Is 2025 the year that university technology transfer will see a big boost? It certainly looks promising, particularly in the UK, where a government-led spinout review has encouraged universities to lower equity in spinouts to 25%. Most universities in the UK have adopted the guidelines. The debate over equity stakes is a discussion that Michele Barbour, associate pro vice-chancellor for enterprise and innovation at the University of Bristol, says she actually welcomed because it gave tech transf...
Dec 13, 2024•28 min
To date, 49 universities in the UK have adopted a recommendation to take between 10% and 25% equity in their life science spinouts. The recommendation was inspired by the USIT Guide, published last year by tech transfer group TenU, making it the guide’s arguably biggest impact yet. But it’s just the start. The University of Southampton has used the USIT Guide to develop a Deal Readiness Toolkit. It’s an effort to standardise and harmonise spinout deal negotiations, with templates, checklists, an...
Dec 06, 2024•28 min
The UK government has committed £40m ($50m) to proof of concept funding over the next five years. How should the money available be deployed? One idea — inspired by the Flemish approach — is to set up investment committees of industry, VC and university experts to allocate the money. But is it enough money? Andrew Williamson, managing partner of venture fund Cambridge Innovation Capital, says he was delighted by the announcement because he was told by the government initially that there was no m...
Nov 29, 2024•29 min
A year ago, Irene Tracey, vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, and Andrew Williamson, managing partner of venture capital firm Cambridge Innovation Capital, published their UK government-sponsored report into the spinout ecosystem with a list of 11 recommendations on how to uplift the sector. Among these points was a call to adopt the USIT Guide, a template for term sheet negotiations that asks universities to take a stake of between 10% and 25% in life science and physical science spino...
Nov 22, 2024•27 min
Whisky may not be the first industry to come to mind when you think of university innovation, but for the University of Kentucky — based in a US state known around the world for its bourbon industry — it’s an obvious next step in its tech transfer activities. UK Innovate, the institution’s commercialisation arm, is spearheading a new organisation called Estate Whiskey Alliance (EWA) that will allow members to access and help guide research in areas such as sustainable whisky production and regen...
Nov 08, 2024•38 min
Researchers with promising technology in the UK can apply for public innovation agency Innovate UK’s pre-accelerator programme ICURe, which supports them in reaching out to 100 potential customers to understand the market viability of their idea. It’s a powerful initiative that helps would-be founders understand if their idea can make a good business and what it should look like. But securing money wasn’t, until recently, part of that programme and researchers weren’t taught to ask for cash — th...
Nov 01, 2024•38 min
Just over a fifth of academic institutions in Asia have access to a dedicated university venture fund, with a third of all funds found in Japan — that’s the finding of GUV’s latest regional analysis published last week . It puts Asian universities behind those in the US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, though the Japanese ecosystem deserves recognition for being very mature: out of 13 universities on the list, 11 have at least one fund. The University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners is also a ...
Oct 24, 2024•15 min
Should professors be spinout founders? An increasing number of universities are pushing their faculty to be more entrepreneurial but data suggests that that’s not always a good thing — for the professor, the spinout or the students. Maria Roche , an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, examined the funding and exits of hundreds of biotech spinouts and discovered that if the startup’s technology is closely linked to the research in the original lab or the faculty is a founder, the spin...
Oct 17, 2024•37 min
Despite the benefits of universities having a venture fund they can draw on to invest in companies they help commercialise, they are still a rarity in places with mature venture capital sectors like Europe and the US. More top European universities have access to university venture funds than the US’s most research-intensive institutions — that’s the finding of Global University Venturing research published this summer. But the story isn’t quite that simple. Both geographies count an equal numbe...
Aug 29, 2024•21 min
We look back at some of the highlights of season 3, which featured many a discussion about university incubator and accelerator programmes, including insights from Jim Shaikh (The Greenhouse at Imperial College London), Paul Devlin (Cardiff University), Brandon Paschal (LaunchLab at Stellenbosch University), and Duncan Johnson and Miles Kirby (NG Studios powered by Deeptech Labs). This season also featured discussions around university venture funds (Anita Nel at Stellenbosch University and its ...
