[00:00:00] Susannah de Jager: Welcome to Oxford Plus, the podcast series that takes you deep into the myths and truths of the Oxford investing landscape. I'm your host, Susannah de Jager and I've spent over 16 years in UK asset management.
[00:00:18] My guest today is Mairi Gibbs. Mairi is the CEO at Oxford University Innovation, OUI. She was previously COO and has worked at OUI since 2002. Mairi has a PhD in chemistry and spent time in the chemicals industry before moving into technology transfer. Mairi's extensive practical experience in technology transfer includes partnership management, the formation of spin out companies, licensing, academic outreach, patent portfolio management and consultancy. A large part of Mairi's role is working with her university colleagues to further develop the university's innovation framework, meeting current and future needs. I look forward to hearing more about her goals following her recent permanent appointment in the role. Our partner, Mishcon de Reya, enjoy a really close relationship with both Mairi and OUI. They have relationships with over 20 universities, advising spin outs, student start ups, and social ventures and despite many sectoral initiatives, such as Knowledge Research UK, Aspect, and Reshape, Oxford is the number one TTO in the UK and they enjoy a particularly close and long standing relationship with them, providing training, facilitating discussion, and supporting innovation at every opportunity.
[00:01:27] Mairi, thank you so much for joining today.
[00:01:29] Mairi Gibbs: Pleasure, nice to be here.
[00:01:30] Susannah de Jager: So you started your career in the chemicals industry and then quite swiftly moved into technology transfer. Can you talk a little bit about what drew you towards the space?
[00:01:41] Mairi Gibbs: Yeah. So, I'd set out with a plan to go and join the chemical industry. So I achieved my goal, but then when I got there, I found that I was enjoying a lot of the things that weren't actually running a team of researchers and I had an absolutely wonderful training, but I ultimately decided that I didn't want to be in that technical role for the rest of my career. So I started looking about and I explored very widely. I had some help from somebody who really helped me to figure out how to articulate what I was looking for in a role and I had literally never heard of technology transfer. This was 2002. It was in its infancy in the UK and I saw an advert. in the back of The New Scientist for a technology transfer job in Oxford and I was an Oxford graduate, I was of course interested in the institution and I thought, that sounds amazing! So I applied for it and got a job. I thought I would have a three year plan that it would be fun. I would learn some stuff and then after three years I'd see where I was and something else might come along and it just carried right on being super interesting and engaging and over the years, opportunities have followed. I'm now in job six in tech transfer in Oxford. So for me, it's turned into a wonderful career from a bit of serendipity, looking at that ad in the back of a magazine a long time ago.
[00:02:56] Susannah de Jager: I love that. what are the elements that you so enjoy about transfer technology? Because I can imagine lots, but I'd love to hear it from you.
[00:03:05] Mairi Gibbs: Yes. I mean, the people are super interesting. You know, we're dealing with very, very smart people, of course. So there's still some connection to the science, which I enjoy. I like the values of it. You know, we're taking publicly funded, charitably funded work and trying to do something to help the world. So that fits with me much better than working for shareholder value, important though that also is. So I feel like I'm doing something useful. It's a pleasure working with most of the people most of the time. There's a constant string of really good problems to tussle with, and I do like to solve a problem.
[00:03:40] Susannah de Jager: Amazing. So you've got a really interesting background. As you said, you've had six jobs and you've covered a huge amount that your TTO is responsible for, which obviously puts you in a great seat. You spoke there though about the mission and what it means to have impact.
[00:03:57] I'd love to hear a bit more about particular areas that Oxford is focused on and I know you've recently produced your impact report and how you measure those things.
[00:04:07] Mairi Gibbs: Yeah. So, the mission is to maximise the global Impact, societal impact coming from Oxford's research and expertise and, you know, we're so fortunate to work with this extraordinary institution. It has huge breadth as an institution, obviously the physical sciences, obviously the medical sciences. But also really rich social sciences and humanities research. So across a huge spread of disciplines, there's such interesting work going on and that means that Oxford can produce really insightful work at the interface between different disciplines, really interesting stuff happens there. So the Institute for Ethics in AI, for example, Institute for Biomedical Engineering. So there's lots of this type of cross disciplinary work at Oxford, which is so interesting and produces really great technology and new business ideas. In terms of impact, we're on a mission to work out and optimise how we measure it, because for me, it's just not acceptable to say that the purpose is to maximise the impact and then to have no way of measuring it and as a sector, the world of university technology transfer has reported impact through case stories for many years and that's really effective and people connect with the case stories. You can understand the narrative thread to get from research to a new medicine for a child's incurable disease and that really connects with people, but it doesn't give you that quantitative impact aggregated impact reporting and so in our report, we set out our logic model that shows the process of research through to OUI's activities, which lead to license deals and spin out company formation and consultancy contracts and then we have companies out there in the world who have the rights to use Oxford research and expertise and they produce new products and services, those are outcomes and then the impacts eventually is the number of end users that are interfacing with that stuff in whatever way that is and so we're starting to collect that data. Really grateful for all of our partners in our licensees, our spin out companies who've helped us by submitting data into our report.
