The only way has always been up

It may seem early to consider the impact of 2018, but Global University Venturing will not publish next month and this year has been the busiest on record since we began tracking the ecosystem nearly six years ago. That is despite the fact that, at the time of writing, there is still a month and a half to go.
So it is time to ask an important question – how do you follow a record-breaking year? As Simon Bond of SetSquared said at the GUV: Fusion conference last year about his organisation achieving the top spot in analytics firm UBI Global’s international ranking of incubators: “The only way is up.”
Your editor is – believe it or not – generally not an optimist, which you would not know from reading the opening editorials in this magazine over the past year. But pessimism – much less cynicism – was never justified, not in this wonderful world of spinouts and people who demonstrate a passion for changing the world that warms this old cynic’s heart in a way that Christmas morning does for children throughout the western world.
Yes, university venturing suffered a dip, much like everything else in the economy, following the financial crisis, but it has recovered in spectacular fashion after what looked like an early peak a few years ago.
With hindsight, the only way has always been up in the long term.
The Global University Venturing team is fresh off the inaugural GUV Summit in the US, held earlier this month in Houston, Texas – there is a full report and photographs in this issue – and there really is no doubt that these people, and their peers elsewhere, are only just getting started.
At the summit, for example, Alistair Hick of tech transfer office Monash Innovation outlined Australia’s vision to become the world’s healthiest nation and figure out how protect the Great Barrier Reef by 2030. It is the kind of project that is so stunningly ambitious in the face of an almost endless array of obstacles, it just might succeed.
That policymakers so often find it difficult truly to comprehend just how amazing their universities are and what an incredible job they are doing is an unbelievable shame, because here are the people who are making a real difference.
Here are the people who will cure cancer one day, who will fix climate change, who will make sure that humanity does not just survive but that it thrives – not because they are told to do these things, but because they care about impact much more than they will ever care about money.
Because university venturing never has and never will be about money. And that is why the only way is up.