Retaining World-class Talent in Oxfordshire

Howard Bentham - 0:04 Hello there and welcome to episode three in this brand-new podcast series. Ox Talks is powered by OxLEP, the local enterprise partnership for Oxfordshire, and aims to give you more insight into the great work that OxLEP does, helping companies and organisations in Oxfordshire and beyond do business better, as well as having a positive impact on the wider community. I'm Howard Bentham and I'm speaking with some influential figures in the county, finding out how they're shaping and driving business locally. They're also all really keen to stress the critical support that's available from OxLEP and how it could be crucial in helping your company or organisation progress in the future. Although, of course, we are concentrating on OxLEPs' businesses and issues in this series, if you're listening to us elsewhere, perhaps in another part of the UK, many of the difficulties we experience here will be very similar to the ones that you're facing where you are. Do share your thoughts, stories and observations with us, plus crucially the solutions to the problems that you've found. Head to our social media where we can pick up on your comments and questions in forthcoming podcasts. We are @OxfordshireLEP on Twitter and Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership on LinkedIn. It'll be good to hear from you. In this edition we're asking how can we retain the best talent here in Oxfordshire? Undeniably some of the world's most talented people work in the county with a host of globally significant companies calling Oxfordshire home. 1:35 Last year alone spin-outs, startups and social enterprises from Oxford University Innovation generated over 30 million pounds of income. Pre-pandemic figures show that every £1 invested in University of Oxford research and knowledge exchange activities generated £10.30 to the wider UK economy. Many of these people and the organisations they work for are delivering critical responses to major issues within fields like energy, medicine and emerging technologies. But as one of the most expensive locations to live in the UK, how can we ensure that Oxfordshire retains and importantly develops the world's best talent for the benefit of everyone nationwide and internationally. It's therefore vital those with an entrepreneurial streak are able to map out a clear and affordable path to building a successful business in Oxfordshire. On OxTalks today we get the chance to get inside the mind of not one, but two eminent leaders in the county. In a moment I'll introduce Dr Rajarshi Banerjee from Perspectum, an Oxford-based medical equipment software company. But first, I'm delighted to welcome to OxTalks Chas Bountra. Chas is the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Innovation at the University of Oxford. He is also Professor of Translational Medicine in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine and Associate Member of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford. That's a mouthful of titles and I didn't even mention that you were visiting Professor in neuroscience and mental health at Imperial College London. Chas, welcome. Great to see you. We like to get to know our guests on Ox Talks. Give us a quick whistle-stop life history if you would. You're originally a Birmingham boy from first-generation immigrant parents, I believe? Chas Bountra - 3:28 That's right. I did my schooling in Birmingham. I did my first degree in London, second in Edinburgh, and then I came to Oxford and then I went into the pharmaceutical industry. So I joined a company called Glaxo and then in 2008, I came back. So I've been here 15 years and I have to say, I love this university and I love this town and I love this place. Howard Bentham - 3:49 I can tell from that smile. I know everything I've ever read about you says that you don't like talking about yourself, Chas. But perhaps for everyone's benefit, listening and watching, pick out a few highlights, if you would, from your career, because there've been certain treatments that wouldn't be around, not for you. Chas Bountra - 4:04 Yeah, I suppose back in 1989, 1990, we were the first to show that a protein called neurokinin NK1 receptor, if we blocked it, if we stopped its function, then it would be useful in cancer and radiochemotherapy and so we developed these blockers of this receptor, NK1 receptor antagonists. We did clinical trials in the early 90s and we showed that it worked in patients and now there are molecules out there, they're being used every day to reduce chemotherapy and radiotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting. So that's something I'm very proud of. I suppose the second thing is I'm probably most proud of some of the people I've trained and developed and mentored etc. So when I was at GSK, probably at least 30 people that I recruited and mentored, they're now sort of vice presidents and senior vice presidents and CSOs and CEOs and heads of research and heads of R&D in big pharmaceutical companies. So that's a source of pride. Similarly, since I've been in Oxford, which is now nearly 15 years, so probably at least people that again, I've recruited developmental etc. They become associate professors or full professors or some of them have gone into industry and taken up senior roles etc. So that's a big source of pride Howard Bentham - 5:36 And your pride is tangible from what you're telling us. We've all of course followed the incredible achievement of the development of the covid vaccine with the University of Oxford. Give us an idea of some of the other spin-out businesses that are changing people's lives for the better? Chas Bountra - 5:53 You know, it's a great question. I mean, the great thing about this university is that we do attract superstars from all over the world. And these superstars are working on all the big problems that we're facing across the planet. You know, Banjo and I care about healthcare, that's our passion, you know, so we worry about dementia and mental health and rare diseases and cancer and AMR and, you know, I could talk for hours on those