[00:06:16] So it's a journey. At the moment, we're counting breadth in terms of sheer numbers of users. I want us to get to a stage where we can also find some way of reporting the depth of the impact. How much difference did the difference make, if that makes sense. So it's a journey. this is year two of us doing public reporting for it and we'll continue to develop it.
[00:06:36] Susannah de Jager: And I'm sure it'll be exceptionally interesting as that picture has more longitudinal data to see what's evolving. Were there any big surprises that came out when you did that first reporting?
[00:06:47] Mairi Gibbs: Well surprise number one was that it was possible to get some data that showed something interesting because we really didn't know how it was going to play out. So that was a very happy surprise. We've decided to align around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and that's really a different sort of measure of breadth. I mentioned the huge span of activities in the university, so I literally need to be able to compare questionnaires for assessing multi dimensional poverty with quantum computing. Like these are things that are actually in our portfolio. So it's not comparing even apples with pears in the greengrocers basket, it's so different. So we decided to use the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a means of bucketing similar things together and so it's brilliant now to have data that says that 90 percent of the spin outs who've responded in our questionnaire, 90 percent of them are working on at least one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. So that says that we've got a big portfolio here who are really focused on working on the world's really big and important problems for our future and between them, someone is working on every single one of those SDGs. So that demonstrates the breadth of impact that's going on here.
[00:08:02] Susannah de Jager: It's amazing.
[00:08:03] So Mairi, can you talk a little bit about the different models for research or ideas that come out of the university? Because you talk about consulting services, you talk about licensing and venture disclosures and obviously there are actual spin outs or start up companies and these are all slightly different models.
[00:08:19] Mairi Gibbs: Yeah. So each of those is a different legal mechanism really for carrying out a partnership and of course, companies can interface directly with the university through sponsored research as well. So, briefly, the difference between them. Consultancy is about expertise or service work where an individual academic or a group of academics from a department are solving problems for a company. Maybe it's technical work or getting some samples tested, something like that, or scientific advisory board work. A license is an arm's length transaction of intellectual property between us, who holds the IP, and the outside company that already exists, like, for example, the malaria vaccine license to the Serum Institute of India and then a venture creation, a spin out company, is still a license of technology. That's still the mechanism for transferring the rights in the asset, but we're creating a new company to partner with and then that company, of course, will need people to work in it, it will need investment, it will need a website and logos and a place to park itself and all of those things.
[00:09:19] Susannah de Jager: And out of those three, which do you see growing the most over the next five years?
[00:09:26] Mairi Gibbs: It's all of them because they go hand in hand. Really often, almost always, a spin out company will have some consultancy that goes from the academics into the company. So yes, it's a venture creation and it's a consultancy and that doesn't get so much attention, but it's nonetheless true. Similarly with a license, there might often be some consultancy that goes alongside it. So we don't view it as a binary, you do one thing and therefore you can't do the other, actually often it's a partnership with multiple facets to it and often we use all of those mechanisms. So, hopefully all of it's going to grow.
[00:10:00] Susannah de Jager: Wonderful. I look forward to seeing the stats. When you create these companies, there's a huge amount that as a TTO you can help with, and as you outlined briefly, are responsible for. Would you mind going into a little bit more detail on the things that when people create a company with OUI that you are able to support?
