In this blog, Professor Matt Freeman, Centre Director of Future Space, UWE Bristol’s innovation centre for high-tech businesses, shares his journey from academic to start-up founder to university-business innovation leader, reflecting on what it truly takes to bridge these worlds and make collaboration thrive.
If you had met me a few years ago, I might have introduced myself as Professor Matt Freeman, a digital media academic who published books and led research at a university. I spent over a decade in academia, from completing a PhD and lecturing, all the way to running a research centre, leading REF and becoming a professor. Yet, despite the publications and promotions, I realised that being an academic was never really about the research for me, it was always about the role of innovation.
Along the way, I’ve learned a few lessons about what it takes to make university-business partnerships thrive. In this blog, I want to share those insights with both my university colleagues and our industry partners. My hope is that these reflections can spark ideas on how we innovate together across the academia-industry divide.
My journey from academia to entrepreneurship
My personal turning point came during a secondment to a £6.8m university-business R&D partnership (Bristol+Bath Creative R+D, itself led by UWE Bristol). There, I fell in love with bringing together commercial businesses, academic research, knowledge exchange and fresh student minds under one collaborative effort. I saw first hand how powerful it is when ideas developed in universities get tested and applied by industry and vice versa. In fact, I loved it so much that I took the leap into entrepreneurship myself. In 2021 I founded Immersive Promotion Design, an R&D-led marketing consultancy to help virtual and augmented reality creatives put cutting-edge ideas into practice. That experience, applying research insights to real business challenges; taught me more about bridging academia and industry than any journal paper ever could.
Fast-forward to today: I now run Future Space, an innovation centre on UWE Bristol’s Frenchay campus, where we support 70+ high-tech start-ups. It’s a role that lets me combine both identities: the academic and the entrepreneur, to drive university-partnered innovation. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that innovation is never a ‘bolt-on’ to business, it’s an all-encompassing reimagining of what can be done and how.
What makes innovation partnerships succeed
Working at the intersection of academia and industry, I’ve seen some partnerships soar and others stall. Success isn’t automatic; university-business collaboration doesn’t happen by accident. There are two ingredients that I believe make all the difference:
Physical proximity and shared goals: Firstly, both sides need to be committed to a common purpose. The most successful collaborations I’ve led weren’t transactions, they were true partnerships built on trust and aligned vision. A recent national evaluation of University Enterprise Zones reinforced this: Place-based innovation infrastructure can work. A chat by the campus coffee shop can spark a R&D project or a hire, but only when paired with clear sector focus and active engagement. In short, everyone needs to row in the same direction.
Bridge-builders and brokers: Secondly, successful innovation partnerships need people who can speak both ‘languages’ and broker the relationship. In many ways, that’s become my job description. Universities and companies often have different cultures and timelines, so you need dedicated translators to connect the dots. It takes skilled facilitation to turn an introduction into a funded R&D project. Having a team with the skills and capacity to broker relationships and deliver tailored business support is critical.
Bridging cultural gaps between universities and industry
Even when the will to collaborate is there, cultural and structural barriers can get in the way. I’ve lived in both worlds, so I know the misconceptions that academics and business folks sometimes hold about each other. Universities can see industry as too fast paced and profit driven; businesses can see academia as an ivory tower too slow to adapt. The reality is, both worlds do things differently, and together they can offer different insights and value. Recognising this is the first step to bridging the gap.
One major difference is how each measures success. Academia rewards rigour, depth and publication. Industry rewards speed, customer satisfaction and revenue. Neither approach is ‘better’ outright – they are just different. The key is finding ways to reconcile these approaches. For example, at Future Space we pair 121 business support (an industry-style, bespoke approach) with one-to-many support like workshops and student projects (a university-style approach). Rather than argue over which is superior, there’s plenty of room for both models to co-exist, delivering richer support together.
