Beyond the Breakthrough with Thierry Heles

Is 2025 the year that university technology transfer will see a big boost? It certainly looks promising, particularly in the UK, where a government-led spinout review has encouraged universities to lower equity in spinouts to 25%. Most universities in the UK have adopted the guidelines. The debate over equity stakes is a discussion that Michele Barbour, associate pro vice-chancellor for enterprise...

To date, 49 universities in the UK have adopted a recommendation to take between 10% and 25% equity in their life science spinouts. The recommendation was inspired by the USIT Guide, published last year by tech transfer group TenU, making it the guide’s arguably biggest impact yet. But it’s just the start. The University of Southampton has used the USIT Guide to develop a Deal Readiness Toolkit. I...

The UK government has committed £40m ($50m) to proof of concept funding over the next five years. How should the money available be deployed? One idea — inspired by the Flemish approach — is to set up investment committees of industry, VC and university experts to allocate the money. But is it enough money? Andrew Williamson, managing partner of venture fund Cambridge Innovation Capital, says he w...

A year ago, Irene Tracey, vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, and Andrew Williamson, managing partner of venture capital firm Cambridge Innovation Capital, published their UK government-sponsored report into the spinout ecosystem with a list of 11 recommendations on how to uplift the sector. Among these points was a call to adopt the USIT Guide, a template for term sheet negotiations that...

Whisky may not be the first industry to come to mind when you think of university innovation, but for the University of Kentucky — based in a US state known around the world for its bourbon industry — it’s an obvious next step in its tech transfer activities. UK Innovate, the institution’s commercialisation arm, is spearheading a new organisation called Estate Whiskey Alliance (EWA) that will allo...

Researchers with promising technology in the UK can apply for public innovation agency Innovate UK’s pre-accelerator programme ICURe, which supports them in reaching out to 100 potential customers to understand the market viability of their idea. It’s a powerful initiative that helps would-be founders understand if their idea can make a good business and what it should look like. But securing mone...

Just over a fifth of academic institutions in Asia have access to a dedicated university venture fund, with a third of all funds found in Japan — that’s the finding of GUV’s latest regional analysis published last week . It puts Asian universities behind those in the US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, though the Japanese ecosystem deserves recognition for being very mature: out of 13 universit...

Should professors be spinout founders? An increasing number of universities are pushing their faculty to be more entrepreneurial but data suggests that that’s not always a good thing — for the professor, the spinout or the students. Maria Roche , an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, examined the funding and exits of hundreds of biotech spinouts and discovered that if the startup’s te...

Despite the benefits of universities having a venture fund they can draw on to invest in companies they help commercialise, they are still a rarity in places with mature venture capital sectors like Europe and the US. More top European universities have access to university venture funds than the US’s most research-intensive institutions — that’s the finding of Global University Venturing research...

We look back at some of the highlights of season 3, which featured many a discussion about university incubator and accelerator programmes, including insights from Jim Shaikh (The Greenhouse at Imperial College London), Paul Devlin (Cardiff University), Brandon Paschal (LaunchLab at Stellenbosch University), and Duncan Johnson and Miles Kirby (NG Studios powered by Deeptech Labs). This season also...

Andy Shenk, the chief executive of Auckland UniServices, the commercialisation subsidiary of the University of Auckland, knows that collaborating with the Māori people is important. He also knows that big data and AI offer great opportunities, but tells me about some of the challenges too. He also argues that the country’s remoteness actually makes space tech a strength for New Zealand, although t...

Setting up a venture fund in 2020 was a “huge paradigm shift” for Stellenbosch University in South Africa, because, for the first time, the executive leadership at the institution became interested in spinouts, says Anita Nel, the chief director for innovation and business development, because they understood that academic research had commercial value and a way to build, for example, local pharma...

Immigrants are profoundly entrepreneurial people: they leave behind everything they know for a new country and new opportunities, often at a financial risk. This willingness to embrace change and build a new life from scratch means it should not be a surprise that in the US alone, 43% of Fortune 500 companies have been founded by immigrants. But there are obstacles that governments around the worl...

