Public Sector - Case Study

The Problem
A public sector organisation was under pressure to support its grant funding by making better commercial re-use of its assets. These included physical assets but also significant investments in intellectual property assets arising out of its core activities. These included technology IP, data and information streams which had significiant commercial re-use applications.
 
But the organisation had no culture of commercial enterprise, no processes in place to manage commercial exploitation and few of the skills to do so even if such processes were in place. Furthermore, there were significant governance and regulatory issues affecting the ways in which such public assets could legitimately be re-used commercially.

The Solution
We formed an interim team with a remit to tackle this problem.  A colleague focussed on physical non-core assets, another on internal governance and legal issues. We were briefed to deliver the following:

• an evaluation of the commercial potential. This involved market and competitor analyses of quite diverse business markets to assess the potential success of commercial re-use of the client's assets.
• the development of business plans to support the development of these activities.
• a comparative review of different public sector commercial organisation models from both the public and private sectors.

The public sector body is now carrying on developing these commercial activities along the lines of the recommendations we made. What is more it is doing so within an organisational context specifically developed to comply with the myriad regualtory responsibilities which face any such activity within a public body.