GOTT: RFQ for Public Sector Founder Equity and Rewards to Innovators

Awarded contract for the following former opportunity:

Established in 2022, the Government Office for Technology Transfer (GOTT), part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, supports the UK public sector to unlock the potential of its knowledge assets to deliver value to the UK economy and society. Our priorities include providing support through guidance, such as the Rose Book and specialist advisory support. More information on GOTT is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-office-for-technology-transfer.

One of the areas that GOTT is looking at is company formation and decision making at the early stage of seeking external sources of finance to develop the social, economic of financial value of knowledge assets owned by the Crown. As such we are keen to build a broader picture of UK public sector approaches to taking equity in spinouts and supporting them to commercialise public sector funded research.

The proposed study is designed to address these questions by building out a picture of the number and type of the UK's existing public sector spinouts/companies. The successful supplier will need to initially build an evidence base of existing spinouts across government through a variety of routes, such as internal and external data sources. We will then use this as a data set to understand equity positions taken by public sector organisations under different scenarios in these spinouts/companies, including making relevant comparisons, such as to the UK university tech transfer sector.

The study should also look at whether public sector employees (innovators) and founders have been able to take equity or other forms of revenue such as royalties in the spinout and if so, under what terms. For the purposes of this study, the public sector will be defined as central government departments, ALB's and agencies. This definition explicitly does not include the university sector and local government.