Build out a commercial business with the Ploughshare Spinout Playbook

The government is investing £14.9 billion in R&D in 2021-22 – its highest level in real terms for four decades. Ploughshare is the hub that will be part of making this happen. We help to deliver the government’s agenda to deliver more impact from its knowledge assets.

Ploughshare helps to deliver the government’s agenda to deliver more impact from its knowledge assets

The public sector faces new challenges and opportunities arising from the digital economy. Where technology advancement and skills are changing at such a pace government organisations need mechanisms to explore these problems and opportunities rapidly, and at scale. This requires early technology experimentation allowing departments to understand the viability of a project or outcome at various stages of development. Ploughshare’s purpose is to take scientific and technical innovations developed in government departments and find ways for them to benefit the UK economy and society as a whole.

We enable the acceleration of Government innovation and impact

Since our inception in 2005, when we were created as a result of the increasing commercialisation activities conducted by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), we have been wholly owned by the Secretary of State for Defence but operate completely separately. This allows us to engage with industry to negotiate license deals and create spin-out companies – ultimately leveraging government technologies for the good of society. Ploughshare has established itself as an integral part of the Ministry of Defence’s (the MOD) technology transfer ecosystem and is increasingly bringing the same impact-driven, people-connecting ethos to our work with other government departments.

What we do at Ploughshare

We as Ploughshare are the technology transfer office for the Ministry of Defence. Wholly owned be the secretary of state for defence, we are the catalyst that bring communities together to deliver positive results from our spinout companies. We work across the full spectrum of innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, SMEs, corporates, not for profits, and public sector organisations through a variety of means to unlock innovation and share it for the greater public good. Through licensing and spin-out companies we help government innovation to have greater economic and societal impact. In addition to leveraging MOD technologies for civilian applications, the royalties from sales of our licensed technologies raises revenues for the Crown. Since 2005, more than 75m of exports has been generated which in turn results in a return to MOD.

The Ploughshare Spinout Playbook

This Playbook was created to support our overall mission to get ideas out of the Government lab and into the hands of users for wider impact and benefit to society. This playbook is designed to de-mystify the spinout process and provide relevant resources for both spinout founders and relevant stakeholders that would like to better support new innovation within their departments. It contains a wide range of information about the spinout process and associate specific resources from the Government and Ploughshare as well as material focused on the key stages of developing IP into a viable business from ideation to growth.

We value feedback and suggestions from readers to develop future iterations of this playbook, please contact us at info@ploughshare.co.uk