Annual Reports
Year One
May 2025 - April 2026
Our Annual Report for the first year of Forging Ahead is now available. The report highlights the progress made during the programme's first year, showcases the people behind its delivery, and recognises the collective efforts of partners across the collaboration. It also demonstrates how Forging Ahead is strengthening commercialisation capability, connectivity and innovation across the Midlands.
It lays out how:
- The project is building greater capability in and unlocking the potential of university commercialisation and spinout teams in the Midlands - supporting them to scale in the region where they were founded.
- The project is strengthening pathways to spinout, licensing and venture creation, helping more research-led and IP-rich opportunities from across 16 universities reach the market.
- The project is connecting the ecosystem by showcasing spinouts at events, building the Forging Links community of spinout founders and - alongside our regional partners - the Dealroom Platform. These efforts are opening up more opportunities for investor and corporate engagement.
Year One focused on building the foundations of a stronger Midlands commercialisation ecosystem through three strategic pillars, which the report is structured through:
One of the clearest lessons from Year One is that collaboration is itself a capability.
By bringing together universities, researchers, founders, investors and commercialisation professionals, the project is creating new ways for expertise, talent and opportunities to flow across institutional boundaries, while developing new approaches to support the translation of research into commercial, economic and societal impact.
The report highlights the programme's early impacts and outcomes, and concludes by setting out the opportunities, priorities and ambitions for Year Two.
The activities that have taken place in the first year of the project - now outlined in this annual report - are helping to create a stronger and more coherent innovation pipeline: identifying entrepreneurial talent earlier, developing the skills and confidence needed to pursue commercial opportunities, and connecting innovators to the specialist expertise, networks and investment required at each stage of their journey.
The ambition is simple but significant: we want more businesses to start, scale and stay in the Midlands. I encourage anyone with an interest in how the region's university research is being translated into companies that grow here to read this.
