Innovation Communications: Campus, Cluster and Country
Gregg Bayes-Brown, Oxford University Innovation’s Comms Manager, shares his thoughts on the drivers and strategies surround the communication of university innovation.
My first taste of university innovation came at the Open University (OU).
A former journalist who’d gone to ground in Milton Keynes, I was involved with FutureLearn, the OU’s take on a UK-led effort to replicate the Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) movement catching fire stateside at the turn of the decade.
“A platform for teaching anyone anything anywhere for free?” I asked myself. “Sounds great. I wonder what else is out there?”
Once I scratched the surface, I quickly became addicted. I bid the OU a fond farewell, launched Global University Venturing, and spent the next few years finding university innovation stories from around the globe.
Immunotherapies and regenerative medicine, hydrogen powered cars and wireless energy transfer technology, robotics and artificial intelligence. Every day, I’d wake up and find out how tomorrow was going to look.
Discovering this world was and remains endlessly stimulating, but I soon began to wonder, “why isn’t anyone else doing this?”. Granted, you have regional university innovation trade magazines such as the fine Spinouts UK. But in mainstream tech mags? Business sections of nationals? Barely a mention, if at all. To the outside world, the whole process was essentially magic.
When you dig into why this is, the reasons quickly become apparent. Consider the evolution of university innovation. It is a sector started by scientists and engineers and progressed by businesspeople and financiers. These professions clearly have many strengths, but a natural affinity for storytelling generally isn’t one of them.
Also, the average university innovation office tends to be understaffed and overstretched. As a result, communications is considered nice to have, but not a core requirement. Furthermore, there are few storytellers either side of the TTO. On one side, university press offices that regularly aren’t engaged with these stories — if they even realise the university has an innovation arm at all. On the other, cash strapped spinouts and startups which often prioritise almost everything else over getting professional assistance to tell their stories.
The result is that communication of university innovation has the same valley of death facing the concepts we work with. There is a vertical cliff edge after the underpinning research has been published, there are scant resources to help stories make it across the barren wasteland, and the only rides out of there charge exorbitant sums for the pleasure.
It’s easy for us collectively to look at this and brush it off as not much of a problem. University innovation offices still licence tech, we still pop out the odd spinout, the various numbers and metrics we collect at the end of the year look okay compared to the last one, so what’s the big deal? The issue is that we can beat people until we’re blue in the face with our facts and metrics, but it is compelling storytelling that makes the difference.
Our messaging as a sector continues to miss its mark. In his recent editorial on the AUTM 2019 Conference, my successor at GUV, Thierry Heles, wrote on the invisibility of the tech transfer — and this is from a trade mag for the sector. Research conducted by Oxford University’s news office in 2016 demonstrated that, even with Oxford’s brand recognition, sizeable research funding, and strong success in innovation, numerous groups from general public to MPs still see Oxford as students and humanities — OUI and our many spinouts were barely on anyone’s radar at all.
The human brain has evolved to understand story over fact. The very concept of a fact, an undeniable proven truth, has only emerged with scientific method. This is why climate change is still treated as debatable by many. The facts are stark and brutal, while the narrative of “the planet is doomed and it’s our fault” is unpalatable for many. As a consequence, anyone saying “you aren’t at fault, your family are safe, the scientists are wrong, burn all the oil you want” will probably find a market.
In contrast, using narrative as a force for good is what has inspired my three C’s for innovation communication: campus, cluster and country.
One takeaway from a recent Oxford-MIT event is that at MIT, the saying goes that you’re not at MIT until you’ve done a couple of spinouts. This attitude comes from a culture geared up to embrace innovation, with over 90% of the Institute working with MIT’s innovation arm. This sort of culture only comes when you have a strong enough narrative to inspire it. In a similar vein, we can use narrative to shift internal perception of the TTO away from IP stormtroopers who pester academics who just want to do research and to facilitators who catalyse research into reality and allow academics to have a substantial, positive impact on society.
This can be done through targeted internal communications across a university, but it works more effectively when it is done hand in glove with the cluster, using spinouts and prominent examples of entrepreneurship as news hooks to drive wider, culture changing narratives.