things, etc. But you know, frankly, the climate emergency is a magnitude worse, you know, better batteries, green energy, increasing biodiversity, more food production, water, clean water, etc. But then we've got things like social inequalities or the impact of technology on society, etc. These are all enormous, enormous challenges and we've got colleagues in the university working on all of them. So I'm proud of things like Oxford PV, you know, better solar panels. I'm proud of First Light Fusion. You know, I hope that pans out quickly. You know, it could solve our energy problems. The Perspectum, we'll hear a lot about from Banjo, I mean, a phenomenal organisation full of great people. I think it's a great success story for Oxford. But in medicine healthcare, there's lots of others, you know, sort of my colleague, Richard Cornell, created this company, Miro Bio, three years ago, focused on inflammatory diseases. It was acquired by Gilead a few months ago for more than 400 million pounds. Then Carol Robinson's company, Omas, you know, mass spec, very focused on sort of rare diseases. Danuta's company, Nucleome, again focused on sort of inflammatory diseases. We've also got social enterprises. So a company called Sophia is focused on trying to help companies all over the world tackle alleviate poverty all over the world, etc. So you know, we've got commercial enterprises, we've got social enterprises, but importantly, we've got great people working on all of these problems. Howard Bentham - 7:58 You’re quoted on the university website as saying Oxford could become like Boston, Massachusetts. What do you mean by that? And what does Oxford need to do to achieve that? Chas Bountra - 8:10 Well, you know, I'm a little envious of Boston and Stanford. So in Boston, of course, they've got great universities. They've got great hospitals. But they've got all the big pharmaceutical companies. They've got hundreds of biotechs and med techs. But importantly, they've got lots of money coming into that ecosystem. Money from the government, money from philanthropists, money from industry, lots of venture capitalists, lots of angel investors, etc. and now, in terms of biomedicine healthcare, there's some real buzz in Boston. I mean, there's so much innovation and enterprise and commercialisation happening there and many colleagues who work there, once they go and start living there with their families, they never have to leave because if they decide to change job, which many of them do, they just move to another company or whatever within Boston. So the partner doesn't have to change jobs. The kids don't have to change schools, etc. So it's a great ecosystem. Likewise, if I look at Stanford, on the doorstep of Stanford, they've got, what, five companies worth more than a trillion dollars. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Tesla, etc. and you know what? Apple, I think, is $2.6 trillion. Microsoft is about $2 trillion. Alphabet, Google, is about $2 trillion. Amazon is about 1.7 and Tesla is 1. Now you can imagine the job opportunities for kids in Stanford in those five companies. You can also imagine the money that's flowing from those companies into Stanford. It would be great if one of our companies, Perspectum, some of the, OMass, Nucleum, and whatever, became an industry creating hundreds of thousands of jobs because that's the important thing with those companies that have all been set up in the past 25 years. They've not just created a few jobs, they've actually changed the world. They've created a new industry, they've created hundreds of thousands of jobs, and they produce lots of millionaires and frankly they produce quite a few billionaires. Howard Bentham - 10:22 So to get Oxford to Boston status, give us a few practical things that need to happen at this end. Chas Bountra - 10:31 Well I think we've got great superstars. So I think what we need to worry about is... Howard Bentham - 10:35 We've got the raw materials basically. Chas Bountra - 10:37 We need to retain them here. Many entrepreneurs, many innovators, many leaders will go off to the US, they'll go off to Boston and Stanford because there's a lot more risk capital there. In Oxford, in the UK, in Europe, I hear colleagues creating a company and they say, "If I had £5 million I could do this." But in Boston and Stanford they say, "I need $100 million and I'll do this." It's on a different ballpark, and that's where we need to get to, so I think we need more risk capital. I think we also need a bit of a culture change. I see students in Stanford, they'll write one business plan. Before they've got that funded, they'll write number two and number three. In the UK, Europe, it's still very much you write one business plan. If you don't get that funded, you never write another one. Also in Boston, I have colleagues who work in Harvard, and then they go and work on this pharmaceutical company Novartis and then they'll go off and set up a biotech and then maybe they'll go back to MIT. I think that movement around is extremely good. Howard Bentham - 11:41 So the collaboration again is a real… Chas Bountra - 11:42 it's collaboration is partnership but it's also understanding each other's perspective, understanding each other's language, growing your network because big innovations are going to come by bringing these different stakeholders together. You know you saw it with the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. That wasn't created just by the University of Oxford. It was great academics inside the university working with government, working with industry, AstraZeneca, working with the regulators, working with the funders. That's what we need to do. Big step changes happen when we bring together these different stakeholders and create a single goal, a single ambition, a single folk. Howard Bentham - 12:24 But there are blocks that are standing in the way potentially, aren't they? I mean the cost of living and the cost of doing business locally is an issue. London prices for rent and property, Midlands wages for workers. You've got to square that one somehow. Chas Bountra - 12:39 Well, I'm