[00:10:19] Mairi Gibbs: Sure. So we have a dedicated person working with each company and their job really is to help smooth the path and to make it happen and that might include, working out how to protect the IP and managing the patents, paying for the patents, which we doin the early days, before it goes to the company. It might include helping the founders to identify management to come in. It might include working with the founders to establish the business model for the company and to scope out what the plans for the business might be. It might be some early market conversations, and oftentimes we might be exploring licensing routes and spin out routes in parallel. So that process of market engagement to understand where does this stuff best fit? What's the route? Where is it going to have most traction in the outside world? Those are important activities that we support with and then as the venture gets closer to what we call completion, when the, investment money actually comes in, it gets a bit more transactional and there are legal agreements and negotiations and that sort of thing.
[00:11:16] Susannah de Jager: So it's vast. I mean, it's such a wide remit because these companies are tiny that you're helping them with everything.
[00:11:22] Mairi Gibbs: Well, they don't exist, you see, until they get created and so all of the things that are needed for that company need to be thought about. So yes, it's huge.
[00:11:31] Susannah de Jager: Really, really interesting and then when you get to that point where it's formed, you talk about the investment coming in. Can you talk a little bit about the continuation of that journey for, I appreciate none of them are probably regular and they're all a bit different, but how might that look as they go and evolve from that point?
[00:11:46] Mairi Gibbs: Yeah, so typically there would be a, we call it a seed investment round, which is the initial investment that comes into the company on its formation and that will take the company for its first, maybe couple of years, maybe three years and typically during that period, the business will be building out its team, hopefully making some headway with whatever it is it's setting out to do. Maybe there will be some technical development work that's needed or some early engagement with customers. So these are really important early stage activities for the company. It'll be establishing its identity, hopefully it'll be thinking about what sort of business do we want to be for our staff? How shall we grow this as a business? And then typically there's a sort of funding escalator. It's relatively rare for that initial investment to be the only investment that one of these ventures needs in order to get it. through to profitable sustainability. So typically there would be a series A, a series B, growth capital, depending on the growth journey for the business and of course, during that, hopefully there'll be getting some partnerships in, there'll be some money coming in. So it's not purely a burn model.
[00:12:49] Susannah de Jager: And do you stay involved all the way up through that stack or do you find that your engagement lessens as companies become more independent?
[00:12:55] Mairi Gibbs: It changes over time. So pre formation, we're working really hand in hand with the researchers and the investors to prepare that business. Post formation, we'll have a license agreement, so there's a licensee licenseor side to it, and we'll hold a shareholding for the university. So there's a shareholding management arrangement. We're not able to provide sort of hands-on practical support for the day-to-day business of growing a company, 'cause there's lots of them and not so many of us and actually they need to learn to stand on their own two feet as well. It needs to be their business. They have to have ownership of it.
[00:13:34] Susannah de Jager: Wonderful.
[00:13:35] So the spin out review that was co authored by Irene Tracey spoke about a lot of the structural issues and challenges, but also the opportunities for UK universities. One of the things that I think lots of people might have been surprised by was that many of these tech transfer offices are loss making for universities and that they haven't seen a return. You obviously are making some money, but where are you on that side of things and how do you hope that will evolve?
[00:14:03] Mairi Gibbs: Yeah. I mean, it is a super important question. You know, universities are all over the news at the moment for the parlous state of their finances and we're in an environment where student fees have been capped for the last five years and of course we all know that level of inflation that we've had. Universities costs have gone up enormously through that period of time. Brexit has affect in the visa rules, has reduced the numbers of international students coming in, which was a profitable activity for universities. So that income stream has shrunk, the costs have gone up. On the research side, the public research funders do not pay the full economic costs of their research, they pay a contribution towards it and they pay the direct costs of the research programme. But universities have to make up that gap. So universities are making a loss on their teaching and a loss on their research. So it's really essential that there's some mechanism to make at least a little bit of money down the line from future commercial returns from the outputs of that work.
[00:15:03] In Oxford, you know, OUI operates at a large enough scale of portfolio that we are able to pay for ourselves and to provide some returns back into the university. But in many universities in this country, most universities in this country, that's not the case and we have the Higher Education Innovation Fund from the government, which underpins the costs of running knowledge exchange technology transfer activities and in Oxford, we do have some HEIF and it pays for things like student entrepreneurship and work to foster diversity work to support the researchers in gaining translational funding.
[00:15:41] Susannah de Jager: And how do you think any of that will change given some of Rachel Reeves' recent announcements?