During my time at GUV, one thing I found is that the more a cluster communicates and collaborates with itself, the stronger that cluster is. Silicon Valley is recognised the world over, and much of that success comes from the draw the Bay Area has from its messaging, and there’s a similar story in Cambridge, MA too.
You can see this difference between Oxford and Cambridge, UK. Both have similar research bases, attracting world-class talent to work in equally fantastic settings. Yet even though Oxford receives more funding for research, it is Cambridge that’s known for doing something with it. The same MPs who align Oxford with humanities and Harry Potter recognise Cambridge’s scientific and technological achievements, and the innovation which stems from them. This is no fluke, but the consequence of a concerted cluster wide effort to articulate the entrepreneurial strengths of Cambridge.
Working in tandem with the Oxford Local Enterprise Partnership, OUI has begun to pull together Oxford’s first cluster comms group. The idea is that whether you speak to me, the Vice Chancellor of Oxford Brookes, Williams F1, or a startup on the Harwell campus, we’ll all be saying the same things about Oxford in a bid to create a rising tide that raises all boats.
Comprised of a group of the universities, corporates, research institutes and investors, we’re working on shared messaging that showcases innovation excellence in Oxford, we’re sharing data, research and opportunities across the network, and implementing a far more integrated, collaborative approach to communication in general across the region.
Our first project is a cluster map. Taking a page from Oxford’s JRR Tolkien, who drew the map of Middle Earth before he began to tell its stories, the cluster map is all about taking the currently ethereal concept of the Oxford tech cluster and making it tangible. Drawing inspiration from similar projects in both Cambridges, this map will both be an interactive map of everyone who’s here, plus a who’s who of Oxford’s innovative residents.
While organisations across Oxford may have different and even competing agendas, there is significant overlap. We all need talent, we all want to attract investment of some kind, and we’re all looking for partners to collaborate with. The cluster comms project and the forthcoming map provide all comers to Oxford — be it potential hires for a spinout looking for a community, investors looking for the next unicorn, or journalists and politicians looking to better understand what we do here — with a single, clear window into Oxford.
From my point of over here at OUI, cluster comms allows us to tell deeper, more engaging stories beyond the four walls of our Botley Road office while handily positioning us as a lynchpin in fostering innovation around Oxford. It sells the concept of Oxford to the talent we’re looking to attract to work in and lead our spinouts. It showcases the potential of what we’ve got on our hands here both regionally and nationally. And crucially to OUI, it brings interest to our “invisible” activities, enhancing our ability to encourage ideas from the University and develop methods, such as Oxford Sciences Innovation, to support them.
There’s much talk of the OxCam Innovation Arc, an attempt to marry the innovative outputs of both clusters with Milton Keynes in the middle. But for this to be a success, the outside world needs to be excited by the prospect, and that will only come when the narrative is as compelling as the metrics charting the impact of innovation from Oxford. From my perspective, ensuring this project and others like it work are key to the UK retains a competitive edge in the months and years ahead.
More than anything though, communications exists to inspire. An aspect of innovation that is often overlooked is that it is diversity and the ability to access the greatest minds, regardless of nationality, gender, race, sexuality, religion or any other definition of a human being — the only thing that matters is ability to get involved.
This is a sector filled with wonder and excitement, and it should be viewed as such. We should be having academics burst through into our offices who can’t wait to turn research into reality, we should be stealing talent away from tech giants and hedge funds, and have investors and corporates banging on our door to get involved — all of them here to help us build the future.
My mission is to inspire as many people to do as I did all those years ago back at the OU, to scratch the surface, and fall down the rabbit hole with us. But that only happens when we speak about it. If scientists and engineers were the first wave, financiers and businesspeople the second, I see creativity and communications as the third step in the evolution of university innovation. Let’s put this sector — both figuratively and quite literally in my case — on the map.
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This article first appeared in Spinouts UK. For more from Gregg, follow him at @GreggBayesBrown. For more from OUI, follow us on Twitter at @OxUInnovation.
