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).