Aug 08, 2024•26 min
Andy Shenk, the chief executive of Auckland UniServices, the commercialisation subsidiary of the University of Auckland, knows that collaborating with the Māori people is important. He also knows that big data and AI offer great opportunities, but tells me about some of the challenges too. He also argues that the country’s remoteness actually makes space tech a strength for New Zealand, although the nation still struggles with a lack of serial entrepreneurs despite the fact that many people are ...
Aug 01, 2024•41 min
Setting up a venture fund in 2020 was a “huge paradigm shift” for Stellenbosch University in South Africa, because, for the first time, the executive leadership at the institution became interested in spinouts, says Anita Nel, the chief director for innovation and business development, because they understood that academic research had commercial value and a way to build, for example, local pharmaceutical expertise (the country had to wait six months longer than the northern hemisphere for a cov...
Jul 25, 2024•45 min
Immigrants are profoundly entrepreneurial people: they leave behind everything they know for a new country and new opportunities, often at a financial risk. This willingness to embrace change and build a new life from scratch means it should not be a surprise that in the US alone, 43% of Fortune 500 companies have been founded by immigrants. But there are obstacles that governments around the world put in front of such people and those they subsequently want to hire for their startups. In the US...
Jul 18, 2024•54 min
Commercialising social sciences research is such a new area of technology transfer that when you spin out a company “you might be the first to do that type of deal,” says Paul Devlin, the head of research commercialisation and impact at Cardiff University. And Cardiff is going all in: the institution is a founding member of Aspect, a UK-based multi-university organisation that was set up to drive the creation of social sciences spinouts . Two years ago, Cardiff opened a six-storey incubator, cal...
Jul 11, 2024•39 min
The Cambridge, UK cluster isn’t short of opportunity: the university’s research and knowledge exchange activities alone contribute £23.1bn to the economy per year. Investment firm NetScientific, and its fund management subsidiary EMV Capital, are among the investors that have flocked to the city. And NetScientific is now doubling down on the cluster, chief executive Ilian Iliev says, after having taken over its local peer Martlet Capital, a firm that had been the corporate venture arm of aerospa...
Jun 27, 2024•23 min
Universities, by their very nature, have always been strong centres of innovation. Scientific discoveries are routinely made in university research labs – but spinning those discoveries out into an operational business comes with numerous hurdles. Academics who go on to found companies based on their research have not just a steep learning curve to adapt to the new commercial environment, but also a wider shift in their mindset. The lab, after all, is a much different place than the market. Fern...
Jun 20, 2024
Duncan Johnson argues that spinout founders in the north of England need to learn to think bigger. That’s not just a question of access to capital (his investment firm Northern Gritstone has £312m at its disposal) but also of infrastructure to mentor and nurture these founders. Duncan took a trip to Boston last year where he realised that even the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had benefited from creating The Engine, which has a fund and a deeptech incubator. To do something similar back ...
Jun 13, 2024
Some of the most innovative clean energy and climate technologies originate in the labs of the world’s research universities. At Imperial College London’s climate innovation accelerator, The Greenhouse, startups address solutions in niche areas such as bio-textiles, waste management and green hydrogen. It is not just venture capital investors that are engaging with these startups. Corporate investors seeking to decarbonise their supply chains are seeing opportunities to partner and finance these...
Jun 06, 2024
We take a look back at some of the key insights shared by guests on season 2 of Beyond the Breakthrough. Hear from Tony Boccanfuso (UIDP), Prof Jenny Kuan (California State University, Monterey Bay), Tatiana Litvin-Vechnyak (Georgetown University), Kelley Rich (University of Notre Dame), Kevin Leland (Halo), Simon Hepworth (Imperial College London), Nii Dodoo-Amoo (Osage University Partners), Rayner Lim (Innovate UK), Allison Byers (Scroobious), Jo O’Leary (UKRI), Will Caldwell (SaVia Health), G...
May 16, 2024•35 min
Licensing intellectual property to a spinout can take frustratingly long and end with terms for a spinout that a venture capital investor might not be comfortable with — the university taking too large a share is a typical argument that you’ll hear particularly in the UK. There are initiatives to speed this up. The US has BOLT and the UK has the USIT Guides, template term sheets co-developed by tech transfer offices, investors and law firms to significantly speed up the process. Ireland even has...
