“Their mandate is to be disruptive and that can create tensions.” With Hamish McAlpine

Hamish McAlpine is Director of Policy & Engagement at innovation consultancy Oxentia. Hamish is working on a report, due out in September 2025, which explores how Scottish universities currently work with external experts to support research commercialisation and what could be done better in the future.

Sarah and Hamish talk about

• The inherit tensions between how entrepreneurs think and how universities operate
• How entrepreneurs in residence are recruited, inducted, supported and deployed across universities
• The myriad reasons why the pool of experts lacks diversity
• Why Scotland is well placed to make system-wide improvements

Connect with Hamish on LinkedIn 

Visit Hamish’s page on the Oxentia website

Follow the Academic Adventures podcast on LinkedIn 

This podcast was a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky, working in partnership with Ross Tuffee and The Connect-Ed Network. The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black and Sarah McLusky. This season of Academic Adventures is supported by the Scottish Funding Council.

Transcript

Hamish McAlpine Academic Adventure 2.9 Final Transcript

[00:00:01] Hamish McAlpine: These people are by their nature entrepreneurial with all that comes with it. Their actual mandate is to come in and do something disruptive and that obviously creates some tensions with how many universities work.

[00:00:13] Hamish McAlpine: Not to be too blunt about it, I think everyone I've spoken to so far who has undertaken that kind of role will tend to be an older white man 

[00:00:23] Hamish McAlpine: I think at the moment they're very much seen as the expert. But what do they need that would make them better?

[00:00:31] Sarah McLusky: Welcome to the Academic Adventures Podcast. This podcast is all about the journey from teaching, research, and innovation to real world solutions. For season two, we are joined by experienced founders and other experts who work alongside university staff and students to help create and support a culture of enterprise on campus.

[00:00:50] Sarah McLusky: Hello there. I'm your host, Sarah McLusky, and this is episode nine of season two of the Academic Adventures Podcast. Today's episode's a little different. So far this season, all of my guests have been external experts who collaborate with universities, entrepreneurs and residents or commercial champions.

[00:01:08] Sarah McLusky: My guest, Hamish McAlpine, is not an entrepreneur in residence or a commercial champion, but he knows a lot about them. Hamish is Director of Policy and Engagement at Innovation consultancy firm Oxentia. Hamish has been tasked with producing a report on the current state of play, delving into how Scottish universities currently work with external experts to support research, commercialization, and suggesting what could be done better in the future.

[00:01:33] Sarah McLusky: The report is due out in September, and Hamish is currently deep in the research stage. He took time out from reading and interviewing to share some insights into the process and what he has discovered so far. Amongst other things, we talk about how entrepreneurs and residents are inducted and supported, why diversity is a challenge, and the potential for sharing good practice across Scotland.

[00:01:56] Sarah McLusky: So welcome along to the podcast, Hamish. We've got you along today really to talk about this report that you are doing, which is all about external experts contributing to research commercialisation.

[00:02:11] Sarah McLusky: But let's begin just by hearing a bit about you. Tell us a bit about who you are and what you do. 

[00:02:16] Hamish McAlpine: Thanks Sarah. So yeah, my name's Hamish. I am the Director for Policy and Engagement at Oxentia. Oxentia are a small innovation management consultancy based down in Oxford. We started life as an operating division of Oxford University Innovation, but we've been an independent company since 2017.

[00:02:37] Hamish McAlpine: And my role there is to work with universities, governments and other types of organisations around innovation, knowledge exchange and commercialisation.

[00:02:47] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. Fantastic. And certainly, as you say, really nicely placed there to do this review of the current situation. So tell us a bit more about the report, what it entails, what you're hoping might come out of it. 

