Commercial capability at the heart of place-based growth

 

The UK does not have an innovation problem. It has a conversion problem. 

If the UK is serious about growing its industrial base and raising productivity in every part of the country, the investment case cannot stop at infrastructure and capital. A decade of investment has built the pipeline - universities, research institutes, technology transfer offices, incubators and innovation districts - and a substantial wave of place-based finance is now following it, through the British Business Bank, the National Wealth Fund, Local Growth Plans and pension reform.

Much of the investment has concentrated on two sides of the equation: innovation infrastructure and capital. What determines whether either converts into companies, customers, jobs and value that stay in place is a third, much thinner layer: the commercial capability to turn research and technology strength into businesses that sell, raise growth capital and scale where they started.

That question ran through a three-part roundtable series hosted by Metro Dynamics at June's inaugural UK Global R&D and Science Investment Summit. Around ninety leaders took part across the three connected conversations - from government, universities, industry, investment, local and regional institutions and innovation ecosystem organisations - including our co-founder Roisin Garland.

The sessions were chaired by Professor Dame Jessica Corner, Executive Chair of Research England; Stephen Jones, Director of Core Cities UK; and Tom Walker, Executive Director of Policy, Economy and Investment at Essex County Council, and were hosted by Fiona Tuck of Metro Dynamics with independent advisor Emma Lindsell. The brief was deliberately practical: how national policy intent becomes local growth, in county economies, smaller cities and rural areas as much as in the established innovation cities.

The report from those discussions has now been published, and the proposition at its heart is bracingly plain:

Measure conversion, not activity

The first of the report’s three headline messages is about what the system counts. "We measure funding allocated, programmes launched, buildings opened and businesses supported," it notes, "but spend much less time understanding whether those interventions are genuinely changing commercial behaviour or improving long-term economic performance." What places need instead is a clearer view of "whether ideas, businesses and opportunities are moving through the system towards customers, investment, growth and wider socio-economic value" - what the report calls innovation throughput. And the leading indicators that would show this early enough to act on are, as it puts it, rarely developed.

 

The missing layer: commercial capability

So what decides whether ideas make that journey? The report is direct about it:

It goes further, naming execution capability as "now the UK’s scarcest innovation resource" - the venture builders, ecosystem orchestrators, cluster leaders, commercial translators, investment curators and partnership brokers who turn a decade of strategies, programmes and physical assets into outcomes.

The report’s practical implication is set out without hedging. The system needs to move "from creating businesses to creating commercially successful businesses", which means "proof of market and proof of customer should sit alongside proof of concept, with sales, business development, procurement and commercial execution brought much earlier into the innovation support system." Success, it argues, "is not just about generating more innovation ideas; it is identifying the strongest opportunities faster, failing others earlier and backing the best harder."

 

Closing the conversion gap in practice

That matches what we see, and the wider evidence points the same way. Only around one in eight UK startups that raise a seed round ever goes on to raise a Series A, according to Antler’s analysis of more than 41,800 UK funding rounds. These are companies that have already cleared an investor bar once - making the drop-off a useful indicator of the conversion challenge between early promise and scalable, investable businesses.

The independent review Beyond the Capital Gap found the most common cause of failure at that step to be the absence of experienced commercial leadership rather than weak technology, and that 69% of UK research power sits outside the Golden Triangle while those regions attracted just 15% of spinout venture capital since 2010. The same gap appears in the Entrepreneurs Network's Ideas to Impact report and in Tony Hickson's independent review for UKRI Research England, Deepening University-Investor Links. As Hickson put it, capital alone is not the answer, and simply throwing money at unprepared founders will be futile.

There is a timing problem too, and it is one we see repeatedly: structured support tends to fall away at the moment a company is formed, exactly when market traction, leadership confidence and investor alignment decide who survives.

 

Building commercial capability - and making it visible

Grand Scale Kickstart features as one of the report’s case studies, described as "a useful example of the kind of commercialisation support that places increasingly need":

Grand Scale was founded by two female commercial leaders who had spent decades helping build and scale technology businesses internationally, including experience right through to acquisition and IPO. We set out to codify that commercial experience into a model that could be applied much earlier in the venture journey.

That is the gap we have worked in for over six years — across 160+ ventures and 330+ founders and senior leadership team members, with 33 universities.

From 2022–2025, Kickstart was delivered nationally for Innovate UK’s ICURe programme across 75 spinouts and 27 universities. Measured over the 12-month engagement with the spinouts, the programme generated a reported 33:1 return on £2.736m of public investment, including £82.4m in follow-on funding and £7.8m in early commercial revenue. Kickstart is also recognised by the ScaleUp Institute as an exemplar national programme.

