Take a moment to celebrate

University venturing is on an upwards trajectory that seemed doubtful even just a couple of years ago – as our quarterly data analysis in this magazine shows, the first three months of 2018 have already significantly outperformed the same period last year, even much of the whole year.

There are many reasons for this. For one, the ecosystem benefits from countless university venture funds that are now fully operational and have been steadily growing their portfolios. Oxford Sciences Innovation, UCL Technology Fund and Maryland Momentum Fund are just some of the vehicles that have been making an impact – for an in-depth review of university venture funds, see next month’s issue of GUV.

Another reason is the increased scope of technology transfer. University of Oxford, for example, has been looking outside traditional areas of life sciences and IT to launch spinouts emerging from humanities and social sciences departments.

And then there is the ever-increasing interest from governments, not least of all in the UK, where the patient capital review last year made headlines not just on GUV but across the mainstream media too.

One of the findings in that review was that the UK was lagging behind its peers in the US. The document did not give spinouts as much credit as it should have – and some of the figures cited within it did not line up with GUV’s own data.

It may, therefore, to our readers at least, not come as a surprise that a report published this month by intellectual property law firm Anderson Law found that spinouts in the UK have a significantly higher success rate than regular startups.

In fact, nine out of 10 spinouts that attracted capital between 2011 and 2015 are still operational. For other startups, the survival rate is merely two out of 10.

Anderson Law’s report recognises, however, that the UK government is lacking a clear strategy for research commercialisation and points to Brexit – now less than a year away though with a transition period until the end of 2020 – as imminent dangers to the success of spinouts.

The firm makes a number of recommendations in its report, most notably that UK Research and Innovation, the umbrella organisation for the UK’s research councils, should establish an intermediate funding mechanism for early-stage spinouts.

The government, Anderson Law said, should establish a clear strategy and provide a framework for tracking investment into research and mapping the performance of spinouts.

When it comes to universities, the firm called for programs that engage with local businesses, educate researchers about investment and facilitate teaching sabbaticals for faculty to pursue commercial opportunities.

Since the report came out, things have shifted again slightly. Midlands Innovation, a group of eight universities in the UK’s Midlands region, has secured a $7.1m award to launch a connected system of incubators and accelerators. The initiative will provide a single gateway to intellectual property commercialisation for Aston, Birmingham, Cranfield, Keele, Leicester, Loughborough, Nottingham and Warwick universities.

Elsewhere, the Ceres Agritech Knowledge Exchange Partnership secured $28m from the UK government and unnamed investors. The partnership will commercialise agritech projects from the universities of Cambridge, East Anglia, Hertfordshire, Lincoln and Reading, as well from independent research organisations the National Institute of Agricultural Botany, John Innes Centre and Rothamsted Research.

None of this will be quite enough for the UK to take the top spot from the US, of course, though that is arguably not the aim. But they are important developments. Crucially, they enable the country’s institutions to keep punching above their weight by combining their expertise.

They also allow universities with less of an international profile to increase support for their researchers and attract more venture capital to their spinouts.

The next logical step looks like it may well be multi-university venturing funds, an instrument for which Global University Venturing has long been arguing.