Reflecting in the shade

Once again, we’ve rolled around into August. The month where all university-based news dries up in the same heat everyone’s taking their holidays in. For myself, this time of the year always offers a moment (ideally a two-week long moment on a beach) to kick back, recharge the batteries, and to take stock of where you’ve come to so far this year.

For that reason, I’ve cast my mind back to January when I both took over this publication as its editor, and also made several predictions about what the university innovation ecosystem may encounter over 2014. While we won’t see the whole picture until the end of the year on the only other window for reflection before 2015, we can already see where we were right about some trends, and wrong about others.

A survey conducted by Global University Venturing at the end of last year indicated that most of our respondents planned to be setting up more spin-out this year. Our data won’t be able to confirm that prediction until the end of the year, but at least in the UK, the declining trend over the past four years in spin-out production appears to be, at the very least, slowing, according to publication Spinouts UK.

We also made the prediction that there would be more attempts at collaboration. As the ink was drying on that forecast, so too was it on agreements between UK-based commercialisation firm the IP Group and US universities Pennsylvania and Columbia, with Princeton added to the mix in April. In the same month, UK university incubator partnership SetSquared also gave us a billion reasons to collaborate when it announced that it had raised £1bn in external fundraising for over 1,000 companies. Allied Minds and Bristol-Myers Squibb have come together to form Allied-Bristol Life Sciences to support biopharmaceutical research across US institutions. Startup NY, a project looking to create tax-free zones to companies launching or rebasing to universities in the state of New York, is now in full swing.

Looking back over stories from this year, there has barely been a week that has gone by without some new collaboration between universities and other bodies or news of success derived from collaborative projects. It is a similar state of affairs for another prediction, incentivising entrepreneurial spirit on campus, with a regular flow of stories regarding new incubators and projects geared to stimulate student and graduate innovation hitting the pages of GUV.

In terms of funding, our readership suggested in our survey that more of you would be looking for increasing co-operation with corporates and venture capital units throughout the year to make up for the gap in funding, particularly in the US where sequestration looks to run the river of innovation dry. Our news and data so far for the year indicates that this is taking place, but perhaps not at the pace many of our readers would hope for. In the US, the Jobs Act looks to fill the void with crowdfunding as a source of investment. However, the Securities and Exchange Commission is still inking out the details on how it would be implemented with no clear roadmap of when it will be fully implemented.

We also predicted, on the back of survey respondents, that more universities would be launching a venture fund. So far, we’ve seen 13 funds launched directly by universities, ranging from seed funds in the $1m region to Singularity University’s $50m to support startups coming out from the future-tech institution.

In terms of our eight startups to watch list, three have returned to our news pages since the start of the year. Manchester graphene spin-out 2D-Tech was acquired by materials firm Versarien, and WiTricity, the company commercialising wireless energy transfer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, signed deals with tech firms TDK and Intel. Juno Therapeutics, which is commercialising oncology therapeutics from three institutions, continued building its impressive series A to $175m in April. And, as GUV was going to press, news came in of a series B round, bringing the spin-outs total funding to $310m raised in 9 months.

So, all in all, not a bad haul on the prediction front so far. The only lingering question from the start of the year centres on Scottish independence and the impact it will have on both Scottish higher education institutions and UK innovation. As it was in January, rhetoric still fills the halls of Holyrood, with pro-union leader Alistair Darling unable to present a compelling positive story for union, and nationalist leader Alex Salmond still scrambling for a backup plan on currency. Yet, with polls still indicating a no vote, neither side have done much in the way of actually convincing voters one way or the other, with only marginal gains to the yes camp over the past eight months. We’ll know more after Scotland says aye or naw to going it alone on the 18^th of September.

In the meantime, GUV wishes its readers a good holiday season, and I look forward to seeing your news in the new academic year.