Notably for a place-based agenda, 65% of those spinouts came from outside the South of England and accounted for 68% of reported investment — an association we would be cautious about reading as causation from a self-selected cohort, but a markedly more balanced distribution than the wider spinout picture.

The report also picks up the city-region application of Kickstart: "a ten-week pilot for the British Business Bank in Glasgow City Region which brought ventures from four universities into a single investment-ready pipeline."

The British Business Bank commissioned that pilot to test whether concentrated commercial capability support could strengthen venture investability and deepen the regional pipeline. Ten ventures and twenty-two founders came through it - and the phrase worth dwelling on is a single investment-ready pipeline.

The signal that mattered most was not ours to give: an independent panel of active UK early-stage investors judged the cohort investment-ready, and three of the ten moved into immediate follow-on conversations. Hear what the investors said.

But the wider value was to the ecosystem around them - universities, investors, local government and economic development partners - who could see the ventures through a shared lens, making progress and readiness more visible across institutional boundaries.

That speaks to something the report describes well:

Commercial capability as shared infrastructure

The line we would most encourage people to sit with is the report’s call to consider “the commercial capability of a place as an important part of its infrastructure” — “not only about individual programmes or interventions, but about the people, networks and know-how that help businesses understand markets, find customers, raise finance, navigate growth and learn from others who have done it before.”

If commercial capability is infrastructure, it should be built systematically and made accessible across the business journey — not dependent on whether a company happens to be a spinout, a startup, a scaleup or an established firm.

That matters because the report identifies one of the biggest blind spots in the current innovation agenda: policy is largely designed around newly formed businesses, founders and spinouts, with comparatively little attention paid to established firms, supply-chain companies and businesses now led by people who were not their founders — particularly in industrial, rural and non-metropolitan economies.

Our own work already spans more of that journey than the spinout headline suggests. Kickstart supports startups and scaling companies as well as research spinouts — including high-growth businesses in the North East of Scotland, now one of Scotland’s two Investment Zones, through a programme delivered with Scottish Enterprise and Opportunity North East.

The disciplines don’t fundamentally change. Validate the market. Understand the customer. Build a pipeline you can forecast. Earn the investment rather than simply pitch for it. Those disciplines aren’t the property of spinouts, and they don’t stop mattering as companies grow. The report’s challenge — to bring established and supply-chain firms deliberately into the innovation agenda — reaches further still, and it is the right one.

 

The real competition is outside the region

There is one more reason to treat this as shared infrastructure rather than local advantage. Stephen Welton, Chair of the British Business Bank, has warned that the UK risks becoming an "incubator economy" that "builds up new companies only for them to be sold off to overseas buyers or left to wither on the vine." That is a value-capture problem, and no single region solves it alone.

The report arrives at the same place from a different direction, through what it calls "complete, not compete" - the logic behind the Cambridge x Manchester and Oxford-Liverpool partnerships, which it describes as "attempts to retain more of the research translation and commercial value chain within the UK." Collaboration, it argues, "should not be seen as an alternative to scale, but as one of the mechanisms through which scale is achieved," with places of all kinds increasingly needing to "hunt in packs."

 

Making public investment convert - and capital work harder

The encouraging signal in this report is how firmly the argument has moved. "Over the last decade, many places have invested heavily in physical innovation assets," it observes. "The next challenge is to wrap systems around them." Buildings remain important, but they are no longer enough. The same logic applies to capital: the report’s closing section argues that places need "to become more investable, not just better at attracting investment", that developing an investable pipeline "requires significant commercial capability", and - a line worth pinning up - that "investors are customers too."

Investors, the report notes, "are not simply looking for long lists of projects or broad statements of sector strength; they are looking for opportunities that have been tested, shaped and de-risked."

Capability, in other words, is not an alternative to capital or to infrastructure. It is what makes both of them convert.

We’re pleased to have contributed to the discussions behind the report and look forward to continuing the conversation and working with partners to translate innovation potential into growth across all parts of the country.

 

About Grand Scale

We build the commercial capability and intelligence that de-risk innovation for the people backing it — funders, customers, partners and investors — turning research and technology potential into commercial evidence, investability and scalable companies.

Our frameworks have been applied across 160+ ventures and 330+ founders and senior leadership team members, with 33 universities. Kickstart is recognised by the ScaleUp Institute as an exemplar national programme.

 

 

Sources: Turning innovation ambition into economic growth in places across the UK, Metro Dynamics Ltd, 2026. Stephen Welton, "The British Business Bank is a partner for the scale-up economy", City AM, 22 January 2025. Additional figures: Antler, The New Path to Series A in the UK, 2026; Beyond the Capital Gap, Henham Strategy for Pioneer Group & The Crown Estate, March 2026; UKRI, Deepening University–Investor Links. Kickstart outcome figures are reported by participating ventures; Glasgow City Region pilot delivered with the British Business Bank, January–March 2026.