[00:03:03] Hamish McAlpine: So this piece of work, which I'm, I've been engaged in now is via University of the West of Scotland and Orla Kelly via Scottish Enterprise and obviously Scottish Enterprise have a huge vested interest in ensuring that they have a really good pool of talented people who can help academics and universities commercialise all the brilliant research that's going on. I guess what's, what we are really interested in is this, there's a very broad landscape. We talk about entrepreneurs in residence. We talk about executives in residence, commercial champions, and within all those types of roles that have some kind of role in, in innovation and entrepreneurship in the university setting there's a huge variety of things that they could be doing. So one of the kind of first challenges is what does this landscape look like? How are we bounding this problem? And one of the main lenses we are really using to look at the landscape and what might be done about it to ensure we have this pool of really great people to support the innovation is making sure we're staying relatively focused on the part of the role which supports academic research commercialisation. 

[00:04:13] Hamish McAlpine: For example, entrepreneurs in residence, executives in residence might get involved in student entrepreneurship. They might get involved in all sorts of facets of how entrepreneurial thinking is embedded in the university. But we are having a particular lens on spin outs, high growth companies, that kind of thing.

[00:04:30] Sarah McLusky: So perhaps clarifying some of the language. You've said already there's lots of different terminology around this. Is there any one particular, just so for the conversation going forward, how we're gonna refer to these people. Is there one particular term that you found is most commonly used or, or most usefully encapsulates the kind of people that we're talking about. 

[00:04:52] Hamish McAlpine: There, there's two really entrepreneurs in residence I think is really well understood. If you look at the literature, that's the bulk of what's talked about. And there are schemes which Scottish universities are part of, such as the Royal Society's scheme. So that's a really well understood term. And the other one, which is maybe more specific to Scottish Enterprise are commercial champions.

[00:05:12] Sarah McLusky: So that's what we're, so just clarify, we're talking about entrepreneurs, residents, and commercial champions. And and certainly anybody who's been listening to the series so far will have already heard some of these people talking about their experiences, but obviously that's all quite anecdotal and they're talking from their personal stories, which is really valuable. But what you're doing really is bringing it all together in a much more formal way and looking at some of the literature. Yeah. 

[00:05:36] Hamish McAlpine: Yeah. Yeah. So the kind of what we've been commissioned to do with, within that broad objective of how do you create a large and diverse pool of the right people. We are looking at the literature.

[00:05:47] Hamish McAlpine: What does that tell us? Both in the sort of Scottish context and more broadly. We are looking at the roles themselves, the skills with that might be required at different stages of the sort of spin out journey We are looking at how people who are doing this now got there, how does this system operate?

[00:06:05] Hamish McAlpine: How are they, how do they find out about opportunities? How are they inducted into the whole kind of ecosystem? How are they managed through that ecosystem? What are their support requirements? And how could we do things differently or more effectively in the future? What are the opportunities to, to do even more than what's happening now?

[00:06:26] Sarah McLusky: Yeah, it sounds like it's gonna be a really useful resource once it finally comes together. But at the moment you're really deep in that research process, aren't you? So you've been doing the kind of literature side of things so far. Maybe tell us a bit about what you found out there. 

[00:06:42] Hamish McAlpine: Yeah, so we, our point of departure was a look at the literature. And this is by no means a kind of academic study, we're taking a really practical approach to this. It's not a, an enormous piece of work. This is a, that's, that's come up with something really practical and applicable. So we are not spending months doing an academic literature review.

[00:07:03] Hamish McAlpine: What I would observe from the literature is a lot of it's very general. There's a lot of quite descriptive stuff about entrepreneurs in residence and. The kind of difficulties they might encounter and some suggestions towards what could be done to improve that. There's much less literature specifically on the role of the entrepreneur in residence, specifically in supporting spin outs academic research- based intellectual property heavy, Mm-hmm. often spin outs. The main focus seems to be on the kind of curriculum development, student entrepreneurship generally, how do you embed entrepreneurship in the mindset of the university or the thinking rather than the kind of people who support potentially high growth spin out.

[00:07:49] Sarah McLusky: So it sounds like there's a bit of a gap there. So it sounds again these conversations that you're having are gonna really feed into that. So then the next part of your research has been to go and talk to some of these kinds of people, hasn't it, about their own experiences and how's that going so far?

