FST JOURNAL

We all agree that the UK is a global beacon of scientific excellence. Our universities consistently rank among the world's best, producing groundbreaking research and the most brilliant minds. This scientific foundation is one of our nation's greatest assets, a wellspring from which we can draw solutions to humanity's most pressing challenges and drive economic growth. The question, then, is whether this scientific excellence alone is enough to translate into the real-world impact and scale that we urgently need.

For all our pride in UK science, a critical challenge remains: the struggle to translate this world-class discovery into globally competitive businesses that deliver tangible impact and scale - whether it’s saving more lives, wielding geopolitical power or protecting national security - and inclusive growth. In the Industrial Strategy, the UK  has laid out plans to invest 10% of its defence budget into novel technologies. Do we have the tools to develop those and secure scale-up investment? The assumption that we have cracked translation is a fundamental impediment to achieving our national ambitions, particularly in the realm of deeptech - the key to solving complex global problems.

At organisations like Deep Science Ventures (DSV), we're busy building the infrastructure, programmes, and companies that enable scientists to become VC-backed entrepreneurs and visa versa. Our focus on pre-identified opportunity areas actively de-risks the company founding process, with our companies facing an 82% survival rate, with none built in the last five years dying - a contrast to the 90% of deeptech companies that don’t survive beyond five years. This not only leads to the creation of businesses that are designed to scale and thrive, for instance Mission Zero or Supercritical, but also strengthens the UK's reputation as a global science leader.

Listen to any keynote, participate in any roundtable and you would conclude that capital is (all) what UK deeptech needs. According to DSV calculations, we need to scale capital into UK deeptech by at least 50 times to meet our policy and economic goals. However, capital alone is naive; US ARPAs still lack technology commercialisation skills and UK startups feel that The British Business Bank doesn't conduct sufficient sector analysis. The UK needs a concurrent scaling and integration of the entire deeptech ecosystem: talent pathways (both new and existing), infrastructure to incubate nascent ventures, and an agile regulatory environment. 

Our current talent pool is insufficient to meet the UK's R&D demands; we'll need more than 382,000 researchers by 2027 just to sustain 2.4% R&D (The R&D Pipeline). The talent challenge isn't just about volume. To achieve the extraordinary innovation results the UK desperately needs, we must think beyond traditional definitions of talent: cultivating a new type of talent, marrying scientific expertise with entrepreneurial drive to feed the appetite to, in turn, scale the scalers.

The bottleneck: beyond discovery

The current trajectory, an organic, incremental evolution of the ecosystem, is inadequate. We risk falling short of our economic objectives, seeing our brightest talent drawn to more fertile entrepreneurial grounds abroad, and consequently losing our competitive edge as a global hub for innovation. 

While we celebrate our science higher education system and the hungry talent it produces, the UK finds itself in a familiar cycle, generating knowledge but, retrospectively, failing to translate and scale solutions that break free from the lab and shape futures. Today, less than 0.5% of PhD students spin-out or licence their research findings (Beauhurst & RAEng Spotlight on Spinouts 2022).

At the same time, deeptech has fallen out of favour. While artificial intelligence (AI) is, without question, a transformative enabler and infrastructure for research itself, without high quality data - which in turn requires an understanding of the underlying science to be created and the tooling and talent to produce it - we cannot fully harness emerging AI-in-science capabilities.

The current laser focus on AI, leads to a skewed, less vibrant landscape where an array of vital foundational, disruptive institutions and programmes struggle for attention and investment. 

Reinventing the wheel: invention as a discipline

To unlock the UK's deeptech potential, we need to fundamentally broaden our definition of scientist, and rethink how we cultivate scientific leaders and intentionally, systematically build and scale ventures. This demands a paradigm shift: treating venture creation not as an accidental or serendipitous outcome of scientific discovery, but as a rigorous, teachable discipline in its own right, i.e., the science of building companies that scale, Venture Science. Following in the footsteps of great British scientists, who consistently created inventions with purpose, from Charles Babbage, to Hertha Ayrton, and Sir James Dyson.