afraid how there's not much I can do about that. I'm not a politician. The one thing I would say is that living in Boston is even more expensive than living in Oxford and living in Stanford or San Francisco is a lot more expensive, etc. All we're focused on in the university is using the talent that we've got, the brand name that we've got, the networks that we've got in industry and government, the networks that we've got all over the world with our alumni, bringing all of those together, focusing on big problems to create solutions to make the world a better place. That's what we're focused on. I appreciate, you know, if Oxford does become like Boston, house prices are going to go up more etc. People are going to have to commute greater distances etc. But this is why you know this university has been such a great champion of the Oxford-Cambridge art project for example. You know the narrative we've given there is that I don't look upon that as a road link, rail link between Oxford and Cambridge or a million homes between Oxford and Cambridge. For me that project is about everybody saw what this university did in the pandemic. Now all these problems that we talked about, they're all global, they're all big, we can't do them on our own. We need to work with the universities along this corridor and there's about nine or ten of them and we need to come together, work together and tackle these problems. So I think, I mean Oxford's a tiny town, it's much smaller than Boston, you know, if we want to become like that, you know, we're going to have to bring in lots of other colleagues. Howard Bentham - 14:16 What about whether we physically have enough lab space or business space to accommodate the sheer scale of innovation? Chas Bountra - 14:22 We absolutely do not. Howard Bentham - 14:24 No. Chas Bountra - 14:24 We need millions of more square foot of lab space in Oxford and you know what they're putting up in Boston is miles ahead of us. They've got a lot more of it in Cambridge. You know this university is going to be creating 30, 40, 50 companies a year. Those companies are going to need space. The 200-odd companies that we've already created, they're all growing. They're going to need even more space and I can tell you just recently, just last week in fact, we had colleagues from Birmingham who are putting up a, they call it a precision health technology accelerator right next to the medical school and right next to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. So the medical school in Birmingham is the second largest in the country. Queen Elizabeth Hospital is the second largest hospital in the country and so, they're putting up this sort of innovation centre accelerator next to it and the conversation I started with Gino Martini, who is the CEO of that, is, if our companies in Oxford don't have the space, can we get space in that accelerator? And the advantage may be that the rent in Birmingham is going to be less than in Oxford, but also, you've got access to the amazing clinical patient resources in Birmingham. You know Oxford's got a population of what? 250,000. In Birmingham, they've got a catchment of six million patients. Can you imagine the clinical patient resources? Howard Bentham - 15:50 You've touched on this already But it's interesting to explore what the level of collaboration in Oxfordshire is between the likes of the universities obviously Thinking about Brookes as well Harwell Culham Milton Park Does that ensure that great minds can collaborate and generate the best ideas? Is that happening today? Chas Bountra - 16:08 It is. Howard Bentham - 16:09 To the degree it needs to? Chas Bountra - 16:11 And I think OxLEP has been a great glue there as you say You know, we've got the universities. We've got all the companies that are being created We've got the science parks. We've got the big infrastructures at Harwell and Culham, you know, we've got the local politicians We've got the politicians in Whitehall etc We all need to work together because I do honestly believe that, I don't wish this to sound very grand, but I think people and industry and society and government is looking to places like Oxford to come up with solutions to some of the world's biggest problems, to create lots of jobs, to create tax revenue. You know, we need that tax revenue to pay back all the money that we borrowed in the pandemic and the money we're borrowing to help people with their energy bills, etc. Howard Bentham - 17:02 Has Brexit put a huge spanner in the works, do you think? Chas Bountra - 17:06 Well, I was completely against Brexit. I think it was a crazy thing to do. Of course, I think globally, and I like working with people all over the world, et cetera, and I like the idea of opening up markets wherever, but to me, shutting down a market on our doorstep was a crazy thing to do and of course, it's very hard at this stage to say what's happening now is a consequence of Brexit because we had two years of Brexit, then we had two years of the pandemic and now we've had a year of the energy crisis and the cost of living and so it's been a bit of a mess of five years, etc. But one thing I do know is that within the university, we get brilliant people from all over the world, but we are getting less applications now from the continent. Howard Bentham - 17:53 Just picking up on what you said there, could central government and indeed local authorities be doing more then? Chas Bountra - 17:58 I think anything government can do to help us to continue to bring in the best people into this country or into the university, that's obviously got to help. Anything that they can do to accelerate visas and so on and so forth. I mean fortunately, Howard, one of the nice things in Oxford is that Oxford's a nice place to live and it's fairly close to London and you've got access to the airport etc. You know, so great entrepreneurs like Banjo, you know, that's what they look for and you know, and they want nice schools for their kids, etc. and we've got some great schools as well. Howard Bentham - 18:32 Before we bring Banjo - Dr Rajarshi Banerjee into the conversation, let's