Dr Christopher Waite and colleagues leading Undaunted’s Climate Solutions Catalyst (CSC) programme reflect on the need to proactively search UK research for new climate solutions and, in doing so, how they are opening up a new route into climate innovation for academics.
As our window of opportunity to tackle the climate emergency closes fast, the increasing speed and scale at which we must respond demands a new wave of innovation. While many climate solutions exist, the task of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero and removing historical emissions from the atmosphere will only get progressively more difficult. Despite the growing urgency for solutions, climate tech innovation is fraught with unique challenges when compared to established sectors – from high capital costs and the need for deep infrastructure integration to unpredictable and prolonged routes to market and revenues.
Universities are hotbeds of scientific discovery. The fundamental and applied research taking place in public research institutions has a vital role to play in advancing deep-tech climate innovation – both by increasing the diversity of potential solutions and deliberately exploring high-risk or neglected areas overlooked by the private sector. Yet, many climate-relevant breakthroughs never make it out of the lab. In this post, we examine the key barriers that stifle the real-world translation of academic research – and introduce a bold new initiative designed to overcome this pivotal bottleneck.
Can academia plug climate innovation gaps?
More than 2 million scientific research papers are published every year, many describing new discoveries with weird and wonderful real-world applications – from enzymes that can break down plastic waste to nanomaterials that can desalinate seawater using only sunlight. While these lab-scale innovations are often far off commercial deployment, the freedom afforded by the academic system allows for exploration of high-risk, speculative or entirely theoretical solutions that can complement the market-driven pragmatism that constrains technological innovation and deployment out in the ‘real-world’.
A critical bottleneck in the global response to climate change is that hype, capital and political will are grossly misallocated relative to actual emissions reduction potential across sectors. Between 2021 and 2022, roughly 40% of clean tech venture capital flowed into transportation – primarily electric vehicles – despite this sector accounting for only 13% of potential direct emissions cuts. Likewise, over 60% of the 2022 U.S. Inflation Reduction Act’s climate-related funding supports electrification, which accounts for just 22% of potential emissions cuts. On the flip side, heavy industry contributes roughly 18% of emissions yet receives only a small fraction of capital investment. As a result, technologies with outsized potential impact – like low-carbon cement and steel – remain underfunded, while some sectors lack viable decarbonisation pathways altogether.
If nurtured in the right way, academia has the potential to feed novel technological climate solutions into the innovation pipeline and specifically target the most neglected challenge spaces. However, in practice, a range of structural and cultural barriers hamper the translation of research into real-world impact. Despite a new scientific paper being published approximately every 15 seconds, only a tiny fraction of discoveries make it out of the lab. Not all academic research need have a commercial application in mind – fundamental blue-skies research is essential for advancing humankind’s knowledge base. Nonetheless, this bottleneck not only reflects a missed opportunity to convert taxpayer-funded research into societal value, it also poses an existential problem in the race to tackle climate change from as many angles as possible.
Through interviews with researchers and relevant stakeholders from across the UK, the Climate Solutions Catalyst team has mapped the structural biases, support gaps and pipeline inefficiencies that impede climate-focused research translation. Four key challenges stand out:
1. Academia does not incentivise translation
Academic life centres around publishing research, securing grant funding, and teaching students – there is little time left to focus on commercialisation or broader societal impact. Career progression does not actively select for an entrepreneurial mindset and academics must proactively seek out innovation support mechanisms, engage the technology transfer office, and leverage limited resources such as fixed-term staff if they wish to advance their ideas.
2. Academic solutions are often detached from real-world problems
Acclaimed discoveries that are worthy of publication in high-impact journals such as Nature or Science are not necessarily aligned with the challenges and working constraints of industry – academia prizes novelty rather that technoeconomic feasibility, regulatory compliance or process efficiency at scale. Collaborations with industry are often superficial, setup primarily to strengthen funding bids, and researchers rarely find themselves at the coalface. As a result, the granular detail of genuine industrial problems and market needs rarely flow back into the lab to shape better-aligned research agendas.
