The Scottish Government will put £2.92 million into 17 university research projects to help turn them into businesses, it announced on 2 October 2026. The awards come from the research commercialisation Proof of Concept fund, which was piloted in 2025-26, when 18 projects shared £2.95 million.

According to the government’s release, the money is intended to help researchers explore and realise the commercial potential of their work, and to speed up parts of the spinout process, from developing prototypes to market analysis and pitching to investors.

The Scottish Government has now invested nearly £6 million over the last two years to realise the economic potential of more Scottish spinout companies starting and succeeding.

Stephen Flynn, Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Tourism & Transport, Scottish Government

Where the money goes

The list of successful projects, published by the government’s Economic Development Directorate and updated on 2 October, names seven universities. TED’s tally of the individual awards on that list gives these totals:

  • University of Edinburgh: four projects, about £743,750
  • University of Glasgow: three projects, about £624,080
  • University of Strathclyde: three projects, about £496,610
  • University of Aberdeen: three projects, about £436,070
  • Robert Gordon University: one project, about £249,900
  • University of St Andrews: two projects, about £247,850
  • Heriot-Watt University: one project, about £124,300

Individual awards range from £122,920 to £249,898.05. The largest is for SPIRES at Robert Gordon University, an AI-enabled optimisation platform for island and remote hybrid energy systems. Close behind is £249,877.04 for VasQX at the University of Glasgow, a dialysis graft with embedded biosensors. Edinburgh’s awards include £247,355.95 for laboratory-grown blood vessels intended to reduce reliance on animal models in drug testing, and £247,098.96 for NeurEYE, a retinal imaging platform for dementia risk assessment.

Other named projects include Scensai, a handheld chemical sensing device for beverage quality control at Aberdeen (£186,468.96); Merra-log, a low-cost aquatic environmental sensor at St Andrews (£124,934.08); Kinera, a wearable for Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor at Heriot-Watt (£124,303.66); and Revalint, a Strathclyde project on certified remanufacturing of aerospace components (£247,267.00). The subjects span health, energy, agriculture, environmental monitoring and aerospace.

What is not disclosed

The release does not say how many applications were received, how projects were assessed, whether the government takes equity or any return, or whether there will be a further round and at what size. The descriptions of what each technology does are the government’s and the universities’ own, and have not been independently tested.

What it means

TED analysis:

  • For university technology transfer offices: all but one award falls into one of two bands, of roughly £125,000 or roughly £250,000, which gives a practical guide to the scale of proof-of-concept work the fund will back.
  • For investors: the published list is an early, public pipeline of Scottish spinout candidates, with Edinburgh and Glasgow alone accounting for about 47% of the money.
  • For policy watchers: at under £3 million a round the fund is small beside UK-wide schemes, and it was announced a week before the Prime Minister set out plans to devolve innovation funding to mayors in England, a change that does not yet extend to Scotland.