[00:08:05] Hamish McAlpine: So that's fascinating because it has actually accorded quite well with, with the kind of issues identified in the literature. So some of the kind of commonly recurring things you'll read about with entrepreneurs in residence and any kind of critiques of it is that, similarly to a lot of, broadening this out to knowledge exchange how universities interact with the outside world.

[00:08:27] Hamish McAlpine: You often have reported things like mismatches of expectations, timescales, purposes. This is common when you're thinking about something like university. Industry relationships. It's perhaps even more acute when you're talking about entrepreneurs in residence because these people are by their nature entrepreneurial with all that comes with it, they're generally quite action orientated. They may not enjoy being in a sort of highly regulated process and system heavy environment. Their often, their actual mandate is to come in and do something disruptive, they are empowered to be a kind of maverick or a disruptive maverick, I think one of the papers called them and that obviously creates some obvious tensions with how many universities work, which are a large, and have, from the outside, particularly from a sort of entrepreneur perspective, quite bureaucratic processes and systems which have been put in place for very good reasons. The academic quality and rigor and all those really good things. But there can be a really a quite acute cultural mismatch. 

[00:09:35] Sarah McLusky: Yeah, it's definitely something that's come through in the conversations I've had so far. But it's interesting that in some ways that, that these people are being brought in to be deliberately disruptive, but then are perhaps hitting this wall when it comes to actually getting things done. Is that something that's coming out? 

[00:10:00] Hamish McAlpine: Yes. I think maybe a, a bit less so in the case of particularly the commercial champions, they are bought on to do a particular role. So maybe in their case, that kind of mode of entrepreneur in residence kind of thing through a commercial champion role, they're bought on board for a specific project. It's quite time bound. It's quite narrow in its focus. They're not trying to do curriculum development or all the other things that more general entrepreneur in residence might do. But I still get the impression that how they are inducted and how they gain an understanding of the wider university system and the purpose and why are things, how they are how much time and can the academic really devote to this, the projects, I think in some cases might be improved by having more of that upfront understanding of where do the constraints lie. So you know, that kind of alignment expectation setting at the beginning. I think another kind of key topic is induction, when these people join a university as an entrepreneur in residence or a commercial champion how, and to what extent are they inducted into this is the purpose, this is the totality of what we do, here's how you fit into it, and here's how, here's why things are what they are. And it's clear already. That's quite a lot of variability in that,

[00:11:24] Sarah McLusky: Right? 

[00:11:25] Hamish McAlpine: But sometimes it seems to be done really well and it's no problem. Other times it feels like a bit more like kind of transactional relationship where this is the all-knowing expert is bought in to do a job and they're expected to crack on with it. 

[00:11:38] Sarah McLusky: And so when you've seen it done well, what does that look like ?

[00:11:42] Hamish McAlpine: It looks and it feels like to, to the entrepreneur and residence or commercial champion involved, it looks like they are integrated into the university, that it goes beyond a transactional piece of consultancy work that they're doing. There is a good relationship between not just the academic team and the entrepreneur and residents or commercial champion, but also with the the wider professional services staff who are involved at that university, the tech transfer office or whoever has that function, that there's a really sound relationship there too, and that there's a route to be able to be helped to navigate all the kind of complexities of spinning out. 

[00:12:25] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. And certainly that those complexities are something, again, that's come up in a lot of the conversations that I've had that, that are clearly a source of quite a lot of frustration for the entrepreneurs in residence coming in. And, even when they do feel like, yeah, they've got a job to do, but they almost feel like they're being blocked along the way. And as you say, perhaps there's good reasons. For those blocks, but they don't understand them. And that's where I can see where either having some, good relationships, having people they can talk to, having people that they can ask questions or as you say that onboarding, that understanding of the process could be really valuable.

[00:13:07] Sarah McLusky: I think though, maybe when we're bringing in these people, is there always an expectation that they should adapt to the university or is there a call to the university to have a bit more flexibility about how they integrate this commercial champion? 

