes:

• Have founded their own company or has been deeply involved in the venture community
• Have worked internationally across different cultures
• Have raised funds and/or sold a bootstrapped business
• Have experience of growing a company from a handful of employees to a scaled entity
• Have experienced failure and learned from it
• Looks externally for best practice
• Have time to deploy their experience and expertise to the institution.

Quality assurance is not a simple box ticking exercise; it is vital so that we can maximise the potential for success. We see examples of where this has been successful in CivTech where they take great care over the quality of the people that they deploy to support their start-up cohorts.

Driving change to achieve our ambition

Strategy and direction are in themselves not sufficient: what we need is action. It is clear from the above that there is a significant potential that we can achieve should we get it right.

In the following section we list a series of actions that we believe will have a significant positive impact on our economy and support our ambition laid out in NSET. Whilst a handful of our higher education institutions have achieved a level of success in terms of delivering/supporting entrepreneurial driven economic impact, there is far more that can and should be done within each institution and across our regions. If we compare our overall impact to that of other UK, European and US institutions, we realise that we have a long way to go to reach the levels of success that we will require to achieve the "tipping point" and subsequent economic transformation outlined in NSET. We note that many of the most successful Entrepreneurial Campuses around the world have evolved over 50 years, leaving Scotland a long way behind the pack at a national level. This report has focused on what we can learn from these institutions and apply to our current level of capability (which varies across Scotland).