More than a decade ago, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz looked at talent agency Creative Artists Agency (CAA) for inspiration in how to support entrepreneurs and run their then-new firm. Michael Ovitz, CAA’s co-founder, served on Andreessen and Horowitz’s prior startup, Opsware’s, board from 2000 until Hewlett-Packard’s $1.6bn acquisition in 2007 and shared […]

Recently Knowledge Commercialisation Australia (KCA) released its annual Survey of Commercial Outcomes from Public Research (SCOPR). With a reported doubling of commercialisation revenue in the two years from 2018 to 2020, it is the first time the report has delved into the commercialisation activities of the survey participants. And it has revealed some interesting and […]

The themes of this year’s GCV Symposium – sustainability and impact investing – capture the “let’s build back better” attitude that I have seen emerging across our ecosystem as we start to re-imagine what our future could and should be like. GCV Symposium’s choice of themes has an uncanny knack for setting the agenda for […]

Over the past 50 years, women have transformed their lives and goals through higher education and employment, in some cases accessing those sought-after seats in the board room. However, a large gender gap still exists which is particularly prevalent amongst entrepreneurs. For example, in the UK, for every three female entrepreneurs, there are five male […]

Verv, the smart energy company founded by Peter Davies at University of Bath six years ago, is on the verge of international success. The spinout has developed machine learning technology to produce devices that can monitor domestic energy consumption while also detecting and predicting faults on appliances such as air conditioning units. But its early […]

What sets Orca Computing apart from other quantum technology developers is its use of fibre optics and photonics to overcome one of the key challenges facing the sector – the disruption that can be caused by outside forces such as magnetic fields and thermal energy on qubits, the building blocks of quantum computing. “What you […]

An innovation that could drastically reduce the volume of harmful plastic microbeads in products ranging from cosmetics to paint is helping a UK cleantech developer win plaudits and attract investment. Naturbeads, a spinout from University of Bath, has developed a process to manufacture biodegradable microparticles from cellulose. The firm, set up in 2019, is based […]

When Global University Venturing published its ground-breaking analysis of more than 60 years of spinouts at University of Oxford in April 2020, all the data we had collected was from a pre-pandemic world. By that point, the institution’s portfolio had collected more than £2.2bn and another $245m in equity financing overall. Guest after guest on […]