“This has been our strongest calendar year to date,” said Gregg Bayes-Brown, OUI’s marketing and communications manager. “In fact, it was a record in spin out generation from a higher education institution in Europe.”
OUI’s performance in 2016 not only improved on 2015, when there were 10 spinouts, but also broadened the sectors covered to include wireless energy transfer, big data and virtual reality.
“Among our successes from last year were OxStem, which raised £16.9m in seed financing for its regenerative medicine technologies and Mind Foundry, which is using machine learning and big data,” says Bayes-Brown.
Research in 2014 ranked OUI as the top tech transfer office globally, based on the number of spinouts, money raised, licenses sold and patents filed.
“Katharine Ku, director of Stanford University’s Office of Licensing, has suggested that, in measuring success, we should be looking beyond simple numbers and the money raised but, at present, there is no consensus on what we should be looking at,” Bayes-Brown explains.
“Cambridge University has developed the ‘Cambridge Map’, which identifies companies operating in the area and the jobs that have been created by various spin outs. That is certainly something we’re looking to do at Oxford.”
Oxford University’s success in developing spin outs can be attributed to the fact that OUI is well resourced and compares favourably with its main US competitors.
“OUI has always been a large and well-funded organisation,” Bayes-Brown notes. “We’ve benefitted from funding from the Oxford Innovation Society and have developed a very strong ecosystem that supports research, including technology companies, venture capitalists and high net worth individuals, all of which is intrinsic to our success.”
That ecosystem has taken more than 28 years to develop, building on the University’s expertise to the point where OUI is recognised as a global leader in university innovation. With a strong spinout pipeline, next year is expected to be even more productive.
“Oxford has also benefitted from its association with Oxford Science Innovation, a university venture fund. A commercialisation vehicle, it is the largest of its type in the world with funds approaching £600m. Its nearest rival, at present, is University of California Investments, which controls $250m,” says Bayes-Brown. “It is, without doubt, a key driver of innovation and entrepreneurial activity around the university.”
The capital that is available to Oxford has, in turn, acted as a beacon for the wider investment community. As a result, there was a quadrupling of venture capital support for spinouts from the wider investment community in 2016.
OUI has also extended its work in areas beyond the traditional sources for technology transfer and work is being done to unlock the potential of the University’s Humanities and Social Sciences divisions.
According to Bayes-Brown: “Innovation is undergoing dynamic growth in the UK when it comes to the development and long term support of spinouts.”
These are not start-ups; spin outs take time to develop and need long term support. Get that right, though, and the prospects, not only for Oxford but for the tech clusters springing up around the UK are good.