just talk about oxford science enterprises They're an organization that focuses on the business side of many of these startups. We've touched on some of the numbers. Tell us about their role. Chas Bountra - 18:46 I think they've been transformative frankly, you know seven years ago before they were set up… So just to be clear, it was called Oxford Science Innovation seven years ago. They pulled in what, $614 million of funding, and that was purely for Oxford academics and Oxford researchers to translate their science, to commercialise their science. So it was the largest VC fund aligned to any single university on the planet. Harvard didn't have it, Stanford didn't have it, etc. So it was a step changing. But before that was set up in 2015, in Oxford we were creating maybe four or five companies a year. As soon as that was set up, it went up to more than 20 and last year we did 31, and we could easily do 40, 50. But what we need in Oxford now is even more money. I mean, sort of OSC, as they're now called, they last year pulled in another 250 million. But frankly, that's not enough. For the ambitions we've got, the companies we've got, we need to scale them up quickly. We need first light fusion to give us green energy, not in 50 years' time, but we need it in the next decade, etc., and that requires scale. We need to be pumping several hundred million into these companies. We need lots more investors, lots more space. We're trying to build more partnerships with global corporates, but we need more scale-up entrepreneurs. It's a slightly different skill set. It's not just about creating a company. It's about scaling it up to 50 billion, 100 billion, 200 billion, because that's when you create thousands, hundreds of thousands of jobs, and that's when you really change the world. Howard Bentham - 20:33 Let's hear from Dr. Rajarshi Banerjee from Perspectum, a self and Oxford University spin-out. Welcome to Oxtalks, Banjo. Tell us a bit about yourself, how you came to set up Perspectum just over a decade ago now. Dr Rajarshi Banerjee - 20:45 Thanks, Howard. A word to Chas first, because I think this is important for all your listeners. I came back to Oxford to do a PhD in 2008, same time Chas came back from industry and at that stage, as you can probably tell, I'm Asian by origin, also born of immigrant parents. There was not a single big translational academic Asian-origin figurehead in the University of Oxford. Then there was Raj Thakur, who's a medical endocrinologist, and Chas and to have these two big names who are in different domains, you know, Raj has learned, discovered more about calcium biology in the body than probably anybody else on the planet, and Chas coming from the world of drug development and changing the science of drug development. These are really big global figures we have on our doorstep and each of them actually is just a little footnote in the history of Oxford. So before we get a little bit negative, we don't have enough lab space, all the things we've got to do. Over the Christmas holidays, I've got a five-year-old and a seven-year-old. I took them to a Christingle meet. 21:54 You go to church, the story of Christ, but in the form of an orange with a candle and in the graveyard of the church was C.S. Lewis. So we're going to wait for a little walk. They're a little bit too young to read about all the lion and all that, but it'll come. That's a perfect starter and then through Christmas, it was really cold, so we went for walks around and you walk past the Florian Chain Building, and you can say to your kids, and did you know Penicillin was purified here and given to the armies during the Second World War? And they do know about Captain America, so they know that his troops were kept alive with Penicillin, and it was right here that they purified it and obviously, the bit they take away from him, it was recycled through wee. So you could make good kids stories out of Oxford and they turn on the TV occasionally, if they're allowed to, and his dark materials is on and that features Oxford and Oxford scientists. What we have here is truly unique because when you walk down the streets, you're walking in, not through, in history. You walk down Mansfield road right now, one of the colleges being redone, and they've put up a mural of all the things that are done there. I've been in Oxford for over 10 years, half of that was new to me. And I was like, wow, if I lived somewhere else, I would come here every weekend as like the perfect weekend city break. Does that make sense? Howard Bentham - 23:11 Absolutely. Dr Rajarshi Banerjee - 23:12 So the important thing we have here in Oxford and Chas said it, but I really want to emphasise it. The calibre of the city, the calibre of its people is unparalleled. If Yale had even a 10th of the history of Oxford, you would never stop hearing about it. But the thing we don't do very well, we don't tell our own stories. You know, you land at Lyon Airport, it tells you the whole history of Lyon before you even got to the immigration gate. Oxford doesn't have an airport, and if you go to Gloucester Green, it doesn't tell you much about Oxford either. That's what we need to work on. How do we, we don't need to get all arrogant about it, but how do we project just some of the things that have been done here positively? So that's one thing. But you know, for me, I came here as a medical student in 1996. I trained, it was the best medical school in the world then still is now So I'm incredibly privileged to have had that education I then went to London to work and I came back in 2008 to do some research a lot of doctors do research before they take up a consultant post and Oxford is probably one of the best places in the world to do it and then through that we discovered how to map inflammation with scans and that's medically important because it means you don't need to do biopsies. 