[00:13:26] Hamish McAlpine: Great question. I think I just I don't want to read too much into the, the relatively small sample we've tackled so far. And, my, my view might evolve slightly, I feel how can I put this, just a kind of broader strategic relationship that university is trying to nurture with, with industry or some type of external partner. You can have a transactional relationship, which can be really effective. And I'm not using transactional in a kind of derogatory or negative sense.

[00:13:58] Hamish McAlpine: It can be really powerful, you need a job doing, you find someone who does that job efficiently and and that's a great thing. But also industry, university, industry relationships more generally. You can have something which is really strategic, which has several dimensions to it, which has a high degree of trust on both sides, a high degree of kind of strategic alignment. And they can be really transformational. So I guess my answer would be. I feel like there's a lot of merit in not maybe all of those type of engagements, but where it's warranted to, to see what you can do to move it from the transactional to the strategic. And that necessarily means two-way dialogue.

[00:14:42] Hamish McAlpine: That necessarily means the university, not just paying lip service to what someone is saying, but providing a, building in to that appointment, a route for them to be able to be heard and to be considered in a structured way. 

[00:14:58] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. Yeah. That kind of path to influence. I can see that be really helpful. It's also making me think about the fact that those kinds of relationships can take quite a long time to develop. And often these entrepreneur in residence programs can be a limited amount of time in the big scale, but also a small number of days as well, can't they? It might be one or two days, here and there. Is that something that's potentially problematic to developing these more strategic relationships, or can it be done within that container, do you think? 

[00:15:34] Hamish McAlpine: Yes, there's a potential issue there. And we've also heard from a few people around rules, around procurement, for example, that can create delays. There might be rules around particular schemes of how many projects you can assist at once, for example. There's good reasons for that. But I think what's really come across from the interviews is the kind of people who are doing this work, they're really well plugged into the ecosystem.

[00:15:58] Hamish McAlpine: This is not a, the only thing they're doing. So often they might have interest in several different organisations. They might be involved in angel investor networks, for example. They might be having a dialogue with the university in some other capacity, and they might be undertaking a, a particular commercialisation project and assisting with that.

[00:16:20] Hamish McAlpine: So I think there's, and generally, yeah, they're already known to the university. These people don't appear out of thin air, contract with the university, and disappear again. They're often quite well known and I think one of the, the great strengths of the Scottish ecosystem is it's quite, it's not enormous, but, compared to some other global context and it's quite tight knit.

[00:16:39] Hamish McAlpine: And that's obviously both a really big strength and, could allow a route to, mechanisms to develop more strategic relationships. There's downsides to that as well, which we can come onto, but, I think there's a lot that can be done outside of the actual transaction that would help build that more strategic relationship out. 

[00:16:57] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. Yeah. So looking at these, that entrepreneur in residence role almost when it's formalised as just almost being a little piece within a much broader relationship with this individual. That makes a lot of sense because as you see the people who are coming forward to take part in these roles can be hugely well connected and so therefore are a really potentially very valuable resource for the university if used appropriately. 

[00:17:24] Hamish McAlpine: Absolutely. And also the kind of projects that might be suitable for them to really add value to aren't continuous. The question there is what do you do with these people when they're not formally engaged on a project? You can do nothing, but maybe you're missing a trick. 

[00:17:41] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. Definitely. So one thing though that you, you hinted at there and perhaps will come onto now, is that the community both within Scotland and also just even narrowing it down to within these, the people who get involved in these kind of roles is quite small.

[00:17:59] Sarah McLusky: And one of the things that, that really is a focus of this report, as you've said, is how can we look at broadening out that pool of people who are involved? So why do we need to broaden the pool? What are some of the issues there at the moment? 

[00:18:15] Hamish McAlpine: Not to be too blunt about it, I think everyone I've spoken to so far who has undertaken that kind of role will tend to be an older white man who has had a significant kind of career in industry and is now maybe at the point in their career where they're looking for a portfolio career or, have, has quite a sort of deep desire to give back to the community.

