The University Industry Impact Explorer (UIIE) is The Data City’s product for universities, mapping every connection your institution has with industry, from spinouts and research collaborations to Innovate UK partnerships and alumni directorships, and classifying it all against the UK Government’s IS-8 priority sectors.
This article looks at a new tool inside the platform, Opportunity Finder. It’s built for teams doing outreach on behalf of a university, such as business development and knowledge exchange, to help them find new prospects and companies to engage with.
But a map on its own doesn’t fill a science park, win a knowledge transfer partnership (KTP), or get a business development team on the phone to the right company. It shows you where you stand, not who to approach next.
That’s what the Opportunity Finder is for. It takes the same ecosystem data and turns it into four ranked, filterable prospect lists, which are built around the outreach decisions a university actually has to make, not just the relationships it already has.
Four ways to find your next connection
The Opportunity Finder sits inside the Explorer and gives you four distinct views onto the same underlying company data; each built for a different kind of outreach:
- Regional Poaching: These are the companies near to your university already working with other universities
- Sector Untapped: These are the fast-growing companies in a sector you choose, with no university relationship at all.
- Open Growth: These are the fastest-growing companies in the UK with no link to your institution, regardless of sector or location.
- Sector Engaged: These are the companies already collaborating with universities in a sector you choose, so you can see who the competition for that sector actually is
Each view is a live, ranked table you can filter and easily sort.
Regional Poaching
This view shows you companies within 50 miles of your university that already have a formal relationship with a different institution, whether that’s a spinout link, a research collaboration or an Innovate UK partnership, but not with yours.
That combination matters more than it sounds. A company in this list is close enough to work with practically, and it has already shown it’s willing to collaborate with other universities. That’s a much easier conversation to open than a cold approach to a company with no track record of academic partnership at all.
The data comes from The Data City’s API for the geographic filtering, cross-referenced against our university relationship database for the collaboration history. We only count substantive research or commercial relationships here. A shared alumnus sitting on a company’s board isn’t treated as evidence of institutional collaboration, so alumni-only connections are excluded from this view.
Sector Untapped
Pick a Real-Time Industry Classification (RTIC), such as Advanced Manufacturing, or Clean Energy, and Sector Untapped shows you the fastest-growing companies operating in it that have no university relationship at all. No spinout link, no research collaboration, no Innovate UK partnership, with anyone.
This is where the Explorer’s IS-8 classification earns its keep. SIC codes can’t reliably surface a sector like this in the first place; Real-Time Sic Codes (RSICs) and RTICs can. So, the list you get back is a genuine, ranked pipeline of high-growth companies in a sector your institution already has a reason to care about – sized, sorted by growth, and entirely unclaimed by any competitor institution.
For a business development or research team building a case for outreach in a specific specialism, this is the difference between “we think there’s opportunity in this sector” and a named list of companies to start calling.
Open Growth
Open Growth drops the sector filter and the regional filter and shows you the UK’s fastest-growing companies, full stop, with no existing link to your university. It’s a nationwide view rather than a local one, and it’s sector-agnostic rather than specialism-led.
Where Sector Untapped is about depth in something you already do, Open Growth is about breadth: a pipeline of high-growth prospects you might not have found any other way, because they sit outside your usual geography or your usual sector focus. It’s the view to use when you want to know what you might be missing, not just what you already expect to find.
Sector Engaged
Sector Engaged flips the question around. Choose a sector, and it shows you fast-growing companies that already have a university relationship, so you can see which institutions are active in that space, and which companies have already chosen to collaborate with someone else.
This isn’t just competitive intelligence. A company already engaged with another university has demonstrated it values academic collaboration and it’s a proof point, not a dead end. Where a company has more than one relationship, that’s often the strongest signal of all: it shows the door is open to working with more than one institution at once.
Built for the conversations that need to happen
Each view maps onto a real outreach decision your business development, research or knowledge exchange team makes every week. Opportunity Finder means you’re working from a ranked, current list instead of a hunch
See it on your own institution
Opportunity Finder is available now inside the UIIE, alongside the Dashboard, Leaderboard and Industrial Strategy views.
Start a free trial or book a demo to see your institution’s own Opportunity Finder lists.
