Onward

Onward's Venturing Out series, which has tracked the UK's lab-to-factory commercialisation gap for four years, received its latest and most pointed illustration in April 2026 when the European Commission approved €211m of Italian state aid for CamGraPhIC, a University of Cambridge graphene photonics spinout. The approval confirmed that the UK has retained the Nobel-prize-associated IP while Italy secured the factory jobs, the manufacturing capital, and the industrial infrastructure. The Venturing Out thesis — that the UK owns discovery and university IP but loses commercialisation to jurisdictions willing to write industrial-scale state cheques — was invoked explicitly in the context of the TenU USIT for Software Guide launched at Mansion House on 20 May 2026: Beauhurst data showing 36.7% of UK spinout fundraisings closed below £500k in 2025 illustrated the capital gap Onward has documented.

Onward is a centre-right UK policy think tank founded in 2018, focused on levelling-up, industrial strategy, innovation, and social policy. Its research programmes produce policy papers and data-led reports aimed primarily at Conservative and moderate cross-party audiences. The Venturing Out series examines why British deep-tech and advanced manufacturing spinouts consistently fail to industrialise domestically, identifying capital gaps, planning barriers, and state-capacity deficits as the structural causes. Onward operates within the broader UK think-tank ecosystem alongside the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Institute for Government, and the IPPR, each occupying distinct ideological and policy territory.

Onward was influential during the Sunak government, with several of its recommendations on levelling-up investment and innovation funding incorporated into Treasury and DSIT policy papers. In the post-election period the think tank has sought cross-party engagement on industrial strategy, positioning Venturing Out as an evidence base for any government serious about closing the commercialisation gap that the CamGraPhIC case made concrete. Its continuing relevance depends on whether the Labour government's Industrial Strategy takes up the specific mechanisms Onward has documented as missing: state-backed manufacturing grants of the scale EU competitors routinely deploy.