The third year: the USIT Guide & more
In 2023, our efforts focused largely on the launch of the USIT Guide in April and on supporting the UK government in the delivery of the Independent Review of University Spin-out Companies. We were delighted to find that the Review had recognised the many strengths of the university innovation sector, featuring the USIT Guide prominently as an example of best practice. Read on for other exciting developments.
The USIT Guide was launched in April with a keynote address by George Freeman MP, the Minister of State at the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, and a host of distinguished speakers from government and the university innovation sector. Crucially, the USIT Guide had a central place in the government-commissioned Independent Review of University Spin-out Companies launched in the autumn, a recognition to the significance of this effort on the development of the sector.
Spearheaded by TenU, the USIT Guide is a set of recommendations for negotiating investment deals that identifies a landing zone for what a positive deal should look like, and demonstrates that there is a shared commitment across the sector to accelerate the pathway from invention to market. It was created through the collaborative effort of TenU’s six UK universities and prominent venture capital investors (Abingworth, Advent, Amadeus, CIC, Octopus, OSE and Sofinnova), with input from two global law firms (Goodwin and Taylor Wessing).
The 16-months process involved many hours of focused negotiation and a sector-wide consultation including the professional associations the BioIndustry Association (BIA), the British Venture Capital Association (BVCA) and PraxisAuril, the association of technology transfer professionals. Events at the PraxisAuril conference and at the County Hall in London provided further opportunity for scrutiny and debate. Follow this link for a podcast on the USIT Guide in International Perspective with a panel of distinguished speakers. Find below links to further critical engagement.
Other activities in the last year have focused on driving the five workstreams agreed as part of the £4m programme inaugurated in July 2022: evidence-building, sector engagement, strategic policy advice, investor relations and training & exchange.
To deliver the programme, I grew my team from one to five bright and capable individuals. The TenU Future Leaders Programme (TenU FLP), an international training and exchange programme for mid to senior-level technology transfer professionals, launched its second round with great success, and the flagship event series TenU Hosts attracted large international audiences for its events on Women in Innovation, Climate Tech and Building Critical Mass. A new event series, TenU Operations, was launched this year as well, bringing TenU staff into conversation on operational issues and so fostering the culture of peer-learning and exchange that characterises TenU.
In the coming year, I look forward to getting to know my team better and to strengthen our foundations to improve our offer to the sector. We will continue working with Government in supporting it in delivering the recommendations of the Spinout Review. This will include convening the sector around a further iteration of the USIT Guide, one focused on less patent-intensive technologies such as software. We will also grow our training and exchange capability with a new sector-wide mentorship programme and a further round of the TenU FLP. Our event series TenU Hosts will appear in a new format, and we hope to offer it more widely through a collaboration with Global University Venturing. Other collaborations will take us to the international stage – more coming soon!
I thank Research England for making all of this possible, as well as our many partners and advocates, including the many contributors of the two iterations of the USIT Guide, the members of our advisory board, PraxisAuril, and ASTP, for their time and effort in helping us to share effective practices with the sector and advising government in turning the UK into a Science Superpower. Special thanks go to my team for their enthusiasm and commitment.
TenU is an international collaboration formed to capture effective practices in research commercialisation and share these with the UK government and university innovation sector. TenU’s members are the technology transfer offices of the University of Cambridge, Columbia University, University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London, KU Leuven, University of Manchester, MIT, University of Oxford, Stanford University, and UCL.
The USIT Guide reviewed
https://ipdraughts.wordpress.com/2023/04/24/usit-or-lose-it/
https://www.mathys-squire.com/scaleup-quarter/the-usit-guide-fuelling-the-success-of-spinouts/
https://www.keconcordat.ac.uk/the-university-spin-out-investment-terms-guide-the-usit-guide-tenu/
https://www.bioindustry.org/news-listing/ceo-update-24-april-2023.html
The USIT Guide in the press
