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What does it take to turn a great civic university into a visible engine of jobs, opportunity and
problem-solving for the people who need it most?
Our bet is Unit M – a small, outward-facing team with a big mandate: to translate the discovery
we’ve established over more than 200 years into impact at speed, across disciplines, and in
partnership and conversation with those who’ve never stepped foot on campus, to change
people’s lives for the better.
With Unit M, we’re tipping all the great stuff that goes on in universities out into the world to
make jobs, opportunities and offer solutions to social problems.
Unit M, led by CEO Professor Lou Cordwell and Professor John Holden, Vice-President for Civic
Engagement and Innovation at the University of Manchester, will answer a simple question: if
the university is the region’s biggest innovation asset, what exactly should it do to drive
innovation-led growth? Our answer is to set up a disruption unit that experiments, makes
mistakes and – crucially – involves more people than have previously been allowed into the
conversation in university discussions.
We believe the great universities of the 21st century will be those who go from discovery to
impact in the quickest possible time. So our mission is to get everything created in the
university out into the real world, having an impact, and creating jobs growth in the region and
UK, much quicker and faster than universities have done in the past.
Unit M is future-facing – but the principle is rooted in Manchester’s deep past. The city has long
been a crucible of scientific breakthroughs and social movements – Turing and AI, but also
suffrage and the trade unions.
Manchester was England’s first civic university, set up to serve the needs of the City of
Manchester, the north west, the UK and the international community. But it was also a global
business hub, with all the change that brings. The flying shuttle and the spinning Jenny came
from having boots on the ground and skin in the game, with innovation emanating from first-
hand experience.
“We are effectively a delivery engine to go and mobilise and enable
projects to become real.” — Professor John Holden
Today, Manchester remains a powerhouse of thinking, culture and industry. But in the years
since, that culture of innovation – of weaving together industry and academia, and acting on the
sparks of knowledge that those with everyday jobs on factory floors have about how to improve
their jobs, innovate and change the world – has weakened somewhat. Unit M seeks to change
that, through innovation open to everyone.
Unit M wants economic and social progress to advance together today. It’s not about driving
growth for the sake of growth, or developing more apps for tech bros to make billions of
pounds. It’s about making changes and developing ideas that are socially useful.
Those projects will come from you, reading this. And they’ll benefit you, reading this, too.
Unit M harnesses the University of Manchester’s world leading 13,000 staff, its 47,000 current
students, and its half a million alumni scattered across the globe. But it brings it to industry.
For too many years, many firms haven’t thought about entertaining university partnerships.
We’re changing that. Unit M is an open front door that we encourage you to come in to, building
connections between industry, academia and ordinary people.
“Writing more academic papers that set out the theory of inclusive
innovation doesn’t shift the dial. Projects do.” — Professor Lou Cordwell
To do that, Unit M has a mandate to operate in an agile way, disconnected from usual university
processes and governance. We can move on industry timescales while still tapping the
capabilities built into the institution. Half of Unit M comes from universities. Half comes from
big industry, the startup world, local and national government, investment communities,
innovation agencies and more. It’s a multidisciplinary blend of skills, with people who know
how to set a strategy… and then actually deliver against it.
Nothing can be done without money – so we’re putting our money where our mouth is. The
university is investing £2.5 million in Unit M every year, and building a central innovation hub
at the heart of campus on Oxford Road where tens of thousands of students and staff pass daily.
But innovation open for everyone, our founding ethos, means while Unit M’s base is on a
university campus, our reach can’t and won’t just end there. If we are going to make growth or
jobs, innovation has got to work for a different set of people than it has worked for the last 20 or
30 years.
That’s why we are spending most of our time facing outwards, asking what problems matter in
Rochdale as much as in university labs, and putting mixed teams of academics, operators and
designers to work on them. We’re open to new ideas, open to everyone, and open to business.
Unit M isn’t just another networking brunch, a roundtable, or a white paper. We’re relentlessly
focused on moving from conversation to outcome. We want to reduce friction, and increase
impact.
We reckon you don’t want to have to find the bits of a university that can solve your problem.
You want one front door, a partner who starts with their needs, and a team that can mobilise
capability. And you want progress, designed around the people who need it.
As we said: we’re open for business. So if you’re SME with a bottleneck, a corporate with an
unmet need, a founder between idea and pre-seed, a public service wrestling with delivery, or
just a person with the germ of an idea but struggling to understand how to make it a reality –
bring us your hardest problem. We want to talk. We want to find a solution. We want results – in
Manchester and far, far beyond.