Tim Dickson talks to CEO Hetti Barkworth-Nanton about next steps for the MOD’s technology transfer unit
Technology transfer, you could argue, began with Isaiah.
In a much-quoted (and oft-misquoted) passage from the Bible, written about eight centuries before the birth of Christ, the Old Testament prophet anticipates a day when people “beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks”, and when “nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more”.
20th and 21st century political leaders may have disregarded that last bit. But since 2005, deep inside the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MOD) a small unit has been helping turn intellectual property developed for the British armed forces into ‘civilian’ products that save lives, strengthen private sector industries and solve some of society’s deepest challenges.
Ploughshare, as the unit is appropriately called, has not yet hit the jackpot with game-changing tech like EpiPen, the auto-injector pen originally designed to allow American soldiers to self-administer nerve gas antidotes, or GPS, the satellite-based radio navigation system initially rolled out for the US military but made available for civilian use by President Reagan in 1983. Since its inception, though, Ploughshare has created 16 new spin-out companies (employing 500 people), negotiated 150 technology licensing agreements between (mainly) the MOD and private sector partners and generated £125m in independently verified gross value added for the British economy.
Success stories include Tarian, whose Data Centric Security helps a range of organisations protect their data and data infrastructure; Sentinel Photonics, which delivers advanced laser detection and protection systems for defence and security users; and P2i, the MOD invention that transformed a breakthrough in nano-coating technology into a scalable commercial capability protecting everyday electronics.
The question now is how Ploughshare, building on more than two decades of experience and accumulated know-how, can expand its activities and increase its economic and societal impact in the future.
According to Hetti Barkworth-Nanton, a former telecoms and utilities executive who has been CEO for the last six years, Ploughshare’s opportunity rests on its unique position as a trusted technology ‘bridge’ between government and the commercial world. “We are government-owned,” she explains, “but we are not the Government, we operate at arm’s length. A lot of investors are cynical that the Government will meddle in the spin-out companies in which we hold its stakes, but they can have all the advantages of, and proximity to, government without the downsides.”
Ploughshare came into existence following the Blair Government’s decision to hive off parts of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) into QinetiQ, a newly private company, leaving behind a rump that was rebranded the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl). “There was a substantial amount of good research still being done in Dstl that was unique and needed a pathway to market,” says Hetti. “That’s where we came in.”
Recruited in 2020, Hetti says she was told at the time “to get Ploughshare off life-support.” Her initial task was to generate enough income from the unit’s activities to eliminate the £1m or so subsidy which the MOD was providing to cover Ploughshare’s annual operating costs. “It quickly struck me that my political masters were asking the wrong question. If we’re going to create the maximum amount of wealth and growth for the UK economy (through technology transfer), we should be setting up new start-up businesses, where possible, but it can take as much as 10 years to develop a new product and a mature market.
“The problem with being told to cover our short-term costs was that we had to go for the ‘quick win’ option of licensing technologies to existing companies, likely to be a lot less lucrative and critically less impactful for the economy than spinning off new ones.”
Ploughshare and the Government have since agreed on a new business model, with ‘sustained’ funding in the shape of a £4.5m injection from the MOD including an ‘accelerator’ fund to develop ‘very nascent’ intellectual property (IP). “Don’t get me wrong,” insists Hetti, “We’re not going to do spin-offs just for the sake of it if there’s already a market and strong suppliers out there; in some situations it will still be better to go the licensing route.”
Ploughshare’s ambition is to expand its portfolio beyond inventions developed by the MOD and other Crown-owned IP that has been its bread and butter for the last two decades. That means working more intensively with what Hetti calls the ‘defence ecosystem’ in the UK, private sector defence suppliers like BAE Systems, Leonardo, QinetiQ and Thales (now grouped together in a Ploughshare-inspired Technology and Growth Alliance), as well as universities, research institutions and even other government departments. “A lot of people are coming to us because of the expertise we have built up over recent years. We’re also in discussion with the British Business Bank to bring in more outside capital, so that the businesses we create can confidently scale up and develop world-beating capabilities in defence and beyond.”