[00:18:39] Hamish McAlpine: So I think. At the moment that there's a, whether it's a perception or a reality that, that those people are the people you want. So there, there does seem to be a kind of, not really an issue with diversity, but that it doesn't seem to be the most diverse pool and there's a number of very good reasons why. If you want that kind of profile and skillset, you are fishing in a pool, which has a lot of people of a similar nature in it, that's inevitable. Having said that, one of the other really interesting things that came out of the literature is how people describe the skills required. To be this type of role, an entrepreneur in residence, commercial champion. And what struck me is surprisingly few people talk about the kind of domain knowledge and experience, I think it's implicit. You need to know, you need to understand the technology you are helping to commercialise. But one person said to me very explicitly, I am not the expert in the technology. The academic is always going to know more than me. So providing you've got some kind of familiarity with a domain and you can, you have enough technical knowledge to know what the academic's talking about. What they bring is two sort of sets of skills really. One is commercial acumen. Knowing how to sell stuff basically. And obviously how you sell stuff depends, differs depending on what technology or product or service you have to sell, but there is a lot of commonality there.

[00:20:09] Hamish McAlpine: And the other thing is, that was really commonly expressed is a whole load of soft skills. Scrutiny listening ability, ability to not sugarcoat things, be realistic with the person being really tenacious. And if you break that, you know what is actually required of that role. It. It's quite surprising how the domain expertise is important. Do you need a 40 year career in that before you're qualified to do this? Possibly not. 

[00:20:39] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. And I can imagine that makes a lot of sense to me. But I can also imagine that's the kind of thing that universities might slightly push back on because they're so knowledge intensive and that's what counts in a university environment, isn't it? Is your 40 year publication history in this particular domain. And even though they know they need the commercial side of things and these other skills that this person brings, that might be where some of that friction comes in. I wonder. 

[00:21:13] Hamish McAlpine: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe there is this mindset of you need an expert. And one really easy proxy for expertise is years of relevant experience in that field. But then you look at what some people have achieved in their twenties and yeah, they're incredibly entrepreneurial. They have incredible domain knowledge, or you look at job adverts that get mocked online because a recruiter's asking for 10 years of experience in X when X has only existed for five years.

[00:21:42] Hamish McAlpine: You can really detach the view of how are the commercial champions that I've talked to and how are the entrepreneurs in residence that I've talked to describing the skill they bring. And if you just wrote that down and went to a diverse group of people and said, do you meet this profile? You probably get many more than if you said do you meet the typical profile of who we have at the moment? 

[00:22:06] Sarah McLusky: And I can see with anything where there's a diversity argument that you know the broader range of people you have. Yes, there's this core skillset, but they also bring all the other knowledge and experience and just life that they've got, the different perspectives and things like that. So definitely an argument there for that more diverse pool of people. But what do you think could be done to actually encourage them to be involved in this kind of work? 

[00:22:36] Hamish McAlpine: I think the first thing that strikes me, particularly from the interviews that we've done so far, is how people get into this. It's really highly so virtuallly all of the time it is personal connections, networks, serendipity, this kind of thing. So to hear stories like, I've worked in Scotland all my life, or I moved here, af after a career internationally settled back in Scotland. Maybe I had roots or family in Scotland and then by kind of will or luck wove my way into this ecosystem and then bumped into someone at a networking event and then I was asked to participate in this project, and it all spiraled from there. That's a really common story. I guess one thing, you know that's, that has incredible strengths. That person to person, and we often talk about knowledge exchange commercialisation as a contact sport, and to have people you know are credible that can be relied upon that.

[00:23:36] Hamish McAlpine: That, someone vouches for 'em to say, this is your guy, this is who you want is great. But the question with that is, who are you missing if that's your main approach? So for example, there's not really, I haven't really found any consistent job description. So what are the kind of, if you think about traditional job description that you might look at, if you're thinking about applying for a job, you have what the role is, essential characteristics, desirable characteristics, nature of the job and what you will get in return.

[00:24:09] Hamish McAlpine: And this doesn't seem to exist in a very structured way in this space. And we know in from job adverts, if you don't list a salary, if you express skills requirements in particular ways you don't get diverse candidates. 

