How can science & tech founders maximise support from scale-up ecosystems to grow more profitably?
UK science and tech is world-class, and the so-called ‘Golden Triangle’ of London, Cambridge, and Oxford are a core part of the UK’s R&D base. This innovative sector is vital to UK economic growth, but there is a lot of commercial potential to unlock.
On 23rd September, Liberti Club brought together science & tech founders and CEOs, investors, policy-influencers, fractional network leaders and advisory partners from our East of England ecosystem for a Dinner & Debate at Downing College Cambridge on the new growth enablers for this important sector.
Setting the scene, Liberti Club Director Alex Evans quoted the latest UK Innovation Update from Dealroom.co and HSBC Innovation Banking. The UK’s $1.7 trillion innovation economy has grown 6.7x in a decade, with 217 unicorns, and in the first half of 2026 the UK raised more than France, Germany, Switzerland and Sweden combined ($10.3B), taking 41% of European Deep Tech & Life Sciences. UK AI startups raised $12.6B from 297 rounds (74% of all UK VC).
“A new Dept for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade replaced the Dept for Science, Innovation & Technology in July, with many in the innovation and R&D community concerned that science and tech isn’t getting the Govt focus it deserves,” he observed, “so how can founders get the support they need to scale?”
“It’s encouraging to see that respected entrepreneurs like Alex Depledge are still advising Govt, and we have a dedicated AI Minister, but a scale-up ecosystem built by the business community is still filling the gap in support that SME founders need,” said Philip Salter, Founder of policy think tank The Entrepreneurs Network.
Examples in the room included fractional General Counsel network, The Legal Director, and the world’s biggest executive coaching business Vistage, providing social capital from peer learning.
“Experienced leaders can help founders access and maximise this ecosystem support, and we’re seeing a boom in demand for fractional executives because they can be accessed more affordably,” he added.
The CFO Centre’s Regional Director, Jeremy Hyde, observed that fractional CFOs are not only helping founders to get their financial house in order and build the strongest case for investment but also finding the right investors to access value beyond capital from their partner networks.
The Marketing Centre’s Colin Stickland explained the role of the fractional CMO in identifying the highest value clients to farm and targeting which to hunt with the right insight, tools and partners. “As AI creates more of a sea of sameness, genuine differentiation becomes even more important,” he said. “Being clear about who you serve, the problem you solve and why you are different helps drive commercial growth harder and faster; and ultimately makes the business more attractive to investors too,” he said.
Kathryn Marshall, a portfolio CPO from People Puzzles’ network, echoed this point saying that employer brand is helping her science & tech clients to compete for the most in-demand talent. “With 53,000 engineering graduates against a demand of 180,000 by 2030, businesses need a people strategy that sits alongside their business strategy, setting out how they’ll build, buy and borrow the talent they need.”
Access to talent and capital were generally identified as the biggest barriers and enablers, with one guest observing greater caution amongst a new generation of investors and a lack of understanding of where the value lies – which has contributed to the decline in follow-on funding. “We need more intelligent capital that is prepared to take more informed risks on future unicorns,” he said.
Elaine Lamb, Science & Tech Practice Partner at risk advisory firm Partners& highlighted some of risks impacting M&A and valuation in this sector. “AI and data protection is rising up the risk register for directors’ liability, as is IP to ensure it’s not owned by contractors plus exposure to cyber risk and attempts to intercept investment capital as it’s being transferred to founders,” she explained.
Solving the right problems
Opening up the debate to the room for their perspectives on the barriers and enablers of growth for science and tech firms, Rui Andres, CEO of Source Certain, said: “There is more than £8 billion of investment every year going into R&D at universities, but there is a big gap between what academia wants to achieve and what industry needs to achieve.
“The value proposition for universities is often about how many patents or papers you have published, but a study from Nature found that only 15% of published papers are replicable. When you get it right, you have the ability to multiply very different things.”
Owen Thompson, CEO of Cambridge Future Tech, highlighted a challenge for University spin-outs and technology transfer.
“There’s an opaqueness around our policies for a PhD or a PI-level founder in the UK, with intellectual property to place into a commercialized vehicle, because it can take up to 18 months of negotiation by which point you might have missed your opportunity to spin out.
“If we had a consistent, transparent, formalized spin-out policy laid down across all UK universities, for which you could literally press a button and say, ‘I would like to take the intellectual property I’ve developed out into a startup, and these are the standardized terms,’ there would be a marked difference in the commercialization value of what we could achieve with startups in the UK. And we could create more economic value for the universities at the same time.”
Access to new markets has consistently been identified by the Scale-Up Institute as a top five enabler of growth, both regional and international. “Global communities offer the UK’s most innovative businesses access to new markets and clients, not just the US but Africa, Asia or the Middle East,” said Dr Khaldon Al Karmadi, Managing Director of the Global Cambridge Institute.
With numerous comparisons of the innovation economy in the UK and US, some observed that we shouldn’t measure success by our version of Silicon Valley but the quality of innovative businesses in this sector and how they are being supported.
“The risk is that we see ourselves as ‘poor cousins’, when we should celebrate the huge number of highly innovative businesses currently operating in Cambridge and recognise the depth and breadth of the Life Sciences and Engineering sectors in particular,” said Sean Wilson, CEO/Co-Founder of SimSage.
“What makes us successful? Innovation: proving and pursuing it to a commercially successful outcome. And collaboration, because we can’t all hire the skills and experience we want so let’s be successful together.”
A great sentiment to end on with so many partners and portfolio leaders in the room helping founders to tap into fractional leader networks, flexible talent pools and advisor ecosystems to access the right advice and services at the right time for biggest impact.