What about other Whitehall departments? Does this mean that Ploughshare will be looking to commercialise the fruits of research funded by, say, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department for Transport or the Department for Education? The short answer is yes. One early example of non-MOD collaboration is Ploughshare’s partnership with the National Oceanography Centre, a largely government-funded research charity which, 18 months into the partnership, closed a licence deal for a significant piece of technology worth £10m over the next 5–7 years. At the moment, Ploughshare is constrained both by its principal obligation to the MOD and, says Hetti, by “Not Invented Here” attitudes. “I think this is changing but I do find that many government departments want to have their own toys and can be reluctant to work with others.
“What I’d say to them is that if you want to do technology transfer really well and on a big scale, you need to have an extensive knowledge of markets and technologies – if everyone tries to set up their own office, we’ll never reach critical mass as a government. By doing it together, we’ll all win.”
One of Hetti’s biggest challenges is to keep Ploughshare agile. “We talk a lot about fast lane, slow lane, and I encourage my colleagues the whole time to try to work in the fast lane. But inevitably there are frustrations and one is the speed of response.”
After months of negotiations with one third party, for example, Ploughshare finally received a contract only for Hetti to be told by her team that it would be another two to three months before they could get the deal over the line. “This can be very disheartening, as it is when you send an email and no one responds for three weeks. I’m very clear, though, that one of my jobs as leader is to unblock the barriers and, if necessary, have those difficult conversations.”
She adds: “I have the utmost respect for my civil service colleagues and the amazing work they do, and they have to strike the right balance between risk and return. But I’d love to see the same level of demonstrable urgency in public sector leaders as I do in the private sector. The system must be the accelerator, but we really have to work hard to stop it being the brake.”
Incentives can be another flashpoint. “It’s true that we have greater flexibility on remuneration than civil servants, not just on salaries. In the past, this has led to tension ahead of our March year-end when teams might have issued a flurry of requests to complete spin-out or license deals that would trigger their bonus. Understandably the MOD intellectual property teams were not happy to be put under extra pressure for that reason. We’ve now changed the way we measure performance at Ploughshare so it’s much less focused on transactions and more on driving long-term growth.”
Hetti would like Ploughshare to be more proactive in scanning government research labs for new ideas. As things stand, MOD scientists have to submit an ‘invention disclosure’ if they think they’ve developed something unique, describing what it is and how it works; an MOD intellectual property team then investigates what other similar products might be out there and what the chances are of taking out patent protection. “I want to flip the dialogue,” she says. “I don’t want to wait for people to notify the system when they have invented an idea. We should be out in the labs hand-in-hand with our IP colleagues, talking to people at an early stage, inspiring them with stories of how they could build a new business and even change the world. It’s all about communication.”
Citing her other life as Chair of Refuge, the charity which supports thousands of women and children who have survived domestic abuse, she says it’s also about campaigning. “There’s a huge synergy between the skills and attitudes of campaigners and entrepreneurs, and that’s something colleagues in the public sector can learn from. Civil servants talk to campaigners the whole time – much more than they do to entrepreneurs. It would be great if the former could bring some of that campaigning zeal into their own work.”
Commitment to gender diversity is also a strong priority for Hetti. 60% of Ploughshare’s commercial department is now female (from a standing start of zero only six years ago), an achievement made possible by diverse shortlists for all jobs and a zero tolerance of recruiters who maintain that there aren’t any suitable candidates.
“Male and female brains typically work differently. There is magic to be unlocked when their different approaches are skilfully brought together. Equally there can be missed perspectives, nuances and opportunities when diverse thinking is siloed. Cognitive skills and other aspects of diversity are equally important, so we have had to work hard on building an inclusive culture – without that, diverse voices just leave because they don’t feel they are being heard.”
Future success will no doubt depend on whether Ploughshare can continue to operate at the intersection between the public and private sector worlds, combining proximity to government and commercial freedom. At the moment, its formal legal status is that of a non-departmental central government company with the Secretary of State for Defence as the main shareholder. It has an independent board, independent non-executive directors and (critically) an independent non-executive Chair (currently, Mike Carr, previously the Chief Scientific Officer for British Telecom, who is in an interim role). “I am now working actively to create a future for Ploughshare that is bigger, with increasing levels of private income and private capital. The right answer for Ploughshare is a business model that will deliver the maximum economic impact for the country.”
Tim Dickson is Editor in Chief of Heywood Quarterly.