Communication is another common barrier. Academics speak in terms of theories and long term impact; entrepreneurs speak in MVPs and quarters. We’ve learned to build a common language, often around solving concrete problems. Framing a collaboration around a shared challenge (say, prototyping a new medical device or testing a software algorithm) helps both sides see the value. I always remind my academic peers that innovation needs research but research should not be done in isolation. We need to get research ideas out of the classroom or even the journals and into real use. Likewise, I reassure start-ups that tapping into university expertise isn’t about getting bogged down; it’s about supercharging and validating their product with insight and evidence.
What universities and start-ups can learn from each other
Having one foot in a university and the other in the start-up world has convinced me that universities and start-ups actually have a lot more in common than people think… and a lot to teach each other. In fact, as pressures mount on higher education, universities may increasingly need to think like start-ups to survive and fulfil their mission.
What does that mean in practice?
For universities learning from start-ups: It means embracing agility, customer-focus and a willingness to adapt. Start-ups thrive by being lean and pivoting quickly when something isn’t working. Universities, by contrast, often carry heavy legacy structures that resist change. But universities can adopt a more market oriented mindset, tuning in closely to what students (the customers) and employers (the market) need. That could mean updating curricula faster, focusing on practical skills, or even launching entirely new bite size boot camp style programmes in response to emerging fields. In short, academia can borrow the start-up ethos of ‘adapt or perish’, staying mission driven, but being willing to reinvent how we deliver on that mission.
For start-ups learning from universities: I’d argue there’s an equally valuable lesson in the other direction. Start-ups can benefit from the depth of research and the long term thinking that universities are built on. In the rush to ship product, start-ups sometimes skip the step of truly understanding why something works or doesn’t. University expertise can provide that rigour, whether it’s a data science start-up tapping into a professor’s algorithm knowledge, or a biotech venture using university lab facilities to validate their tech. Moreover, universities train people to question assumptions and think critically, a useful check against the exuberance of start-up culture. In our innovation centre, I’ve seen start-ups gain huge advantages by engaging with faculty and students: they access state-of-the-art facilities and research labs, collaborate with experts on R&D, and plug into a pipeline of talent by recruiting graduates and interns.
As I often say, when a start-up partners with a university, it’s like getting a ‘sage’ on board. Someone who values knowledge and education as the path to breakthroughs. Conversely, the university benefits by partnering with a ‘hero’ within innovation, nurturing new companies that make the world better. Both sides win by combining the Sage’s wisdom and the Hero’s drive. By learning from each other, agility from start-ups, and research depth from universities we can each become more effective in our missions.
My offer to you
I want to close on a personal note. Having navigated this path from academia to entrepreneurship and back into the fold of university-business collaboration, I’m making an offer to you. Whether you’re an academic, a business leader, or both:
- I commit to being a bridge-builder. If you’re an academic with an idea that could have commercial impact, or a business seeking academic insight, my door is open. I will use my position to help connect you with the right people, be it researchers or partners. Bridging the gap between our two worlds is my passion, and I’ll gladly play the translator to get a partnership off the ground.
- I commit to sharing lessons (including the hard ones). Innovation isn’t all success stories. There will be setbacks and failures. I promise to be candid about what doesn’t work and to foster a culture where we learn from mistakes. Whether it’s through my own Innovate Together think-piece (published monthly on LinkedIn) or a casual coffee chat, I’ll share the insights I’ve gained (and the scars I’ve earned) so that we can all innovate smarter together.
- I commit to championing change. Within my university and in my interactions with others, I’ll continue to challenge the status quo that hinders collaboration. That means advocating for more flexible policies, celebrating engaged academic and industry-savvy students, and pushing for initiatives that make partnership the norm, not the exception. Institutions only change when people inside them drive the change – consider me fully on board for that mission.
Ultimately, my offer is partnership. Let’s break down the barriers and unleash more innovation. The challenges our society faces are too complex for one sector to solve alone. But I truly believe that by combining the curious minds in universities with the daring doers in business, we can create solutions neither could achieve independently.
Find out about the amazing work at future space and how you can get involved.
