For decades, knowledge exchange and commercialisation infrastructure in UK higher education have been framed through a dominant and largely unquestioned paradigm: the technology transfer office (TTO), and a policy environment that equates entrepreneurial success with startup creation and high-growth scale-up.
While this model has delivered impact in many contexts, it has also created systemic blind spots. For many modern universities and small specialist institutions, the traditional TTO framing misrepresents both the nature of their world-leading research and the pathways through which it delivers impact.
Much innovation – particularly in health and social care, creative industries, the service sector, tourism, and the built environment – does not translate into spinouts or patents, but into practice change, strengthening of the gig economy, adoption within existing systems, co-production, policy reform, skills development, and diffusion.
Other ways of seeing
Language matters. When commercialisation is narrowly defined, entire forms of innovation become undervalued, unsupported, or invisible. This presents a structural disadvantage for institutions whose missions, academic profiles, and regional roles are fundamentally different from those of large, research-intensive universities.
Similarly, government economic policy instruments have historically privileged growth, standardisation, and scale. Yet many of the most socially and economically significant innovations, particularly in public services, do not scale in linear or commercial ways. Innovation in health and social care, for example, is often about reinvention rather than replication, personalisation rather than standardisation, and system change rather than product development.
Social outcomes are not products that can be easily packaged. The prevailing emphasis on scale-up and high growth sits uneasily alongside public sector reform agendas focused on person-centred care, complex supply chains, co-production, community wealth building, and the development of sustainable 20-minute neighbourhoods. These challenges are sharpened by recent policy developments in Scotland. New Scottish government Community Wealth Building legislation places explicit emphasis on securing social and environmental outcomes, strengthening local economies, and embedding people-centred approaches to regional development.
Universities and colleges play a critical role in this agenda. One in three REF 2021 impact case studies related to impact within 25km of the institution, highlighting the importance of hyperlocal engagement and place-based innovation. Yet traditional commercialisation infrastructure is not always designed to support this kind of impact – particularly where value is created and captured locally, rather than through IP licensing or venture-backed growth.
To meet net zero ambitions, improve health outcomes, and build resilient local economies, knowledge exchange (KE) infrastructure must be attuned to place, skills, and community. This requires a reframing of commercialisation pathways and the back office systems that support them.
ShaKEs things up
Against this backdrop, 2026 marks a year of new opportunity and change in how shared KE services are delivered in Scotland. With support from the Scottish Funding Council Shared Service Collaboration Fund, six of Scotland’s smallest modern and specialist institutions, working in partnership with the college sector, are piloting a new sustainable model for collaborative commercialisation services. This includes shared TTO-type functions, while deliberately moving beyond the limitations of the traditional TTO paradigm, mirroring similar investment by Research England in 2024 to strengthen regional commercialisation ecosystems.
With 19 higher education institutions in Scotland, the Shared Academic Knowledge Exchange Services (ShaKEs) initiative represents over one third of Scottish universities and has the potential to impact all 24 Scottish colleges.
ShaKEs seeks to reframe and unlock innovation pathways aligned to Scottish Government priority economic sectors, including health and social care, food and drink, creative industries, gaming, tourism, the built environment, and service-sector innovation. Operating at the intersection research, and place, the initiative is underpinned by deep collaboration with the college sector to integrate job creation, workforce development, and to finally purposefully and meaningfully bring skills into the innovation paradigm.
ShaKEs explicitly challenges the assumption that entrepreneurial success must take the form of startups or high-growth ventures. Many innovations need to be implemented within existing systems and organisations such as the NHS, local authorities, public services, third-sector bodies, and cultural institutions. Scaling in these contexts looks different. It may involve rollout and adoption rather than growth, policy change rather than market entry, or continuing professional development rather than venture finance. Innovation in social care, for example, is an area ripe for transformation, yet entrepreneurial activity remains low – particularly among practitioners, many of whom are women who dominate this workforce. Shakes infrastructure aims to address these gaps by empowering practitioners to become innovators and entrepreneurs, enabling new ideas, digital opportunities, and sustainable solutions that transform services from within.
To support these diverse pathways, ShaKEs adopts a hub-and-spoke model that provides shared, fit-for-purpose back-office infrastructure while allowing for locally nuanced, co-created solutions. Partners share a common requirement for specialist expertise in contracts, legal services, and IP, but expertise that is attuned to their missions, academic cultures, economic sectors, and equality, diversity and inclusion priorities. This model recognises the shared challenges faced by small and modern institutions while respecting their distinctiveness and parity of esteem within the tertiary system.
Collaboration sits at the heart of ShaKEs – not only as a cost-effective shared service model, but as a driver of culture change. By opening up a new innovation community in Scotland, ShaKEs seeks to better align R&D and skills, enabling traction in economic sectors with historically low R&D intensity but high employment impact. This includes sectors dominated by SMEs, which account for 98 per cent of the Scottish economy and half of private-sector jobs, as well as the service sector, which represents around 75 per cent of Scotland’s economy.
The ambition for long-term collaboration is explicit in partner institutions’ SFC Knowledge Exchange and Innovation Fund strategies for 2025–30. ShaKEs aims to offer a sustainable, scalable model that supports excellence in KE wherever it occurs across the Scottish ecosystem. By deepening collaboration across the tertiary system and combining the distinct strengths of universities and colleges, ShaKEs seeks to maximise impact, unlock under-recognised forms of innovation, and support a more inclusive, place-based and people-centred KE future for Scotland.