24:28 So if I want to find out about your liver health, Howard, the traditional method is I take a 10 or 12-centimeter needle I stick it in your right side, I twist it through 180 degrees no matter who does it it's a little bit painful and I take it out and I look at it under a microscope and that's been how it is for about 70 years. But scanning technology has got to the point where we can do a virtual biopsy It's called in scientific speak magnetic resonance imaging tissue characterisation, MRI scanning to assess tissue and we've patented it and we've developed it and there's a bit of history there. The first MRI scanners came out of Oxford Instruments, which was the first Oxford University spin-out. So wherever you go, it doesn't matter what discipline you do in Oxford, there's actually a big component of history in it. That company was founded in 2012 before OSE. So as Chas described earlier, you know, we had to find our own seed funding and networks came in and there's some really, really good people in this county to support young entrepreneurs and that company now employs almost 300 people. We also run the Oxford Community Diagnostic Centre so that post-pandemic, if people need scans they don't all have to go to the JR, which is a mess when it comes to parking and access and we've actually just opened an office in Boston for many of the reasons that Chas has said. There's so many of our customers there that they want a physical perspective footprint in Kendall Square. Howard Bentham - 25:51 What about the attraction and the retention of the superstars as Chas called them, the key talent? Does Oxfordshire still do that? Dr Rajarshi Banerjee - 25:59 Yeah, well Oxford produces it, right? You walk down these streets, you meet these people, you get better and you have here in Oxford a critical mass of people to do that. So finding people and creating superstars is not a problem. But you know, if you want to do it in football parlance, how do you become more like Barcelona and Real Madrid and less like, for example, Ajax. You'll note I didn't pick an English club because I didn't want to create too much tribalism. Ajax has a great academy and produces amazing players and then they do a few years there, and then they usually go abroad. I think we're at that pivot point here with Oxford. We've always had the best academy. We've always had tremendous history and style and flair in the way we do things and I mean that. Like, if you look at some of the solutions that have come out of Oxford, there's a flair to them that's more memorable sometimes even than the solution. But you look at how other economies, and you look at the US for example, where they've got massive endowments in the university to pull across professors, huge venture capital funds to support companies, infrastructure like we described in Boston and San Francisco, increasingly now in Texas because it's a low tax state. But it's not just the United States. Singapore has a bio hub. The Middle East has grown some environments that are attracting our kind of companies over to them. So, you know, today, 2023, we think of our main rivals over in the West. You project 10, 15 years, the fastest growing universities are in China, Singapore and the Middle East and the likes of Chas will be spending as much time flying east in the future as they are currently flying west. Howard Bentham - 27:41 So the genuine issues then that you've encountered in keeping the best staff, is it a competition thing then from elsewhere? What is it that's, you've got your superstars, but to stop being like Ajax, how can you become Real Madrid? Dr Rajarshi Banerjee - 27:56 So I can give it to you from our perspective at Perspectum. Having adequate capital, having adequate money in the bank helps. So if you look at typical salary structure, and I know Brits don't like talking about but we've got to break this. A junior scientist in a university will make between 30 and 40,000 pounds and that's an Oxford scientist. That's a really, really high-level scientist, right? That person in industry will make a little bit more, let's say 50 or 60 and they can progress to three figures. But the problem is the starting salary for that person in San Francisco would be $200,000. Now, the cost of living in San Francisco is astronomical. But what you're looking at is a scientist with a PhD and maybe a couple years experience in Oxford, Headington, Cowley, wherever, on sort of 35 to 45 thousand pounds, and they could immediately go to San Francisco for $200,000 and where we sit in the middle depends on where we want to be. 28:59 So we have some companies that pay effectively that here and they'll take like two of the best scientists and do it and they'll usually, because they can't attract enough capital, then exit to, for example, Exact Sciences, which is a company called Base Genomics did here and you have other companies that say, "Okay, we'll try and build up and make a lab more like Danuta's Nucleome and, I hope, also Perspectum, and try and make a long-lasting company such that my kids, now walking through the center of Oxford, when they're teenagers and looking for somewhere that's quiet in the evenings to ride their bikes, will come by here and say, 'Oh, yeah, my dad used to work here and now it's got three buildings.'" That sort of evergreen industrial expansion is, I think, what fits with the university's ethos of creating an ecosystem because that then becomes generational. Does that make sense? Howard Bentham - 29:47 Yeah. Dr Rajarshi Banerjee - 29:48 So the key thing about that penicillin story that I told you about with my kids is not just that penicillin was discovered there 80 years ago, but that people are still making discoveries in that building, creating the science that generates new drugs and if we had more time, I could tell you more about them. But this is also an invitation for you to bring Chas and me back. Howard Bentham - 30:10 The money is key. So Chas has talked about some of this investment. Is it a central government thing? Is it a venture capitalist thing? Who needs to step up to the plate here? Dr Rajarshi Banerjee - 30:19 The money is actually easy. Believe me, the money is easy. Howard Bentham - 30:22 If it's that easy, why are we not doing it? Dr Rajarshi Banerjee - 30:24 Very good question. Many things are easy, but people don't do