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The Higher Education Business and Community Interaction Survey, published on 24 May, shows this to be the biggest chunk of a ?2.6 billion income stream for items such as knowledge transfer and working with both commercial and non-profit sectors.

The survey, covering all publicly funded higher education institutions in the UK as well as the privately funded University of Buckingham, also shows that in 2010-11, universities continued to draw in little income from intellectual property (just ?61 million).

However, they have boosted their income from running courses for business by 77 per cent since 2003-04.

The data also show that graduates created over 30 times more start-up companies than did scholars (2,771 vs 87).