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 and innovation at the University of Bristol, says she actually welcomed because it gave tech transfer a visibility that had so far lacked.

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.

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.

A year ago, Irene Tracey, vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, and Andrew Williamson, chief executive 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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 pharmaceutical expertise (the country had to wait six months longer than the northern hemisphere for a covid-19 vaccine because there were no vaccine developers or drug discovery companies in all of Africa).

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.

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.

Last month, EMV Capital, a fund management subsidiary of British investment firm NetScientific, took over Martlet Capital, a Cambridge, UK-focused investor that had been the corporate venture arm of aerospace and defence company Marshall Group for nine years until 2021. The decision was the natural conclusion to EMV’s earlier decision to become an investor in Martlet and allows the investor to further tap into the Cambridge cluster, NetScientific CEO Ilian Iliev says.

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.

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.

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.

We take a look back at some of the key insights shared by guests on season 2 of Beyond the Breakthrough.

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 tech transfer offices, investors and law firms to significantly speed up the process. Ireland even has a national IP protocol.