[00:15:47] Mairi Gibbs: You know, we're waiting to see the detail of course. There was a line in the budget about proof of concept funding, which was very welcome. So this is pre-seed investment money to help to de-risk early stage basic research and help it take those first few steps towards something that looks like an investable proposition and we're really short of it in this country, so that's really welcome. It's still not very much money when you think about the over three and a half thousand disclosures that come into the universities in this country per year, but absolutely welcome and a step in the right direction. So that's a good start and then we'll see what happens.
[00:16:21] Susannah de Jager: They seem to have read the spin out review, which is positive,
[00:16:24] Mairi Gibbs: It's a really good start, yeah, because so much work went into the spin out review. They really did it properly with consultation from all of the interested groups of parties and anybody wanting to disregard it and start again would have to go through substantially the same process and they would find substantially the same things and they did a really great job on it.
[00:16:42] Susannah de Jager: No, it's really excellent and one of the other things that came out in that report, which I think was very good at dispelling a myth and Irene Tracy and I have spoken about that on this podcast, but the point around equity shares and the perception historically and indeed the reality, but it's changed a lot in more recent years, that UK universities take a higher percentage of share equity than their US counterparts and this is something you and I have discussed. I'd love to hear a little bit more about, how you see those levels being set and whether the review has helped some of those discussions become faster.
[00:17:18] Mairi Gibbs: Yeah, so the thing that the review has done is to endorse what really good practice looks like, and shortly before the review was announced, we launched, so we, Oxford, in collaboration with a number of other major universities, launched the USIT Guide University Spin-Out Investment Terms. USIT.
[00:17:36] Susannah de Jager: Catchy.
[00:17:37] Mairi Gibbs: Catchy, I know, see what we did there! And so that was collaborative work done by a number of universities, ten, that have substantive deal flow, working with investors, working with the lawyers that often advise on these transactions to try and identify what does good look like and what's an appropriate landing zone that recognises the needs of investors to make a good return. Of course, themselves, they're putting the capital in at risk, recognises the need to incentivise the individuals working in that company who are going to be driving success and recognises the contributions of the university and the founding academic team. So that USIT guide set out a landing zone across licensing terms, particularly for life sciences, and equity as well.
[00:18:22] So it doesn't say exactly this is what you must do. It says, these are the things that are important or likely to be very important to the key players in your spin out company and here's a landing zone where you might find that you end up. So hopefully it shortcuts at least some of the negotiation into it. Oxford's choice has been to try and grease the wheels and standardise to make it as easy as possible for as many companies as possible. So we have a standard equity policy, which is 20 to the university, 80 to the founding team and that's always with no anti dilution provisions. So we thoroughly anticipate and expect that as soon as any investment comes in, the university share will be diminished because of that dilutive effect of the capital investment and that's how UK investors prefer to structure their deals. So we as a university anticipate that we'll easily be down well below 10 percent certainly by the time there's been Series A investment. Having done all of the work that I mentioned that we do to support those companies in their formation activities. In the U. S. it works really, really differently. So many of the offices in the universities are technology licensing offices, as opposed to tech transfer, which we have in the UK and that language is deliberate because they only do the licensing. They protect the IP and they license it and the entrepreneurs and the investors get together with the academics and they do all of that hard work of scoping the business, putting the plans together. They form the company and then they come to the TLO for a license. So there's much less work for the university offices in preparing those businesses and also in the US, typically their much smaller number will be protected by anti dilution provisions. So although the headline percent number is much smaller, actually it's protected and we end up typically in the same place by the end of Series A.
[00:20:20] Susannah de Jager: I thought that was really interesting in the report was that kind of worked example that literally showed in a table, this is typically where it ends up. You've illuminated very clearly on what the differences are there and I think it's really important to do so because there is a lot of comparison and often it's not terribly favourable because people always want to argue that, other people should take less equity.
[00:20:41] I did have a conversation the other day where it was talking to somebody who said, lots of life sciences companies are ultimately eyeballing the US market because it's got such a large healthcare market. It's often the best first adopter for a product and with that in mind, often it's US investors that they may be already looking at. So you've said yourself that this is very much what's typical in the UK. Have you considered that perhaps there might be templates for both and that people can select, well actually we are eyeballing the US and therefore non dilutive equity that starts at a lower number, which would be more familiar, would be preferable to us?
