One year on: USIT Guide driving best practice across global innovation network

With official endorsement by UK Government in its Independent Review of University Spin-Out Companies in November 2023, the USIT Guide has also achieved global recognition over the past 12 months since its launch. In the UK, the Government has followed guidance from the USIT Guide to commit to accelerate towards university-friendly policies and develop standardised spin-out term sheets to expedite the process of venture creation.

The recommendations and guidance have influenced the university technology transfer community in various countries, as well as from sector-specific investors and experts who have acknowledged the value of capturing decades of experience to document best practice.

Hiroki Takai, a venture capitalist at Global Brain operating in the biotech market, was vocal in his support of the Guide and penned an introduction to bring it to the Japanese audience. “The USIT Guide shows how tightly-knit leading investors, university tech transfer offices, start-ups and the Government are. Learning from global success stories is critical to integrate Japan’s unique biotech IPs into the global ecosystem,” he said. “There is much for Japan to learn from these efforts.”

Additional endorsement came from colleagues at ETH Zurich, who highlighted the underlying trust between the negotiating groups as a key factor in arriving at deals that contribute to making the world a better place. It was also noted that an understanding that the terms of deals will vary had been consciously considered with the Guide offering economic ranges rather than exact numbers.

“Many deals with founders and investors to create new spin-outs are created from scratch. This is time-consuming and fails to build on the lessons learned from previous success stories,” said the organisation, praising the USIT Guide’s approach. “Having a common approach to negotiations across the sector could make the process much more efficient.”

Produced in collaboration with a group of top investors, professional services firms and TenU member organisations, the Guide’s purpose is to provide a blueprint for university spin-out formation and take advantage of research breakthroughs at pace.

In the UK, the response has been overwhelmingly supportive, with Andrew Wray, Director of Bristol Innovations (Impact) keen to highlight the significance of the Government’s recent pledges and said, “The USIT Guide brings collective knowledge, experience and insight from across the university innovation community into a single reference point. It provides a market informed landing-zone on spinout terms, and is invaluable if we are to capitalise on the Government's commitment to spin-out formation and realise the true impact of academic research in solving global challenges.”

“We’re trying to help the entire university ecosystem recognise how we can get more spin-outs from those institutions,” reinforced Diarmuid O’Brien, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Innovation at the University of Cambridge, who chaired the USIT Guide working group. “We have a group of organisations that have between us raised about £8bn over the past five years and we’re taking the lessons learned, trying to codify it, and giving it back to the sector and the venture community in a way that we can derive more value.”

The second edition of the USIT Guide will launch at the end of May. The follow-up publication will focus specifically on terms for investment in software ventures and products, providing a set of recommendations to improve the speed and efficiency of university spin-out formation for those in this market, where terms are likely to differ from other sectors.

TenU is an international collaboration formed to capture effective practices in research commercialisation and share these with governments and higher education communities. Its members work together to increase the societal impact of research.

TenU comprises the technology transfer offices of the University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London, University of Manchester, University of Oxford, and UCL in the UK; Columbia University, MIT and Stanford University in the USA; and KU Leuven in Belgium.

TenU is funded by Research England and hosted by Cambridge Enterprise.