Unless you’ve been living under a rock, readers are likely to be very aware of the current financial challenges facing universities across the UK.
The situation is no different in Scotland where several Scottish universities have reported an adjusted operating deficit position for academic year 2023–24 – although it’s important to note that this position can also reflect the stage of the institution’s investment cycle or actions being taken to restructure as well as reflecting the current year financial performance of an institution.
These are difficult times for the sector. But a silver lining, if there were one to be found, could be that challenging times present an opportunity to do things differently. Approaches that would have previously been deemed too complicated to undertake can find themselves on the table because they have the potential to drive essential efficiencies and promote sustainability.
Looming large
With 18 universities receiving Scottish Funding Council (SFC) core funding for research – “Scottish QR”, the Research Excellence Grant (REG) – the Scottish system is of the size and scale where SFC can regularly have discussions with every vice principal for research. These discussions help us better understand the state of play and the pressures and challenges being faced.
When we most recently spoke with vice principals, as you’d expect, financial sustainability loomed large. Challenges are having a real impact on how many institutions are considering their R&I activity.
One of the things we heard is that an increasing number of institutions are exploring sharing back-office services between institutions to create efficiencies.
This makes sense. Scotland is a small country with a largesse of universities, all of which undertake world-leading research as determined by the REF. We’re also a country of concentrated geography with many of our institutions focused in the same places.
While these are moves in the right direction for sustainability, there are benefits from things happening sooner rather than later, given that there’s no quick fix for university finances. Here SFC has a role to play, by helping catalyse activity.
This is the thinking behind the funding opportunity we launched this week – a new R&I Shared Services Collaboration Fund.
Getting together
The fund will allow Scottish universities to apply for funding to develop sustainable models and steps to implement sharing services, including but not limited to sharing tech transfer offices (TTOs) and research offices. It will allow:
- The consolidation of existing distinct functions by replacing them with a single shared function.
- Institutions with smaller research portfolios to work with larger institutions to gain access to expertise and capability that they don’t currently have.
- The creation of shared capacity between groups of institutions where limited functions currently exist but new shared capability would drive efficiencies.
It will kick-start longer-term collaboration by supporting the initial costs of change, enabling institutions to navigate the difficult proof of concept stage and de-risk the exploration of new approaches in a financially constrained environment.
Our intention is to precipitate and fund a different way of working, investing in change which will enable the change to carry on.
A total of £3m will be available over academic years 2025–26 and 2026–27 with grants of between £250,000 and £750,000 on offer through open competition. Grants will help to promote system sustainability by supporting increased inter-institutional operational collaboration.
As well as promoting financial viability, where grants are focused on the sharing of technology transfer office (TTO) services, the fund will increase Scotland’s research commercialisation pipeline by expanding access to key facilities across institutions.
This provides an opportunity to further Scottish government innovation ambitions as outlined in the National Innovation Strategy. University research commercialisation is central to the strategy and ensuring that world-leading research from across all of Scotland’s universities can be successfully commercialised requires access to critical expertise. The UK government’s spin-out review, published in November 2023, also highlights the value of shared technology transfer expertise across universities.
And it’s not necessarily just about sharing research offices and TTOs – we’re interested in other proposals for sharing R&I services which meet our criteria.
Small but mighty
We’re under no illusions that the R&I Shared Services Collaboration Fund will solve or even make a significant dent in the financial challenges currently being faced by universities. No, doing that will require multi-factored activity across many stakeholders.
But we hope that this funding will go some way to promoting sustainability and making Scotland’s small but mighty research system function in a way that reflects the opportunities of scale and collaboration we have on our doorstep.
The commentary has a very positive outlook and clearly whilst it is true some functions might be able to, the reality for the core of commercialisation is very different. At Oxford Brookes, we tried a shared service model with Oxford University and indeed bought in services from them. However, the output was close to a disaster with the shared service element dominated by Oxford’s perception of what looks good but was totally inappropriate for Oxford Brookes. Each university had very different financial needs. Much of the commercialisation agenda is driven by what looks good for the very elite university. But if you look at what the majority of universities i.e. mid-tier it is very different. Indeed. it can be made the commercialisation focus should be on the needs of mid-tier universities.