[00:21:17] Mairi Gibbs: Yes, there are universities in the UK that have already experimented with that model, so it's absolutely not ruled out. The question is still how do we actually get it out of the door in the first place? Because if that initial investment is more likely to be from local investors who can work with the company hands on in that very early stage, they've got to agree to the terms and if they won't like anti-dilution provisions, we can set it up like that with a view to the US investors who might come in at Series A. But if we can't get the seed done, there won't be any company to go and search for that Series A. So it's not a terribly straightforward thing and of course, with any provision that goes into the company at a very early stage, there's a risk that it might get written out at later rounds. So it does need really careful thought.
[00:22:07] Susannah de Jager: That seems a fair response. It's never as simple as it sounds or looks.
[00:22:11] Mairi Gibbs: Yeah, it's not a never, but, also not very straightforward.
[00:22:14] Susannah de Jager: No, understood. So, in terms of your resources, you've outlined just how much you do and very importantly outline the difference that it's not a TLO, a Tech Licensing Office, it's a tech transfer with a much wider remit and offering for your companies. So, one of the things that people talk about is not just the terms you come to, it's how long it takes, which is clearly very important. Can you talk about typical timeframes that you see and what you're able to do to expedite things?
[00:22:42] Mairi Gibbs: Something that we've done, we know speed is important and something that we've done to try and expedite it is to set out really clearly what our terms are. So this, sort of greased rails approach that I talked about. So Oxford offers an express license for spin outs on their inception. It's publicly available on a website, so any founders, any investors can go and read it and they know what they will be getting with those terms and it's up to them whether they take those terms or not. they have the choice. If they want to negotiate from scratch, then they're absolutely able to do so, and we'll do that for them and we'll work with them to create a license that really fits their company. But if they want to go fast, the fastest way is take the license and don't argue with it. and we see some founders, some investors, some professional advisors who think that there must be a negotiation and if there isn't a negotiation, somehow they haven't done a good enough job or something.
[00:23:35] Susannah de Jager: What, like in Monty Python, you've got to haggle?
[00:23:38] Mairi Gibbs: That for us, sometimes it feels a bit like that because, you know, we have these terms which are squarely within the USIT guide landing zone, 80 to the founders, 20 to the university with expectation of full dilution. We have an express license, which is very friendly in terms of its financial terms for the spin out company with legal terms, which we pre-negotiated with our partner investor, Oxford Science Enterprises. It's been road tested through many, many companies. So they're fair terms. So you could just sign them rather than arguing!
[00:24:15] So sometimes there is a negotiation dance because at least some of the people there feel that that's somehow necessary. The other thing, you know, of course, we talked about resourcing. Sometimes that's a factor, I wish it weren't, but we're in a constrained financial environment in the university. The other thing that may not be visible to the outside is that often the university will need to be negotiating with third parties in order to have the rights to be able to make this thing happen at all. So there may be collaborating institutions that worked with the Oxford academics to develop that IP, whatever it is and so, of course, we have to take those rights into account. If there's been funding from the big medical charities, they always have rights to give consent. So often that behind the scenes work with the university's partners and funders is completely shielded from the founding teams and the investors. But nonetheless, the thing can't happen without that. So not all of the things that are in the critical path are within the university's control.
[00:25:10] Susannah de Jager: I have a lot of sympathy with that. When I hear you describe it and you use the word shielded, I think it's very important that they're not necessarily subject to it. It does seem that when you are dealing with the complaints that the communication of that would be very important. I presume you do say, listen, this is where we are, this is what you can expect, and it's not all in our hands.
[00:25:28] Mairi Gibbs: I think we try, but I'm not in every single conversation, of course, to know exactly how that plays out.
[00:25:33] Susannah de Jager: Because it does feel like some of this is things you're subject to rather than in control of.
[00:25:38] Mairi Gibbs: Some of it for sure is communication.
[00:25:40] Susannah de Jager: So you talked briefly there about the relationship with OSE. I'd love to hear a little bit more about how that typically works, what the terms are, because it's a very established player, they've brought a huge amount of money into the ecosystem, but often people don't understand where you stop and they begin.
