Leading investors and universities have come together to launch the USIT Guide which aims to put rocket boosters under the way that the Higher Education sector spins out new companies that take advantage of research breakthroughs.
Many of this country’s most successful technology firms – Solexa, Oxford Nanopore, ARM – started off life as spin-outs from a university, and the publication’s authors believe many more will now be forthcoming.
This is an area that the UK already excels in. London’s universities, for example, are more efficient in turning research and development expenditure into spinout companies than many others. They produce a spin-out for every £35.35 million invested in research and development compared with £60.42 million, £42.6 million and £54.5 million for Boston, Los Angeles and New York, respectively.
Between them the group behind the new guidance – which includes venture capitalist firms Abingworth, Sofinnova and Cambridge Investment Capital, and universities Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and UCL – has helped set up 376 new companies in the last five years, raising over £8.6 billion in investment.
But the USIT Guide’s backers believe it can build on this success and allow both universities and venture capitalists to ramp up the whole process of setting up spin-outs by providing direction and advice in such areas as equity share and IP. As it stands, many of these deals are created from scratch, which is both inefficient and sometimes fails to learn the lessons from previous success stories.
The publication, which is supported by TenU, a group of university technology transfer offices in the UK and US, including MIT, Stanford and Columbia, reflects successful practice around the world.
The USIT Guide was created over a 16-month period from January 2022, and supported by a sector-wide consultation which was supported by BioIndustry Association (BIA), the British Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (BVCA) and PraxisAuril. The initiative was funded by Research England. The USIT Guide working group is chaired by Cambridge Enterprise Chief Executive, Dr Diarmuid O’Brien.