The National Oceanography Centre (NOC) is one of the world’s leading oceanographic research institutions, and a pioneer in ocean technology. NOC provides the UK’s National Capability for the marine community, and works with both government and businesses. However, without an established commercial pathway and culture in place, they faced a critical challenge in bringing their cutting-edge ocean innovations to the market.
Wanting to accelerate growth, diversify their income streams, and elevate the management process of their intellectual property, NOC set out to find the right commercial partner to transform their end-to-end technology transfer process and open up new untapped markets and opportunities not possible before. It was essential to find an organisation that offered a robust commercial capability, and a team with proven expertise and experience.
NOC chose Ploughshare for these reasons, and adopted their ‘Discover, Liberate, and Scale’ methodology, which culminated in a landmark multi-million pound licensing deal. As the Associate Director of NOC Innovations, the trading subsidiary wholly owned by NOC, Huw Gullick has played a key role in this partnership.
Securing a significant multi-million pound licensing deal in circa six months.
Driving long-term strategic growth through diversified income streams.
A culture where innovation and opportunity identification are streamlined, enabling faster and more frequent revenue generation from innovations.
“NOC has skills and technologies relevant to a diverse range of marine economic sectors and end-users and can unlock value for society by transitioning our technologies into the commercial world.
Without Ploughshare’s support, though, we would have found it challenging to open up those sectors for NOC. But now, with their support and expertise, we are quickly growing new opportunities with industry. Through partnering with Ploughshare we are able to leverage so much more value from our research, creating pathways for far more our research to scale up in commercial environments.”
Before partnering with Ploughshare, NOC faced three interconnected challenges: managing intellectual property, accelerating commercial deals, and growth through diversified income streams. Fundamental to this achievement was embedding a company-wide culture that values, understands, and actively supports the commercialisation of innovation. At the time, NOC had no dedicated technology transfer team, and limited internal experience in this area.
To build this capability, NOC chose to find a partner rather than develop this independently in-house. After exploring several options, they selected Ploughshare for two key reasons: its deep understanding of NOC’s culture, rooted in a shared research background, and its proven commercialisation infrastructure and processes.
“The immediate value was having the Ploughshare team, who understood how to do technology transfer. It made us feel comfortable talking about Intellectual Property (IP) in a commercial context and helping people embrace it. And then implementing the IP management and tech transfer process of Discover, Liberate, and Scale that the Ploughshare model is built around – it just works really, really well for a research organisation. Yes, there’s value in doing deals. That’s a given. But, all of this foundational work has probably been even more valuable.”
The onboarding process was collaborative and transparent – Ploughshare and NOC worked closely together to define roles, set short and medium-term goals, and fully integrated a member of Ploughshare’s team, Lindsay Smith, within NOC. Lindsay took time to fully understand NOC’s existing structure, capabilities, processes, and culture, before presenting insights that shaped the partnership’s new strategy and path forward.
Ploughshare’s ‘Discover, Liberate, and Scale’ framework was introduced and became the foundation of NOC’s technology transfer process and IP management policy, providing the structure needed to support ambitious growth plans. Sandy Fisher John, Camilla Owens, and Lily Chan from Ploughshare also took a leading role in bringing these milestones to life, alongside Ploughshare’s VP of Climate, Environment, and Sustainability Commercialisation, Kalyan Sarma.
“Ploughshare took a personal approach and got in front of our researchers. It built some early momentum and got over that initial internal challenge of talking about commercialisation.
We had to unpick a lot of existing ways of working alongside policies and procedures, and rewrite them much more akin to how Ploughshare do things, which is the gold standard.”
With embedded experts, Ploughshare’s approach is to work alongside their clients’ teams to surface opportunities. Ned Vardey, one of Ploughshare’s specialists, handled the intricate IP legwork for six months for the ‘Autosub Long Range AUV’ technology – resulting in a landmark multi-million pound licencing deal; the largest in NOC’s history. Ploughshare supported NOC’s ambition to take the lead in this deal, following the new structures and procedures in place from the partnership.
With Ploughshare’s support and strategic guidance, NOC now has a growing, steady, predictable income from technology transfer – with diversified income streams currently accounting for about 20% of NOC’s total income. Critically, Ploughshare have helped NOC leverage their unique technologies in new markets and applications that wouldn’t have naturally been considered previously, maximising the impact and commercial potential of their innovations.
“Technology transfer is a cost, and you have to fund the process and infrastructure, and you have to be motivated by impact. You’re not going to succeed every time, which can be a really difficult concept for research organisations. But, there will be some deals that just smash it out of the park. To me, that’s absolutely fundamental for people to understand.
Moving forward, we have ambitious goals for our diversified income streams – we want to be able to generate £100 million a year by 2035. I do think Ploughshare is positioned to help us accomplish this – I think it’s all doable. I’ve got no question over the expertise of Ploughshare.”
NOC’s 10-year strategy sets an aspirational target: generating £100 million annually from diversified income streams by 2035, up from £14-15 million currently. Achieving this will require a significant step change in the scale and speed of commercialisation and how technologies are moved through the pipeline.
The ability to meet this challenge starts from an organisational culture that embraces and understands commercialisation. Working as strategic partners, Ploughshare and NOC have successfully built this across NOC’s team in a meaningful, sustainable way through a multi-level approach, with Ploughshare team members providing support and expertise at all stages.
With Ploughshare as a partner, new frameworks, policies, processes, and capabilities have been built into NOC – laying a strong foundation to position NOC for long-term commercial success. This foundation is actively and continually being built on to achieve their ambitious goals, with significant wins and new licensing deal milestones met along the way.
“The NOC and Ploughshare partnership has been growing from strength to strength since it began. I am very pleased that the collaborative relationship we have built has not only allowed us to develop the key tech transfer capabilities of NOC, but already capture value from some of its cutting-edge knowledge assets for commercial and wider societal benefits. I believe these early successes stand us in good stead to accelerate the exploitation of NOC’s knowledge assets over the coming years, and meet its future goals as a leading organisation in Oceanography.
I would like to thank all my NOC colleagues, especially Huw Gullick and CEO, John Siddorn, for their leadership, and trusting Ploughshare in supporting them in this journey. I look forward to a fruitful partnership in the years ahead.”
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