[00:25:57] Mairi Gibbs: Sure, so in terms of how we're structured, the ownership is completely different. So that's the first thing to say. OUI is wholly owned by the university, it's really clear who we work for. OSE is an external, independent company structure with a very large balance sheet. The university has a minority stake in OSE, but most of OSE is owned by its investors. So they're outside the university and we have a partnership. So the role of OUI is to provide a service to researchers to protect the intellectual property, to do what's needed from the university's end to get these new ventures out of the door. OSE has a role in venture building and supporting that planning process for the new companies, both before creation and after initial investment and they provide the money. So the shortest terms I can come to is it's our job to get them to the front door of the university and OSE's job to fund them and grow them and OSE has deep pockets, but the scale of the opportunity is absolutely enormous. So we don't have an exclusive relationship with them. They don't invest in all companies, they make their own investment decisions. The academics also have complete freedom whether they accept investment funding from OSE. So we have many investors that come in at seed stage or that come in in the later funding round. So it really is an inclusive investment ecosystem.
[00:27:20] Susannah de Jager: And so just to dig into that a little bit further, if OSE don't want to invest, how does the picture then look for a company?
[00:27:27] Mairi Gibbs: Well, we're just then out in the market, trying to find an investor that's the right fit and of course, there are many reasons why osE might not invest. They have particular sectors that they're more interested in than some others. They're balancing their own portfolios. So, it may be that for a particular company, it's a great opportunity, but the fit just isn't quite right with what OSE is looking for in that moment in time. So then OUI will support that business going out to the wider market to find investors.
[00:27:54] Susannah de Jager: And how does that work with the equity stake? Because if my understanding is correct, the 20 percent that you have in your standard terms is already pre-negotiated with Oxford Science Enterprises. Would they effectively give up their equity stake and then that would be available to other investors or does that get retained by them?
[00:28:10] Mairi Gibbs: No, that's retained by them under our partnership arrangement. So the 20 is 10 to university, 10 to OSE, for companies from the science divisions of the university.
[00:28:20] Susannah de Jager: So that's very clear. The 20 percent sits with you and OSE and if OSE don't want to give further investment, you would then go out to the market. So I know that the university itself can also invest in that you have a pool of capital. How does that typically work?
[00:28:35] Mairi Gibbs: Yeah, so we have two methods. There's a university challenge seed fund, which typically makes investments ahead of the seed investment to do that translational proof of concept type work and then that's structured basically like a convertible loan note so that the university gets some equity at the same price as the investors, but the money has gone in previously and then also we're able to invest on behalf of the university as the company grows through the later rounds and that's the one bit of activity that happens at OUI, which is really focused on maximising the returns because we're investing on behalf of the university's endowment.
[00:29:11] Susannah de Jager:
[00:29:11] Taking a step back from investment side of things, I'd love to know a little bit about how you add your weight to the entrepreneurship culture within the university.
[00:29:20] Mairi Gibbs: Yeah, it's this really important topic because of course, if we don't have researchers wanting to get involved with this, then we're not going to do any new amazing things. So the university, the main structure that it has is a initiative called EnSpire and that provides entrepreneurship training and inspiration and skills development. It's, I would say, probably particularly aimed at the student body, but their sessions are open to anybody in the university and the idea there is to have these sessions with really inspiring speakers to help people open their eyes to the world of entrepreneurship and start to think about what that might mean. there's build a business courses that they can go on, there's pitch practice sessions that they can go on, all sorts of different activities that are freely available to anybody within the university to help foster that interest and skillset for entrepreneurship and oUI is partnered with EnSpire so help deliver some of that and then when those entrepreneurship teams get to the point that they're ready to form a business, they can come to OUI and if it's a spin out with university employees and research outputs, that's a spin out in our terminology, or if it's a student team or maybe somebody who's recently finished a postdoc, then they can come into our startup incubator and they can get really focused support for getting the company moving done through that mechanism.
[00:30:43] Susannah de Jager: Amazing and you spoke there about the university, but something that from my perspective as somebody living in Oxford, but not actually part of the university, in spite of my interest in Oxford+ and all of this, I know lots of people with amazing business backgrounds who are living here and sometimes it can feel a bit us and them, town and gown, and that there isn't that sort of inclusivity with people that might help build ventures or bring business backgrounds in. Do you have outreach to people like that at all?
[00:31:12] Mairi Gibbs: Yeah, it's a really tricky one because we know there's such a huge potential in the city of Oxford and in Oxfordshire. I think for the university in terms of the support that OUI provides, we have to be focused on support to the university. But, you know, we're really fortunate in Oxford. We've got the Oxford Trust that runs all sorts of incubator space. We've got Advanced Oxford, which is a sort of membership organisation that helps to glue together the business parks, local business, works with the local government, as does the university, to try and foster entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship support across the county and the region.
