A brand refresh takes a lot of work. Alongside its rollout across communications and other brand assets, its ultimate test comes in how well it shapes how an organisation thinks and behaves.

How important is having a clear and compelling brand when building a spinout? Organisations at this critical growth stage often need to improve the role brand plays. But instead, it’s easy to believe brand isn’t a priority for now when telling more people about that product feels like the most important job to focus on. 

Find and remove the obstacles to more creative and innovative work. Tips for Research, Innovation and Enterprise leadership teams.

Shared Values are increasingly referred to by corporate partners as a reason for choosing which university, faculty or enterprise hub to collaborate with.

If the Values are lived (not just written), they help to establish behaviours.

Before deciding and communicating what your university or innovation hub does, ask yourself why it exists.

The answer should not be to increase access to funding. That is a by-product of doing something more important that’s going to create value by positively impacting the world.

There is an understandable tension that arises when ‘someone else’ is brought in to work on a project. The internal team can feel overlooked and under-appreciated. The external team can feel wary of being limited by narrow thinking and internal politics.

But when you get it right you get the best of both worlds and this project is a perfect example.

We’ve become so obsessed with driving immediate metrics that our ability to create memories falls aside. When brand builders create advertising that responds to a think/feel/do prompt, they ignore that brands are memory retrieval devices, and therefore the most critical action for them to prompt is remembering.

We’ve developed a considerable amount of knowledge by working with a wide range of organisations at the nexus of academic research, entrepreneurialism and investment for collaborative ventures.

And one of the insights we’ve discovered might sound prosaic but we can promise you, its importance shouldn’t be underestimated.

I really hope this article is useless to you in the very near future. But it just might be vital right now. Because there’s an inescapable truth that innovative scale-ups, spin-outs and startups would do well to heed.

How cultivating a brand can supercharge the impact of Research, Innovation and Enterprise in universities and innovation hubs.

Building a brand is about creating a consistent and meaningful experience for customers that reflects the values and personality of the brand. I’ll spell it out straight from the start and we’ll work back from there: you cannot ‘build’ a brand, you can just create the right environment and prompts for it to thrive.

The antidote to a lack of audience attention isn’t being quicker, it’s being interesting. Despite being bombarded with ads, clickbait, and 15-second viral videos, when creating a brand story, quicker isn’t better, better is better. The truth is, humanity isn’t changing as fast as the algorithms would have us believe.

At the start of their business journey, most founders are fantastic at focusing on their target market and solving the problem their potential customers have. They’ll obsess over details and look for angles. However, as time goes by, this focus tends to change from ‘what is their problem?’ to ‘what is their problem with my product?’.

The ‘newness’ of your innovation might be stifling your growth in the current economy. That might sound crazy, but here are the facts. Two fundamental behaviours have shifted, making growth in the new economy much harder.

Startups and scale-ups behave in fundamentally different ways to large complex organisations. And for obvious reasons. The external and internal factors shaping them are different. But what happens when large organisations need to innovate? Moving like a supertanker - cautious and steady - won't cut it.

Ian Chang to curate a suitably unexpected and adventurous playlist to complement the riding experiences at the visionary new Vittoria Park in Brembate

Having an Impact Identity is critical to the speed you win talent, funding and customers. But building traction with those audiences requires you to take an outside-in perspective and see your innovation from their side of the tracks.

Here are just a few of the lessons innovators in any sector can learn about problem-solving, determination and resilience from founders navigating the complex route-to-market in HealthTech.

Purpose starts with the business model, not in the marketing department. So, how can you ensure your business puts purpose first? Our thoughts to coincide with Bristol Tech Festival which we’re proud to sponsor.

We invited experts responsible for innovation and enterprise initiatives at the Universities of Bristol, Bath and Loughborough to share their practical experiences of creating distinctive, investment-winning brands. Read what they had to say.