May 09, 2024•21 min
How do you get beyond the many roadblocks stopping cutting-edge technology from being adopted by healthcare providers – which naturally have a lot of safety concerns, and often sizeable budget constraints too. Are hospitals moving to being completely decentralised in the future? And is AI about to revolutionise how hospitals are run? Tas Gohir, senior intellectual property, innovation and commercial research manager at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, Gustavo Cavenaghi, head of invest...
Apr 29, 2024
Today, we are revisiting another favourite from the archives. Stanford may be a recognised world-leader when it comes to startups, but it mustn’t rest on its laurels. Sometimes that even means launching initiatives that others have long had — that is just one of the lessons that Karin Immergluck, executive director of Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing, has learnt. Karin also tells us what the US can learn from its international peers, why TenU is an important component of her work and sh...
Apr 12, 2024•46 min
Diversity is not just about making sure more women and underrepresented minorities are on founding teams. When they do create businesses, they are typically ignored by venture capital investors who look for the same type of founders that have previously made money (creating a vicious circle). In the US, female founders raised just 2% of the VC money in 2023, and in Europe it was even less at 1.8%, according to PitchBook. In terms of spinouts, these founders not only face this bias in fundraising...
Apr 04, 2024•48 min
Imagine your corporate R&D team is facing a problem so complex it requires the world’s top researchers to solve. How do you find the right expert? You could scour endless academic papers or slowly build relationships with individual universities. You could invest in startups that are developing a solution. Or you could go to Halo , a matchmaker for cutting-edge research and real-world problems. Here’s how it works: corporates throw out their toughest challenges as precise questions like “how...
Mar 22, 2024
A PhD student who sets up a spinout and becomes its CEO is 21% better at returning an investor’s money than a serial founder would be if installed in the same spinout. Even more impressively, a PhD student turned chief executive is 46% better at making a venture capital fund money than a former CEO from a large company would be. That phenomenal stat comes from Nii Dodoo-Amoo , an investor with Osage University Partners , a US venture capital firm that backs university spinouts. But Dodoo-Amoo is...
Mar 15, 2024•51 min
Can university spinouts help fight poverty? That’s a question Kelley Rich, interim vice-president for innovation at the University of Notre Dame, is trying to answer as head of the institution’s innovation hub IDEA Center . It’s part of a campus-wide initiative launched in January 2024 that will see increased poverty research taking place — it gets to the heart of the private Catholic university’s mission of bringing about positive societal change. Rich recently signed a partnership with High Al...
Mar 08, 2024•48 min
Mark Billingsley, director of the University of Alaska Fairbanks‘ Tech Transfer Office and Innovation Hub, joined Beyond the Breakthrough in April 2022 and today we’re revisiting this conversation because it’s still one of the most unusual places covered on the podcast. How do you do tech transfer when the US federal government’s definition of “rural communities” covers your whole state and rural to you means 30 people that live 200 miles from the nearest road? Thankfully for Mark, Alaskans are ...
Mar 01, 2024
Weirdly, being located at the heart of the US capital doesn’t always help Georgetown University when it comes to creating spinout companies. State universities often have economic development mandates that they can follow, but in Washington DC Georgetown is in something of a vacuum — with little direction for what to focus on, less set funding and fewer people pushing to advance the technologies coming out of the institution. Tatiana Litvin-Vechnyak, vice-president of the Office of Technology Co...
Feb 23, 2024
Silicon Valley is the home of venture capital and startups — but drive an hour or two outside of the city and you are in a different world. Take Monterey, the site of our own GCVI Summit (March 12 to 14 — listen to the episode to get a 10% discount code on tickets). It is a beautiful city with a world-famous aquarium and a gorgeous golf course, but it is a city of extremes: the median household income is $98,000 while at the same time more than 10% of the population lives in poverty. The startup...
Feb 16, 2024
Tony Boccanfuso has spent the past 17 years trying to work out how to get universities and corporations to collaborate better on research. Boccanfuso is the chief executive of UIDP , a non-profit association between large companies and leading research universities around the world. The invitation-only organisation has more than 200 members. It all started with frustrations over negotiating sponsored research contracts, but UIDP’s work today goes beyond this. Boccanfuso tells us: “We tend to thi...
Feb 09, 2024