[00:31:50] Susannah de Jager: Yeah and I saw that you've launched your Venture Scouts programme. you speak a little bit more about that?
[00:31:55] Mairi Gibbs: Yeah. So it's a really exciting initiative, we ran a pilot last year, which was really fantastically successful. So it's aimed at building founding teams that are really capable. We know we've got wonderful scientists, wonderful researchers, but typically they might not have the skills or the desire to go and be a CEO of a new business. So we need that entrepreneur, that business manager, that leadership in the company and that typically won't be the founding researchers. They want to stay in the university, carrying on doing their research thing. So the venture scouts is a programme where we've worked with the Said Business School, because there we've got an amazing crew of people who are business minded and who have those entrepreneurial skill sets. So we've recruited a cohort of venture scouts from the business school, from their current student body. We've given them some training so that they understand what it is to do a spin out in the university. They understand what needs to be navigated there and what we look for in spin out entrepreneurs and then we've let them loose in the university. Well, they're loose in the university anyway, but we've set them the mission to go and find something really interesting and so they've been out, finding really interesting groups of researchers to align with and out of that has come a number of invention disclosures that we wouldn't previously have had, there are quite a few new venture creation teams involving now an entrepreneur, as well as those researchers. So it's trying to grow really capable, rounded teams that are capable of building a business before they leave the university. So it's really exciting. It was quite a small cohort in the pilot, but it was so successful that we're going to do it again and hopefully carry on.
[00:33:38] Susannah de Jager: Amazing. I really like that idea and again, it's something that came out in the spin out review was this thing of often you have world leading universities next to the business schools and historically, it was not that well blended and so it's really encouraging to hear that this work is being done.
[00:33:53] Mairi Gibbs: Yeah and you know, the EnSpire programme that I mentioned is led by Thomas Hellman, who's professor of entrepreneurship in the business school as well. So, we try and be really connected with our business school.
[00:34:02] Susannah de Jager: That makes a lot of sense. So Mairi, thank you. This has been a really, really interesting conversation.
[00:34:08] Please, can you tell me before we finish, what would be your primary goals for the next five years? What is it you really want to see evolve under your leadership?
[00:34:18] Mairi Gibbs: Yeah. You know, we just need to do a lot more of this. The university has huge, huge ambitions. They need more financial returns to meet those financial pressures that I mentioned earlier. We all want to see much bigger, broader impact. So it's a huge opportunity for OUI. Our Vice Chancellor, Irene Tracey, now talks about three limbs to our academic mission of teaching, of course, research, of course and the third limb is innovation. So it has focus and priority and vision in the university in a way that it hasn't previously had. So that's really exciting to be a part of.
[00:34:54] So that's the opportunity and the challenge for OUI. How much can we achieve over these next five years? And of course, you know, these things take a long time to come to fruition. It's typically 10 to 14 years for a spin out company to grow to the point where it's capable of a really great exit event. So a lot of the things that you'll hear about as success over the next five years aren't going to be what we're working on, that's going to be the result of things that are already in the can from, a lot of hard work over the last five or eight years or so.
[00:35:25] But you know, we've got such a lot of exciting companies in the portfolio we highlight a few in our annual report, but our new spin out match bio raised four and a half million pounds in its seed round early this year and that's working on immunotherapies for cancer. We highlight Mixergy, which is a spin out from eight or nine years ago and that's really smart hot water tanks. They've partnered with Birmingham City Council to install their tanks in council accommodation across the city. So it's a much smaller scale thing than trying to develop a new medication for really intractable conditions, but it saves money for those people in those houses and saves carbon as well, of course, which is so important and that's just two examples. So there's going to be a huge amount of interest I think over this next five years from stuff that's already in the portfolio as that work from earlier times starts to mature and really get their products to the marketplace and we're going to be working as hard as we can to make the next generation happen as well.
[00:36:23] Susannah de Jager: Well, I wish you all the best with it. It's really very exciting to see and I think what you're doing is so important.
[00:36:30] Mairi Gibbs: Thank you very much.
[00:36:31] Susannah de Jager: Thanks for listening to this episode of Oxford+ presented by me, Susannah de Jager. If you want to stay up to date with all things Oxford+, please visit our website OxfordPlus. co. uk and sign up for our newsletter so you never miss an update. Oxford Plus was made in partnership with Mishcon de Reya and is produced and edited by Story Ninety-Four.
