What the UK can learn from SPIN: Rise, Europe’s bid to close the innovation gap

“To lead in the ‘Intelligent Age’ and remain competitive and sovereign, Europe must embrace the AI and digital revolutions, enhance investment in critical technologies and supercomputing infrastructure, and improve the conditions for innovation and businesses in Europe.”

That was Henna Virkkunen, EU Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, speaking at the World Economic Forum this summer. And of course she’s right. But we’ve known that for some time. Europe’s scientific foundations are strong but unless we learn how to convert research into scalable ventures, that foundation risks becoming more of a cul-de-sac than an open road to growth and fortune.

So it was interesting to see a new initiative emerge from EIT Digital last month called SPIN: Rise. It’s billed as a pan-European training and commercialisation programme to help researchers turn lab-based innovations into real-world ventures. Over nine weeks, early-career researchers across Europe receive tailored mentoring, IP strategy support, and real-world business training, all aimed at helping them build commercially viable ventures in areas like AI-driven health, cyber-resilience, dual-use innovation and smart manufacturing.

It’s a deliberate, structured intervention to fix the lab-to-market conundrum that still hampers Europe’s competitiveness in deep tech. It’s a disconnect that was laid bare in last year’s Draghi report on European competitiveness.

“We have many talented researchers and entrepreneurs filing patents,” it warned. “But innovation is blocked at the next stage.”

This isn’t just a European problem. The UK faces many of the same pressures. But there are signs of change. The UK already has world-class deep tech research and strong regional ecosystems, from Bristol’s vibrant spinout scene to the growing network of innovation hubs tied to quantum, AI, and advanced manufacturing in Oxford, Cambridge, London and Manchester. But what SPIN: Rise offers is a clear template for scale, a structured, pan-European approach to commercialisation that combines entrepreneurial training with industry-led specialisation.

This isn’t about replicating SPIN: Rise, it’s about recognising that for sovereign technologies to thrive we need domain-specific focus in tech-hungry, high-growth sectors, deeper integration between research, industry, and capital, and more structured, cross-institutional support for scientists-turned-founders.

To this end, the UK government is trying to coordinate its scientific assets into more commercially focused outcomes. The Frontier AI Taskforce, now absorbed into the new AI Safety Institute, sits alongside government plans to combine AI research with sovereign compute infrastructure, as seen in the Isambard-AI supercomputer launch. Meanwhile, the National Quantum Strategy is funding regional quantum centres with an explicit commercialisation mandate, including applications in telecoms, defence, and finance.

But SPIN: Rise reminds us that commercialisation isn’t just about more money, it’s about the right mix of people, process, and partnerships. There’s an opportunity here, not just to compete, but to collaborate. Horizon Europe access opens the door. So does a shared ambition to lead in Virkkunen’s “intelligent age” – not just through discovery, but through delivery.