[00:24:24] Sarah McLusky: Yes. 

[00:24:24] Hamish McAlpine: Yeah. Maybe one really practical thing is just to look at how you are, where you are looking for these people and how are you representing the skillset required for the role.

[00:24:34] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. There's the skillset required as well, and then isn't there, I know that some of the other guests have had on the other episodes have also talked about the way that they're compensated for the contributions that they make as well. And what are your thoughts? What are you finding around that?

[00:24:52] Hamish McAlpine: That's not really emerged as a big issue in the people we've spoken to. But I'm also very aware that that's a very kind of self-selecting sample of people for whom it's not an issue because they're doing it. And of course that means you really need to go and talk to the people who are not doing it or have actively decided not to see whether that's a problem.

[00:25:14] Hamish McAlpine: As I said, one of the really strong motivations of why are people in this is they're driven by that real altruistic desire of I've been there and done it, and I want to help others succeed, and that's very genuine. Other people will say, yes, of course the money's a component, and there's also very good reasons beyond, them just being able to pay the bills for the money being important.

[00:25:34] Hamish McAlpine: That, particularly a couple of people have expressed that if you're doing something pro bono then that signals a value and and the perception that it might be valued less. If they're not remunerated to do it, it might mean there's less kind of expectation and commitment and, commitment to quality, for example.

[00:25:52] Hamish McAlpine: Money seems to be a good thing, whether that's the primary motivation for people wanting these roles or not. Whether it's the right amount of money, whether it's money that's that's creating the diversity, lack of diversity, possibly, but I think there's a lot of other factors as well. 

[00:26:13] Sarah McLusky: Yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah. It's certainly, as you say, can be a factor, but the people who you're looking at with this level of experience, I think some of the guests that I spoke to, it wasn't necessarily the money was important in the sense of paying the bills, but it almost gave them the reason to take time away from the other things that they could be doing in that time. It almost justified the effort that they were putting in and certainly the financial contributions can help with diversity. That can definitely be, 

[00:26:44] Hamish McAlpine: I think so. It is definitely contributing factor, an enabler. Is it about. Doubling the amount you pay them. And is that going to magically increase the diversity or the size of the cohort these people? Probably not, 

[00:26:57] Sarah McLusky: No. I think potentially not. We've talked a bit about some of the things you covered in the report. When's the report likely to come out? Do we know when it's gonna see the light of day yet? Or is that still to be decided? 

[00:27:10] Hamish McAlpine: So I think it's a bit to be decided, and I guess it depends how the recommendations are received, but we are really in the thick of the work at the moment.

[00:27:17] Hamish McAlpine: We expect to have those in the initial report and conclusion certainly in draft form end of July early, early August. And I believe the intention is all being well to really socialize that report and see, see how the recommendations are received and think about how could you take them forward at some point in September.

[00:27:37] Sarah McLusky: Yeah, so it's probably, that's when it's gonna be out in the wider world. So you're still not quite there yet with your final thoughts, but any sense of where you think your recommendations might be going? What things are you leaning towards at the moment?

[00:27:52] Hamish McAlpine: I'm looking at the moment through this, through the different stages, how do you identify these people? How do you describe what you want? How do you contract them and onboard them, induct them? How do you manage them? Whether they're engaged immediately in a project or not. And what happens at the other end. So if you think about that as the life cycle the whole life cycle of these people.

[00:28:17] Hamish McAlpine: I feel at the moment, like the recommendations are coalescing around what practical things can you do at each part of that life cycle to help fish in the right, diverse and suitable pools? How can you then make sure that people have a good and consistent experience when they're onboarded? How can you make sure that they're engaged really effectively, whether they're working on a project at that moment in time or not.

[00:28:43] Hamish McAlpine: So in the future you've got them ready to go, as it were and warm. For example, at the, at the kind of where are you, where do you find these people? We've already talked about how you describe the role. Also things around how are you advertising that? How are you communicating and who are you communicating to?

