The halls of the museum buzzed with energy as a throng of venture capitalists hungry to find deals within university labs mingled with entrepreneurs over champagne and canapés. But it wasn’t just the mouth-watering duck confit and consistent flow of wines or the grandeur of the Gothic-style dining hall, dominated by a rather large skeleton of a dinosaur, which put attendees in a good mood. The promotion of university innovation centers as key liaisons in Europe between academic and business worlds dominated the agenda.

The winners of each university’s entrepreneurship competition represented a range of technology markets including biotechnology, nanotechnology, software, and wireless. They managed to keep the crowd’s attention while they had 55 seconds each to pitch businesses targeting such diverse industries as wound care and weather derivatives.

Commercializing Technology

The following day at Red Herring’s Venture Market Europe conference at London's Hilton Park Lane, the theme of commercializing technology out of universities also arose on a panel called “Commercializing Technology in Europe.” The point of the panel was to highlight the role of innovation centers in promoting technology innovation and entrepreneurship in Europe, although the panel really should have been called “Commercializing Technology in the UK” since it focused mainly on research hubs in the UK.

Walter Herriot, director of Cambridge-based St. John’s Innovation Center, which is owned by St. John’s College of the University of Cambridge, brought a different spin to the topic, emphasizing it is not accurate to assume that most spin-out activity comes from universities. While he argued universities are important since students and professors generate “excellent, pure” research and because they have managed to spin out successful businesses as cases like Domino Technology, Autonomy and Zeus demonstrate, he sees the majority of spinouts coming out of other businesses, particularly technical consultancies in areas around universities. In 1980, Herriot remembers going into a pub with his colleagues and counting twenty university spinouts. Twenty years later, in 2000, he counted 1500 spinouts in the Cambridge area but he says only 5% of these, or 75, accounted for direct university spinouts.

Words From the Wise

According to Herriot, the primary role of an innovation center is to provide business spin-outs links to universities, accommodation, direct business support such as access to finance, networks, and talent pools, as well as help with business planning. He also highlighted the innovation center’s role in giving credibility to businesses so they can sell their ideas to venture capitalists. “It’s easier to sell to VCs from an innovation center than from a rat-infested warehouse in Cambridge,” he remarked.

Billy Harkin, strategic business development manager at the University of Glasgow, also on the panel, agreed the main task of an innovation center is to immediately take over the commercial application of an academic’s idea. “We take charge of writing business plans and determining the right investors,” said Harkin. “If you don’t take charge of the business process right away, things usually end in tears,” he continued.

“It has been said that comparing Cambridge to Silicon Valley is like comparing a seagull to a Boeing 747,” said Herriot of St. John’s Innovation Centre when asked to make a comparison between research hubs in the UK and in the US. “We are working to ensure that we at least become a European Airbus,” he said. According to panelists, there has been a gap in the UK in intelligent seed financing that the university has not been successful in filling due to lack of funds.

For now, the efforts of UK innovation centers to create properly-funded technology transfer offices and to link up with US-based counterparts as well as initiatives on the part of European venture capitalists to be in the know about technology developments coming out of research labs across Europe will help fill this gap and ultimately foster the kind of technology innovation and entrepreneurship needed for Europe to attain “Airbus” status.