The challenge

A recent investor briefing on Scotland’s spin-out pipeline put it plainly: founding teams are often brilliant scientists and researchers, world-leading in their field, but commercialisation is a learned skill with no connection to the academic training that produced the technology in the first place. That gap doesn’t stay theoretical. Northern spin-outs, spanning Scotland and the North of England, attract just 11% of UK venture funding despite producing 40% of the country’s deeptech research output, and a Scottish company typically takes twice as long to reach its first institutional fundraise as a London equivalent. A website that can’t translate the science into a story a non-specialist understands isn’t a minor inconvenience. It’s a measurable part of why good research takes longer to become a funded business.

01 – Design is the easy part. Translation is the job.

Ask most life sciences founders for a website brief and you’ll get one of two things: a wall of scientific detail with no clear commercial narrative, or a handful of confident-sounding phrases that could describe almost any company in the sector. Neither is a strategy. Both are symptoms of the same thing  the founder hasn’t yet had to translate their own science into language a customer, investor or new hire can act on.

That’s why a website project for a biotech or medtech venture has to start with discovery, not design. Before anyone chooses a colour palette, someone needs to unpick who the business actually is, what it does in plain terms, who it’s for, what makes it different, and what the website is actually meant to achieve. Skipping this step doesn’t save time. It just moves the cost to later in the project, when a half-built site has to be unpicked and rebuilt around answers that should have come first.

02 – the region already built programmes to solve this exact problem

This isn’t a niche observation. North East England and Scotland have both built public programmes specifically because scientist-founders need help with the translation and commercialisation side of the business, not just funding. Northern Accelerator, the collaboration between Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Sunderland and Teesside universities, explicitly matches academic founders with experienced business leaders to make sure spin-outs have a strong management team from the outset, not just a strong technology.

Scotland runs the equivalent at national scale. Converge, backed by £1.26 million in multi-year Scottish Government and Scottish Enterprise funding, is taking more than 120 academic founders through an intensive entrepreneurial programme in 2026 alone a record cohort. Scottish Enterprise’s High Growth SpinOut Programme exists for the same reason: to translate research into scalable, investable businesses, because the translation work doesn’t happen by itself.

“Founding teams are often brilliant scientists, world-leading in their field. But commercialisation is a learned skill, disconnected from the academic experience that brought the technology into existence.”

Translating the science into a business narrative is a distinct, learnable skill

03 – What the funding gap says about waiting too long to translate the story

The scale of the gap is worth sitting with. Since 2011, Scottish universities have produced 240 spin-outs, and the University of Edinburgh alone ranks second in the UK with 86 active spin-outs genuinely comparable research output to the Golden Triangle. Yet Northern and Scottish spin-outs, producing 40% of the UK’s deep-tech research, capture only 11% of its venture funding, and a spin-out from Edinburgh or Glasgow typically raises less than a quarter of what an equivalent London company would at the same stage.

Government and universities are closing part of that gap directly: £4.4 million in new Scottish Government funding for spin-out commercialisation support, a £22.5 million North East Spinout Inspire Fund already backing three companies, and University Spin-Out Terms (USIT) guidelines that have helped bring the median UK university equity stake down from 22.6% in 2015 to 16.1% in 2024. None of that money changes whether a visitor lands on a company’s website and immediately understands what it does and why it matters. That part is still the founder’s job or their website partner’s.

04 – The questions detective work has to answer before design starts

Stripped down, the discovery work that should happen before a single page is designed answers a short, specific list of questions. Skipping any of them is exactly what causes projects to stall, deadlines to slip, and budgets to grow.

• Who are you as a business, and what do you actually stand for the science itself?
• What’s your core offering, described in a sentence a non-scientist would understand?
• What do you want the website to achieve investment, sales, talent, partnerships and in what order?
• What problem does your customer or partner actually have, in their own words, not yours?
• Who are your competitors, and what is genuinely different about you, not just better?

Notice that none of these are design questions. They’re business strategy questions that happen to determine every design decision that follows the structure, the messaging hierarchy, the calls to action, even which pages exist at all.

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05 – Why this needs a regional, sector-specific ear, not a generic process

A generic discovery workshop can surface generic answers. A North East or Scottish life sciences founder needs someone in the room who already recognises the difference between a University of Strathclyde spin-out and a Northern Accelerator one, who knows what Converge or the Inspire Fund actually are, and who can translate deep scientific detail into a story that still holds up to an investor who knows the sector.

“Not having your business explained in a format that makes sense to investors or customers doesn’t just delay a website project. It’s a large part of why good science takes longer to become a funded, growing company.”

Getting this right is exactly the sector-specific, regionally-literate work that generic web design agencies routinely miss. A biotech or medtech venture in Newcastle, Durham, Edinburgh or Glasgow deserves detective work from someone who already understands both the science and the regional ecosystem funding it     not a template discovery questionnaire copied from a generic tech startup process.