3. Capacity for scoping new technology transfer opportunities is limited
Largely due to the minimal alignment of disclosed research to real-world problems and ‘market pull’, those managing the commercialisation – often a dedicated technology transfer office (TTO) – focus most of their efforts on ‘technology push’, marketing inventions to potential customers or filing patents to protect intellectual property that might in the future be licensed out. Many disclosures are too early-stage or lack a clear use case altogether. In practice, there is limited time and resource to dedicate to proactively scouting research outputs for new inventions that do meet a latent real-world demand. This problem is particularly acute in climate tech, where solutions may emerge from diverse and unexpected scientific fields, making it difficult to spot promising innovations.
4. Innovation resources are geographically concentrated
While many grants and programmes have a national reach, innovation activity and investment are disproportionately concentrated in regions like London and the so-called Golden Triangle. Well-resourced institutions attract more private capital, entrepreneurial talent, and follow-on support – breeding self-reinforcing hubs. While such centralised hubs have undoubtedly driven exponential growth in climate innovation, they also risk potentially ground-breaking research in less-connected areas falling under the radar.
Introducing the Climate Solutions Catalyst – taking a pro-active search and support approach
Launched by Undaunted – the UK’s climate innovation hub at Imperial – and backed by the Quadrature Climate Foundation, the Climate Solutions Catalyst (CSC) is a trial programme with a clear mission: to pinpoint high-potential academic research from across the UK that, provided with laser-focused support, could evolve into breakthrough climate solutions.
We are deliberately going against the grain of conventional innovation pathways to address the critical bottlenecks that leave many promising ideas in academia untapped. Our hypothesis is simple – impactful climate solutions are hiding in plain sight and a new approach is needed to find and nurture them. We are building both (1) data-driven tools to identify research outcomes with the highest potential impact and (2) a programme of tailored support to help de-risk innovation opportunities at an early stage.
Our search approach has three defining characteristics:
1. Challenge-led focus
We direct our search at problem areas and solution spaces that are urgent yet under-resourced – such as hard-to-abate challenges that lack attention, well-trodden commercialisation pathways, or sufficient market pull. We seek maximum value-add by looking in parts of the research and innovation ecosystem where the usual suspects, whether investors, policymakers or industry stakeholders, are not. After mapping the gaps, we define a challenge theme at varying levels of granularity – down to precise, actionable problem statements framed by industry and policy needs that we can use as key performance criteria when assessing potential solutions. A laser focus on specific challenges aligns our search with real-world demand and helps researchers build robust value propositions from day one.
2. High-throughput prediction of potential impact
The breadth and volume of academic research makes it nearly impossible for stakeholders – including TTOs, investors and industry – to stay abreast of it all. Those scouting research outputs for innovation opportunities may focus on the same top-ranked institutions, prestigious journals and ecosystem hubs, reinforcing the concentration of resources and systemic biases. The emergence of AI offers an opportunity to speed up the throughput of both search and decision-making by orders of magnitude. By leveraging AI, open research data, and expert-validated scoring algorithms, we’re building a pipeline to scan the full UK research corpus and flag emerging innovations with high potential relevance to priority climate challenges.
3. Proactive engagement of new innovators
Most innovation support is reactive, requiring researchers to seek it out. But not all academics have the time, confidence, industry awareness or commercial mindset to translate their science beyond the lab-scale. By proactively engaging researchers identified by our search, tailoring support to their needs and bridging skills gaps, we are testing a completely new route into innovation. This early-stage engagement not only improves translation outcomes but also builds longer-term innovation capacity in academic teams.
We have set out to prove that this approach can add cascading value to the innovation pipeline at multiple levels – supercharging ecosystem-wide search, unlocking new innovations and innovators, maximising commercial value, and improving how research flows towards climate impact.
Get Involved
Over the next 12 months, we’ll iterate on both our search tool and support programme through two six-month cohorts, each focused on a distinct climate challenge space. With a view to sharing our learnings far and wide, watch this space for updates on how we built our prototype AI search tool, selected our first challenge theme, and designed new support interventions to tackle outstanding barriers in early-stage climate innovation.
We also want to hear from you:
- Spin-out entrepreneurs – what challenges did you face, what support was the most valuable, and would you consider mentoring other researchers about to embark on a similar journey?
- Academic researchers – could your research have scalable and real-world climate impact, have you explored avenues for innovation, and what would help you take the leap?
- Investors and industry – what do you need to see from an early-stage innovation to convince you it has true value, and how might academics better align their science to your needs?
- And – if you are in the business of trawling through academic research outputs, how might our search tool help you, and how could we collaborate?
Please get in touch at: csc_undaunted@imperial.ac.uk
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