What if we were to pivot from a pure "discovery mindset" to an "invention mindset," asking not just "what can we uncover?" but "what can we build, and how can we bring it to life at the biggest scale?" When we invent, we begin with a goal to solve a problem and are open to using any knowledge to find a solution. This is in effect, to apply an engineering mindset to science.

Venture creation is being re-imagined beyond traditional academic pursuits, beyond traditional academic walls, demanding a new kind of policy and infrastructure. The opportunity is truly UK-wide - not mapped to the geographies of traditional academic powerhouses. 

Proven solutions to the UK’s translation and scaling problem already exist. Many exciting organisations, like SCVC, ConceptionX, DSV, are already established, delivering compelling impact whilst operating outside and in partnership with the traditional Higher Education Institution (HEI) mould. These outliers often go under the radar, or are a challenge to support in a system designed centuries ago for a single type of organisation. These are not a threat to existing, successful talent pathways or HEIs but rather designed to be complementary, expanding our national capabilities - and must be championed.

For a decade, DSV has honed an approach, systematically identifying high-impact problems ripe for deeptech solutions. Uncompromising, obsessively focusing on creating or combining IP to solve them, DSV has built 50+ companies along the way, translating science into startup, scale up and beyond. This methodology prioritises, backs, and values the deliberate creation of solutions: an "invention mindset." This has been done in partnership with key UK institutions - such as the Net Zero Technology Centre since 2020, Innovate UK with whom we created a therapy for childhood cancer, and Agency of Advanced Research and Invention (ARIA) with whom we're developing a true entropy source. We understand the skills deficit behind the lack of UK scale-ups. 

A new breed of talent: introducing the venture scientist

Venture as a discipline demands a new flavour of talent, thereby reinventing the traditional PhD. Re-imagine a doctoral programme designed not solely for academic publication, but for the systematic identification of critical global problems and - in direct response - the invention of novel, scalable solutions. It would involve attracting not only the best scientific minds, but also individuals with nascent commercial instincts, empowering them to intentionally translate that science into impactful ventures, from the outset.

DSV is pioneering this with its PhD in invention: the Venture Science Doctorate (VSD), seed-funded by Innovate UK and Schmidt Futures, among others. This 3-year, fully-funded, sector-agnostic, global programme is a direct response to the translation challenge, explicitly embedding venture creation at the heart of research. Unlike conventional doctoral studies, VSD candidates don't just conduct research; they are trained as VC-backable, science entrepreneurs from day 1. 

They directly target critical, often overlooked problems within sectors like health, climate, agriculture, and computation. The programme is set to train 1,000 venture scientists per year within 10 years, and is currently fundraising for its 3rd cohort. A proud home-grown initiative, developed by a UK-headquartered venture studio, it is now backed by SPRIN-D (Germany’s Federal Agency for BreakthroughInnovation) - scaling in Germany. 

Optimising for invention 

The UK's ambition to be both a leading science and innovation powerhouse is within reach, but seizing this future demands more than wishful thinking; it demands new language, structures and mechanisms to back ‘venture science’ and a willingness to embrace radical new models of education and venture creation. We must collectively shift our mindset away from the passive hope that increased UK research and innovation funding and an increase in (the same kind of) innovation activities will automatically yield UK-grown, global deeptech companies. 

Venture creation is not just the business of building companies - it's the business of education too, in order to train the builders and future scalers.

Currently, a critical gap exists: while research councils fund research and studentships, and Innovate UK backs innovation, there's no dedicated person, team, funding pot, or organisation within the UK government or its agencies focused on venture creation itself. This 'no-man's land' overlooks a vital reality: startup creation disproportionately happens outside UK universities.

To fill this gap, we must cultivate the entire ecosystem to create and sustain a fertile UK ground for global scientific ventures to economically flourish. 

You can learn more about Deep Science Ventures’ approach, methodology and impact here.