Commercialising social sciences research is such a new area of technology transfer that when you spin out a company “you might be the first to do that type of deal,” says Paul Devlin, the head of research commercialisation and impact at Cardiff University. And Cardiff is going all in: the institution is a founding member of Aspect, a UK-based multi-university organisation that was set up to drive...

The Cambridge, UK cluster isn’t short of opportunity: the university’s research and knowledge exchange activities alone contribute £23.1bn to the economy per year. Investment firm NetScientific, and its fund management subsidiary EMV Capital, are among the investors that have flocked to the city. And NetScientific is now doubling down on the cluster, chief executive Ilian Iliev says, after having...

Universities, by their very nature, have always been strong centres of innovation. Scientific discoveries are routinely made in university research labs – but spinning those discoveries out into an operational business comes with numerous hurdles. Academics who go on to found companies based on their research have not just a steep learning curve to adapt to the new commercial environment, but also...

Duncan Johnson argues that spinout founders in the north of England need to learn to think bigger. That’s not just a question of access to capital (his investment firm Northern Gritstone has £312m at its disposal) but also of infrastructure to mentor and nurture these founders. Duncan took a trip to Boston last year where he realised that even the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had benefite...

Some of the most innovative clean energy and climate technologies originate in the labs of the world’s research universities. At Imperial College London’s climate innovation accelerator, The Greenhouse, startups address solutions in niche areas such as bio-textiles, waste management and green hydrogen. It is not just venture capital investors that are engaging with these startups. Corporate invest...

We take a look back at some of the key insights shared by guests on season 2 of Beyond the Breakthrough. Hear from Tony Boccanfuso (UIDP), Prof Jenny Kuan (California State University, Monterey Bay), Tatiana Litvin-Vechnyak (Georgetown University), Kelley Rich (University of Notre Dame), Kevin Leland (Halo), Simon Hepworth (Imperial College London), Nii Dodoo-Amoo (Osage University Partners), Rayn...

Licensing intellectual property to a spinout can take frustratingly long and end with terms for a spinout that a venture capital investor might not be comfortable with — the university taking too large a share is a typical argument that you’ll hear particularly in the UK. There are initiatives to speed this up. The US has BOLT and the UK has the USIT Guides, template term sheets co-developed by te...

How do you get beyond the many roadblocks stopping cutting-edge technology from being adopted by healthcare providers – which naturally have a lot of safety concerns, and often sizeable budget constraints too. Are hospitals moving to being completely decentralised in the future? And is AI about to revolutionise how hospitals are run? Tas Gohir, senior intellectual property, innovation and commerci...

Today, we are revisiting another favourite from the archives. Stanford may be a recognised world-leader when it comes to startups, but it mustn’t rest on its laurels. Sometimes that even means launching initiatives that others have long had — that is just one of the lessons that Karin Immergluck, executive director of Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing, has learnt. Karin also tells us what...

Diversity is not just about making sure more women and underrepresented minorities are on founding teams. When they do create businesses, they are typically ignored by venture capital investors who look for the same type of founders that have previously made money (creating a vicious circle). In the US, female founders raised just 2% of the VC money in 2023, and in Europe it was even less at 1.8%,...

Imagine your corporate R&D team is facing a problem so complex it requires the world’s top researchers to solve. How do you find the right expert? You could scour endless academic papers or slowly build relationships with individual universities. You could invest in startups that are developing a solution. Or you could go to Halo , a matchmaker for cutting-edge research and real-world problems...

A PhD student who sets up a spinout and becomes its CEO is 21% better at returning an investor’s money than a serial founder would be if installed in the same spinout. Even more impressively, a PhD student turned chief executive is 46% better at making a venture capital fund money than a former CEO from a large company would be. That phenomenal stat comes from Nii Dodoo-Amoo , an investor with Osa...