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Industry Engine identifies university spinout companies using the HESA spin-out register. A spinout is a company created to commercialise research or technology developed at a university or research institution. Identifying these companies can help you analyse how research moves into the economy and compare spinout activity across sectors and places.

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About the source

HESA publishes the register as open data under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. As the licence requires, we credit the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) as the source. The source includes:
  • the spinout’s name and, for UK companies, its Companies House registration number;
  • the associated higher education provider, its UK Provider Reference Number, and the provider’s region and country;
  • incorporation and foundation years;
  • company status and website;
  • whether several higher education providers were involved;
  • whether the company is a social enterprise; and
  • broad subject areas: Medicine, Health and Life Sciences; Physical Sciences, Engineering and Mathematics; Social Sciences; and Arts and Humanities.

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How we process the register

1

Download the source

We download HESA’s published register each month.
2

Standardise the data

We format Companies House numbers as eight characters, convert yes or no fields to boolean values, standardise month values and clean website URLs.
3

Validate and remove duplicate records

We validate the data against an expected schema. We keep one record for each company and higher education provider relationship, so a spinout associated with several providers can retain each relationship.
4

Add the company-level flag

We use the register to populate the Spinout field on company records in Industry Engine.

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Find spinouts in Industry Engine

Use the Spinouts option in the Growth filters to focus your results on companies identified in the register. See using filters for more information. The company-level Spinout field is also available in company data. You can find its definition in the data dictionary.
The HESA register is the source of our company-level spinout status. The deprecated Spinout field attached to investment rounds is always 0 and should not be used to identify spinout companies.

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Limitations

  • This is a source-based classification, not a prediction. Coverage depends on the records HESA publishes.
  • Industry Engine is built around Companies House records. A register entry that cannot be linked to a company record may not appear on the platform.
  • A company can be associated with more than one higher education provider. The company-level field shows whether it is a spinout, not the number of provider relationships.
  • We process the source monthly. Changes to the register appear after the next pipeline and platform update.
Last modified on July 15, 2026