them. Giving up smoking. But the biggest problem with people giving up smoking, if you go back in time, was that everyone thought it was unnecessary and then when you sort of put in the nudges to suppress smoking, you know, bans on advertising, bans on public spaces, don't advertise to kids, all that kind of stuff, smoking rates have really plummeted, right? Accessing finance is about wanting to do good things that other people want to support. We did a financing round just now, raised $36 million. It was oversubscribed, so we've opened up a second close. What that means effectively is our current investors present us to other people who say, "Yeah, I want to invest in this company as well." and I did a call with a Boston investor last week, and after half an hour he committed a million dollars, not quite a million pounds. Depending on how much you want to raise, that's 50 times half-hour calls, right? if you want to raise $50 million. But in order to do that, you have to have something investable and you have to have a team that's investable and you have to… you don't have to, but it's useful if you have a track record. In Perspectum, we have brilliant scientists, absolutely brilliant scientists, who've made amazing products. One, Caitlin recently built, pretty much from scratch, a digital pathology platform, which Microsoft now wants to partner with and brought in $11 million in contracted revenue last year from pharma, because basically it outperforms any pathologist in assessing the liver. That's one scientist who's built a multi-million dollar business and is now opening an office in Boston to expand it even further. I tell that story to you. If you had a million dollars, you'd want to put it into Caitlin, wouldn't you? Howard Bentham - 32:17 Sure. Dr Rajarshi Banerjee - 32:18 Yeah? God knows how much you'd make out of her, yeah? So accessing the finance isn't the problem. The mindset is the problem. Howard Bentham - 32:26 Cultural thing, I mean, and Chas, you touched on that, didn't you? It's a change of mindset, it's a change of culture. Anything you want to pick up there on what Banjo is saying? Chas Bountra - 32:33 Yeah, I mean, I think Banjo raises lots of great points. I mean, I do think we have to recognize that the world is becoming more and more competitive and so, of course, I worry about, I want this university to stay number one, and I worry about Harvard and Stanford, But I also worry about some of these universities, as Banjo said, in China, that are shooting up the rankings and they're shooting up the rankings because the Chinese government is literally pouring billions into those universities, et cetera. So if we want to remain number one, we've got to continue to compete on the global stage. Howard Bentham - 33:12 Where's the line between competition and collaboration? You've talked about the Cambridge Arc as the other university, if you like, on the other end of that arc. Where's that line between collaboration and competition? Chas Bountra - 33:23 Can I just make one comment upon your earlier question before I answer that one? The second thing I would say in response to Banjo's thing is sort of, I think we in the UK and Europe have to be a lot more ambitious. You know, in the US, they go for these moonshots. You know, we're going to cure cancer, we're going to land somebody on the moon, we're going to take people to Mars, et cetera, et cetera. In Europe, if somebody comes up with these big dreams big goals, 10 people immediately jump on that individual and say, "Oh, you'll never do it. It sounds really risky. You'll never get the funding for it," etc. Whereas in the US, because there's so much more risk capital, people will say, not give me a million dollars, “I need 200 million to do this." It's on a different scale. So I think we need to be more ambitious. So your question about competition and collaboration, it's a balance, isn't it? I think one of the other things I often say to colleagues is we have to be humble and by that I mean we have to recognize what we're not good at or what somebody else is better than us at. Because you know Oxford's got brilliant people and it's got great infrastructure, but we can't be brilliant at everything, right? 34:40 And so we need to recognise there are other organizations, other institutions, other countries, people who have got some expertise that we don't have. They have a technology that we don't have. Now, the fact is, the problems we're trying to tackle are so urgent, we don't have time to duplicate those technologies. We have to collaborate. We have to partner. I think the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine story is a beautiful example. You know, this university, Sarah Gilbert, Adrian Hill, set up VaxiTech, and then, with the help of our VC, Louise Richardson, former VC, and John Bell, our Regis Professor. They pulled in AstraZeneca, they pulled in the UK government, the regulators, the funders, and it was a recognition that, you know, this university cannot produce three billion samples of the vaccine. This university can't distribute those three billion samples all over the world. That's where we needed AstraZeneca and I should also say in that project, in the pandemic, funding was not limiting. I mean in this university we had our alumni sending in money saying do… use this money to do Covid research. We had funding from government, we had funding from these different funders and of course AstraZeneca put in I don't know how many hundreds of millions probably billions etc. So you can be number one and we want to stay number one, we want to be world leading, we want to attract the very best etc. But to tackle these big problems I don't think anybody can do it on their own, any organisation. So, you know, we have to work with these different stakeholders. Howard Bentham - 36:18 Banjo, you've been nodding furiously to what Chas is saying. Do you want to just pick up on any of those points? Dr Rajarshi Banerjee - 36:25 I just think he's absolutely right. Oxford is basically the academic general of the world. I know it means I ruled out a job at 50 other universities, I don't