[00:29:02] Hamish McAlpine: There's also something which has been raised by a couple of universities around the potential to, pool resources. There doesn't seem to be a huge tension when it comes to again, collaboration versus competition in the Scottish sector. One thing that's I've really noticed through previous work in Scotland is this really high willingness to collaborate and put that above, the potential competition concerns of you are gonna, you are gonna poach my entrepreneur in residence. That doesn't seem to be such an issue in many things in the Scottish system. I think there's that recognition that, we all have to work together here. We're not a huge country. We're not hundreds of universities. So could there be something there about, potentially sharing resources. If not that, then could there something about sharing good practice, like what's worked at other places, to what does good practice look like? What does good practice in recruitment and onboarding look like, et cetera. So I think there's definitely something around there.

[00:30:01] Hamish McAlpine: And then I think once you have this. A cohort of people, it's clear that a lot of them are well networked and people have often mentioned they keep bumping into each other at various events and things like that. But is there anything more structured that can be done?

[00:30:17] Hamish McAlpine: The other kind of interesting thing, it's something I've asked everyone I've interviewed is were they ever asked what their training or development needs were? And nobody was. And I'm a real firm believer, like everyone, has some kind of training, development potential area that would help them be better, myself included. A hundred percent. You nobody's perfect, right? So is there something to be done about, not treating these people as this kind of loose network, but is there a way of formalizing that in this way of thinking?

[00:30:51] Hamish McAlpine: How do we add value to them? I think at the moment they're very much seen as the expert. They're coming in, they're being paid as the expert, they're being bought in as the expert. But what do they need that would make them better? Commercial champions, better entrepreneurs in residence? It's just that, and that goes beyond just onboarding. That's not just about what information do they need to understand their roles and to work effectively in the sometimes weird university context, but how can you really engage them as a, as an individual and make sure they're getting something back as well? 

[00:31:21] Sarah McLusky: They sound all like really practical, tangible things that could be done. And as you say, and certainly I've noticed that this, the collaborative approach in Scotland. And I also love your vision for making it a bit more of a two-way process as well.

[00:31:38] Sarah McLusky: And that is could potentially help with, the recruitment and the diversity and things like that, couldn't it? Because again, people just can see what they're gonna get out of it and it starts to look like a more attractive opportunity. Yeah. Oh we shall look forward to that report coming out.

[00:31:56] Sarah McLusky: I know that we'll certainly do something on the podcast around those recommendations once they're out, it'll either be a podcast or that we're even talking about possibly an event or something. Yeah, listeners watch this space. But for now, Hamish, if anybody would like to get in touch with you, anything about this work or just the other things that you do, whereabouts is a good place for them to find you?

[00:32:18] Hamish McAlpine: They can find me on LinkedIn. There's not that many Hamish McAlpines. I guess I had, I didn't address the elephant in the room at the beginning. Despite them being obviously as your listeners will now realize I'm not Scottish, but there's not that many of us, so I'm not much of a challenge to find on LinkedIn.

[00:32:34] Hamish McAlpine: If you look for Hamish McAlpine Oxentia or you can contact me via our general inbox, just info@Oxentia.com. 

[00:32:41] Sarah McLusky: Brilliant. Oh, you maybe could have got away with that if it hadn't been a speaking podcast, couldn't it? Yeah. With the name, but yes. I think though that external perspective can be really valuable, can't it? Having somebody looking from the outside and seeing how things are going. Thank you so much for telling us all about the report. As I say, we look forward to coming out, but for now, thank you for sharing where you're at so far with it. 

[00:33:04] Hamish McAlpine: Fantastic. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

[00:33:08] Sarah McLusky: If you've been inspired by this podcast, head over to our LinkedIn page and tell us about your biggest takeaways. You'll find a link in the show notes or just search for the Academic Adventures Podcast. This podcast is a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky, working in partnership with Ross Tuffee and the Connect- Ed Network.

[00:33:26] Sarah McLusky: The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black, and me, Sarah McLusky. This season of the Academic Adventures Podcast is supported by the Scottish Funding Council.