Universities and investors across the world are ready to tackle the next global challenges.
Environmental, social and corporate governance are increasingly important factors when setting up spinouts and investing in them, guests have been telling Global University Venturing on its podcast, Talking Tech Transfer, over the past several months. Social enterprises and other types of non-profit companies are also having a moment at institutions as illustrious as University of Oxford and University College London.
London School of Economics and Political Science is leading a project called Aspect – an acronym for A Social Sciences Platform for Entrepreneurship, Commercialisation and Transformation – that focuses exclusively on commercialising research emerging from social sciences departments. Its membership has grown to 19 universities, including York, Sheffield and Manchester – whose heads of tech transfer all spoke to GUV for a feature on the north of England in this issue.
Oxford, which is also a member of Aspect, has long been a pioneer in commercialising social sciences – Mark Mann took home the GUV award for Personality of the Year 2019 for his work in the area – and a recent analysis by its tech transfer office, Oxford University Innovation (OUI), showed it had 24 active companies working in the cleantech space. It is hardly a surprise then that OUI partnered venture capital firm Global Accelerated Ventures this past quarter to set up a $25m special purpose investment vehicle targeting conservation-focused startups. A venture studio will aim to launch between 13 and 20 companies tackling climate change challenges over the next two years – challenges that range from biodiversity loss, the energy crisis and human food security to landscape change.
Some investors, like Chalmers Ventures – the incubator and venture arm of Chalmers University of Technology – in Gothenburg, Sweden, actively encourage portfolio companies to pursue the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. An interview with Chalmers Ventures’ new chief executive Sara Wallin is up next on Talking Tech Transfer.
Main Sequence Ventures, the Australia-based venture firm set up by Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), this week collected A$250m ($194m) for its second fund that will continue to focus on key objectives including feeding 10 billion people; humanity-scale healthcare; increasing industrial productivity; developing next-generation computing; and accessing space. The second fund will also add a sixth remit to the firm’s mission: decarbonisation.
Martin Duursma, the Main Sequence partner who will lead the effort on decarbonisation technologies, explained the firm’s decision: “We are entering a transformational and critical decade for addressing climate change globally; Australia has a natural opportunity to develop the solutions that help everyone forge a path to net zero.
“Our ingenuity and deep science background as a nation will be pivotal in building a clean hydrogen industry, adapting heavy industry, decarbonising our energy grids and developing new ways to capture and sequester carbon. We are determined to help uncover the scientific discoveries, turn them into real, tangible technologies and accelerate their potential so we can reverse our climate impact and avoid a climate catastrophe.”
In the US too there are mounting efforts – thanks to the change in government also at a political level – to tackle the next crisis. One notable recent example is Big Idea Ventures, a firm focused on early-stage alternative protein investing, launched Generation Food Rural Partners in late January with North Carolina State University as an inaugural partner and a goal to raise $125m to commercialise agtech research in rural communities. Earlier this month, it expanded that partnership dramatically by adding Louisiana State University, Oregon State University, Penn State University, Purdue University, Tufts University, University of Hawai’i, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Of course, covid is not behind us – and the heart-breaking news from India shows the worst may yet be to come for humanity despite good vaccination progress in many western nations – but multiple vaccines now exist, freeing up universities and researchers to ask which crisis to solve next. It can be disheartening to realise that there is no shortage of crises from which to choose but consider these words from former US vice-president Al Gore, who said at the Bloomberg Green Summit earlier this week he was “very optimistic that we are crossing the political tipping point right now”.
He added: “We are in the early stages of a revolution that has the magnitude of the industrial revolution. Many are saying it is the biggest investment opportunity of all history.”
It seems increasingly obvious that institutional investors are not willing to miss it, especially if those opportunities come out of university labs.