care. You remember in the 90s there's a bunch of disaster films, Independence Day, Deep Impact, all that sort of stuff. If there was an imminent global disaster, you would want to pick your brains from within this county. Not to do all the work, but to work out what the plan of action would be. The vaccine story is perfect. That's essentially the same thing. We're not going to make three billion samples, we're not even going to necessarily tell you how to distribute it, but we can do the whiteboarding better than anybody else on the planet. It's in the pavements, it really is. The flair for elegant solutions under pressure is in this city. I don't know if I can communicate that any better than that. Chas Bountra - 37:22 Maybe if I could just add to that, Banjo, and just this is following on from your flair, elegance, comment, etc. So you know when we created that vaccine, and I take no credit for this, this was my colleagues, they agreed with AstraZeneca and the government that we're going to produce this vaccine and we're going to give it away at cost price. So anybody in low-income countries, in middle-income countries, in high-income countries, you know, during the pandemic they would get this vaccine at cost price. So the university was going to make no money and AstraZeneca was going to make no money. Now bear in mind in that first year of the pandemic, Pfizer, I don't know, I think they probably made close to 30 billion or something from their vaccine, Moderna made 20 billion or something, AstraZeneca made zero, this university made zero, and I would argue I don't think there's any other university on the planet that would have done that. I don't think Harvard would have done it, Stanford wouldn't have done it, I don't think Cambridge would have done it. You know, there was a pandemic, we desperately needed to get out of it. This university pulled its network together and we created a solution and it wasn't about making money for the university, it was the focus was we need to get the world out of the pandemic. Howard Bentham - 38:45 Let's bring into the conversation OxLEPs communications manager Rob Panting. Rob, we've been talking about the availability of lab space locally in our discussions, worth mentioning the many hundreds of thousands of pounds that have gone into the Headington Life Science Laboratory development with funding secured by OxLEP. Rob Panting - 39:05 Thanks, Howard. Similar to previous discussions we've had in earlier podcasts, our role is to find opportunities for investment and clearly, as both Chas and Banjo have said, life sciences is a huge sector for Oxfordshire. It has a global footprint in terms of what we create in Oxfordshire. So the Wood Centre for Innovation, we've secured local growth fund investment to generate additional lab space for the Oxford Trust and really create not only space but also I guess a concerted business journey for these fantastic companies that are emerging from within Oxfordshire. Howard Bentham - 39:47 And OxLEP co-sponsored a vital event locally called Ox to Zero and I know Chas, you are a key figure in this too. Explain how Ox to Zero aligns with the discussion we've been having today? Rob Panting - 39:56 Yeah, I think our role as a local enterprise partnership is to continue to create platforms to showcase Oxfordshire on a global level and Oxford to Zero, an inaugural event working with the university, with Harwell and the UK AEA at Cullham, was to really showcase the really great work that Oxfordshire is doing around addressing the climate change. So great discussions around fusion, electric vehicles as well, you know, huge potential that sits across those many different sites, the R&D that's being developed in those areas as well. So it's quite an easy sell for an organization like OxLEP to talk about the great potential and capabilities that exist within Oxfordshire, and we're determined to work in partnership those organisations to create further Ox to Zero events and similar events too. Chas, you were driving force behind Ox to Zero,. perhaps tell us a little bit more about your involvement. Chas Bountra - 40:54 I mean the reason we organised that meeting, Ox To Zero, last September in the Blavatnik School of Government was that we wanted to bring together the whole community in Oxfordshire working on the climate emergency and thinking about better batteries, green energy, biodiversity, food production, water, etc. and we wanted to put a bit of a flag in the sand that Oxfordshire is serious about this and we had at that meeting, we had colleagues not just from within the university, but we had colleagues from some of the companies that we'd created. We had colleagues from the Science Parks, we had colleagues from Harwell and Cullham etc. We had some media people and you know so that was the start and I think the intention is to make that a regular event. Howard Bentham - 41:50 Chas and Banjo thank you both for the moment we will chat again shortly. It's good to have you along for OxTalks, the brand new podcast series powered by the Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership. If you want to get in touch with the team at OxLEP and comment on what you've been hearing, find us on social media. We're on Twitter @OxfordshireLEP or via LinkedIn search for Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership. Perhaps you run a company or organisation that's looking for some specific help or simply need a steer to the most appropriate business advice available. Why not try the OxLEP Business Support Tool? OxLEP Business Support Tool - 42:30 OxLEP's Business Support Tool is here to help your company. Whether you're just starting out, growing or ready to take on a new business challenge. If you're looking for the latest advice and support, complete our business support tool today and get set to receive a bespoke action plan for your organisation. Head to OxfordshireLEP.com to find out more. Howard Bentham - 42:54 Let's chat more to Chas Bountra, Pro Vice Chancellor for Innovation at the University of Oxford. Share another story with us, if you would, from a start-up or a spin-out