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Commercialising social sciences research is such a new area of technology transfer that when you spin out a company “you might be the first to do that type of deal,” says Paul Devlin, the head of research commercialisation and impact at Cardiff University.
And Cardiff is going all in: the institution is a founding member of Aspect, a UK-based multi-university organisation that was set up to drive the creation of social sciences spinouts. Two years ago, Cardiff opened a six-storey incubator, called sbarc|spark, which is dedicated to social sciences and home to the tech transfer office itself.
Devlin — who’s been in the job for 18 months — can already claim early successes such as HateLab, a platform to detect online hate speech and crime, that began as a social sciences research project but last year was spun out as Nisien.ai.
Devlin is also working with his boss Vanessa Cuthill and vice-chancellor Prof Wendy Larner to make sure tech transfer is measured by impact, rather than just VC investment raised — a metric that makes sense for life sciences or software spinouts, but not for social sciences.