Ideas that improve lives

A core part of our mission is turning research into deployable solutions. Spinouts and commercial ventures bridge the gap between lab discovery and patient benefit, bringing the focus and capability needed to build, test, evidence and scale.

• Around 60% of Heriot-Watt’s commercial innovation is focused on health and care.

• 16 active spinout projects spanning medical imaging and sensing through to photonics-based approaches to chronic disease.

• In 2024–25, Heriot-Watt secured over £1.1m from Scottish Enterprise’s High-Growth Spinout Fund, alongside an award-winning performance across Scotland’s spinout ecosystem.

If you can offer a clinical setting to validate in, manufacturing and regulatory expertise, routes to market, or growth capital, we can move more technologies through the steps that determine adoption. In return, you get earlier access to investable, clinically relevant innovation, shaped with the evidence, usability and compliance needed for real-world delivery.

Health innovation depends on specialist environments, credible testing, and access to equipment that small teams cannot build alone. Our facilities help partners validate ideas, refine them with users, and generate the evidence needed for safe adoption.

Through our collaborative approach, we support translation from lab bench to bedside. Our ecosystem includes the Immersive Co-Design Suite, the Medical Device Manufacturing Centre, and more than 50 specialist labs that support testing, prototyping and scale-up.

We welcome partners who want to use these facilities, bring clinical and operational challenges to test against them, or explore co-investment in new capability where shared infrastructure would remove barriers for the sector.

Better health technologies are shaped with the people who will live with them. Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement helps us design research that is relevant, inclusive, and more likely to be adopted in practice.

Through our PPIE approach, we are:

• Growing the VOICE Network so patients, clinicians, policymakers and lived-experience contributors can shape priorities and success measures.

• Supporting researchers to embed lived experience early, from funding proposals through to design and trial stages.

• Creating more opportunities for ongoing dialogue and co-creation between communities and research teams.

For partners, lived experience reduces avoidable risk. It helps teams spot what will fail in the real world, improves relevance and trust, and strengthens the case for adoption by showing that solutions were shaped with the people they are meant to serve.

If you have lived experience, or represent a community affected by a health challenge, join our network to shape priorities, test ideas early, and keep research grounded in what care actually feels like.

Across the UK, policy and industry analysis is consistent on one point: we are strong at discovery, and adoption is where many health innovations stall. Collaboration helps close that gap by combining research depth, specialist facilities, clinical insight, and commercial capability early enough to produce usable, scalable solutions. 

Public involvement strengthens this further. NIHR reporting shows that involving people in research is now standard across the majority of funded awards, and the broader evidence base links meaningful involvement to clearer priorities, better study design and more credible outcomes for implementation.

What this means in practice is simple: partners who work with us can move faster with less waste. You gain access to facilities and expertise that de-risk development, evidence that supports clinical confidence and investment decisions, and a pipeline of technologies shaped with clinicians and lived experience, designed for adoption rather than demonstration.