GUV’s top 10 articles of 2020

All of us here at Global University Venturing would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your continued support and wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year!
Our office is now closed until January 5, 2021 so all of our staff can get some well-deserved rest, but if you are looking for great content here are the features that made the biggest impact over the past 12 months.
 

1. Oxford’s ecosystem leads the way
   University of Oxford gave GUV unprecedented access to its spinout portfolio in this ground-breaking analysis showing one of the oldest institutions in the world has been spinning out companies with remarkable success for more than half a century.
2. SETsquared: a global leader continues charging ahead
   Following our look at University of Oxford’s spinouts, SETsquared approached GUV for a similar in-depth feature with interviews with Simon Bond, Rosie Bennett and a host of its portfolio companies – and the exclusive revelation that the world’s number one incubator is raising a fund.
3. Atlantic Bridge connects Irish spinouts to the world
   2020 really was the year of in-depth features: Atlantic Bridge’s Helen McBreen and Kathy Kelly also gave GUV a fascinating interview looking at the Irish ecosystem.
4. Does Deerfield have The Cure?
   Deerfield Management is putting up $2bn for early-stage life sciences research through to 2030, but what does its involvement mean for its partner universities, asked our own Callum Cyrus in this look at one of the most ambitious programmes yet in university venturing.
5. Mobilising the university-industry community against covid-19
   Everyone loves In-Part, the university-industry collaboration platform, and so do our readers which always push guest comments from the company to the top of our most-read articles.
6. The impact of covid-19 on university ventures
   Speaking of guest comments, another one loved by our audience this year was a contribution from David Grimm and Simon Goldman, investment directors of UCL Technology Fund, looking at how the pandemic has affected university ventures.
7. University venturing in the wake of the WeWork saga
   It almost seems like decades ago that WeWork collapsed in on itself, but it has really only been just over a year and even less since GUV took a look at what it might mean for university venturing.
8. Hatchtech’s 20-year journey to FDA approval
   Uniseed CEO Peter Devine made multiple wonderful contributions to GUV this year – his podcast interview was another favourite – but it was his guest comment describing Hatchtech’s decades-long journey to gaining regulatory approval in the US that proved especially popular.
9. Downturn? What downturn?
   Do you remember 2019, that year about 700 months of March ago? There was some doom and gloom in the financial papers at the time, but the university ecosystem proved resilient and that optimism clearly struck a chord with our readership. Spoiler alert: it looks like 2020 may have been even better for spinouts overall – stay tuned for our annual review next month.
10. Leadership Series: Orin Herskowitz
    A relatively new addition to GUV’s offering, our podcast has been a phenomenal success. We purposefully left out episodes from this ranking, because a significant portion of the top “features” would have been audio, but we cannot not mention our interview with Columbia University’s widely admired Orin Herskowitz, which continues to be our most downloaded episode. If you are new to the podcast and looking for a place to start, play this one (and then all the others, because they are all phenomenal).