that you've been involved in in helping Oxford Nanopore springs to mind you you were telling me about this. Chas Bountra - 43:10 I've not been involved in that of course we've all applauded it from the periphery but i i think that's a great example of a company created by Hagen Bailey one of our great academic entrepreneurs i should also say one of the great things in Oxford now is we've got a number of academics who are serial entrepreneurs and they are role models for young kids and researchers et cetera, et cetera. So that I think is very exciting. This is why I think Oxford's about to take off in this sort of space, et cetera. But Oxford Nanopore of course was created in 2005. They did an IPO about a year ago. They're worth a few billion. What we need in Oxford, we need more Banjos, but we also need more Oxford Nanopores. We need companies that are going to grow to sort of not just a few billion, but we need to help them grow to 10, 30, 50 billion, 100 billion, because that's when they really create tens of thousands of jobs. That's when they really start to change the world. I think what we're trying to do in Oxford, of course, we're focused on big problems, and many of these big problems are going to require new platforms, new industries, new technologies, etc. But of course, as we said at the start, we also want to help the UK economy, and we want to create jobs and tax revenue, etc. So I think more banjos and more Oxford Nanopore. Howard Bentham - 44:37 What about using Oxfordshire more as a live test bed? You think about the electric vehicles, Oxbotica's electric vehicles that are on the roads, autonomous vehicles. We've talked about living labs, perhaps with the vaccine, again, springs to mind. Is there a better use of the geography perhaps and the people? Chas Bountra - 44:55 I don't know how to answer that one, Howard, But let me just say this, that in this region, we have got so many clusters. You know we talk about life sciences cluster. Well Oxford's got that or Oxfordshire's got that. We've also got clusters in space and satellite. We've got clusters in green energy. We've got clusters in quantum. We've got clusters in autonomous vehicles, motorsport. We've got clusters in publishing. There is no other place on the planet that has got so many clusters. Howard Bentham - 45:31 Banjo, you're again furiously nodding. Dr Rajarshi Banerjee - 45:34 I'm saying the only thing we're bad at is fishing. Howard Bentham - 45:49 Let's have a closing thought from both of you, Banjo, perhaps on you, on the easier fixes if you like, to encourage and retain the best talent here. Dr Rajarshi Banerjee - 45:49 Expressions of pride in the city, willingness to put your best foot forward. Don’t be one of the 10 people that Chas described who jump on an idea negatively, be one of the people that goes, "Oh, that sounds really interesting. Let me know how I can help." That I think each of us can do to make Oxford an even easier place to develop talent and in time retain talent and then as we look outside, we have the stories to raise funding. We just need to unshackle ourselves and support and recognition from other parts of the country should be a good thing. So it shouldn't be Oxford versus the UK. Oxford is part of the UK. We should be very proud of it. It's not Cape Canaveral versus the United States in terms of rocket launches. That's where we just do our rocket launches from. That's what Oxford should be for UK science and innovation. Howard Bentham - 46:40 Chas? Chas Bountra - 46:41 I think Banjo said it all. I know it's quite easy in the current time. You switch on the news and it's all very gloomy and negative and everybody wants the government to do this and this and this and this, etc. and everybody wants money. So it is easy to get gloomy actually. But I think in Oxford we have to be positive. We have to be confident. We have to be ambitious. You know, we're surrounded by smart people. We've got amazing networks all over the world. Our alumni are spread all over the world. They are very successful. of them want to put back into Oxford, etc. So let's use all of that, you know, use our brand, use our networks, use our collaborations, partnerships, use all the talent that we've got, be confident, be ambitious, because that's the way we create solutions to big problems. I mean, you know, Bill Gates didn't have it easy. Mark Zuckerberg didn't have it easy. You know, Elon Musk didn't. I'm sure Jeff Bezos, he works 24/7 or something like this, etc. If you're going to change the world, you need determined, ambitious, confident people who are not going to take no for an answer. That's Banjo. Howard Bentham - 47:58 Chas Bountra from the University of Oxford, thank you. A big thank you as well to Banjo, Dr. Rajarshi Banerjee from Perspective, and as ever, thanks to Rob Panting from OxLEP too and thank you for listening to OxTalks. This is the third podcast in the series and we hope you'll tune in to more. Find us where you normally get your podcasts from, please tell your friends or colleagues, and if you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. Feel free to share your thoughts and suggestions on our social channels. It'll be very good to hear from you. Remember, business support in Oxfordshire is just an email or a phone call away. The OxLEP Business Support Tool can signpost you to expert help in a matter of minutes. It's worth taking a look. Find it on our website, OxfordshireLEP.com. Do tune in again to the series when we'll be discussing Oxfordshire on the global tech stage and why we should be backing business right now with a particular focus on supporting SMEs locally and if you didn't catch the first couple of editions of OxTalks, find out what MakeSpace Oxford's Andy Edwards is doing to repurpose buildings in the county to help level the playing field for disadvantaged communities and also hear from the CEO at Blenheim Palace, Dominic Hare with his thoughts on the visitor economy and if tourism is the key sector for all sectors to thrive in the county. Well worth a listen, but for now from the OxLEP team and from me Howard Bentham. It's goodbye.