It was great to be at the 10th birthday party of ICURe in Manchester today. So many great things I could talk about, but I particularly want to highlight the wonderfully upbeat key note speech from Andrew Williamson of Cambridge Innovation Capital. He basically congratulated our spin out ecosystem's investors, funders, entrepreneurs and advisors for its development from almost nothing 25 years ago into a world leader. So having been part of that ecosystem for all this time, it’s great to hear!
He also made a very interesting and important point that the UK doesn’t have many large companies that invest heavily in R&D, so universities are our main innovation and growth engine, and we need to be good at it. The good news is that we are very good at university spin outs, and our statistics from the golden triangle and other Russell Group of Universities are every bit as good as US universities. Our research groups are world leading and in many cases better than anywhere else in the world.
We are really good at the process of developing and spinning out university start-ups and ICURe has proven to be a very effective. Spin-out terms and share splits are a long way down the path to standardisation towards those set out in the spin-out review. https://lnkd.in/e3HBPwuG This is the optimum balance between the founders and investors whilst recognising vital university input. Investors should get behind them.
In short, this is something to celebrate whilst recognising that there is still much we can do do make something good into something even better.
Thank you Lisa Hazelden, Tony Walker and the rest of your team for putting on such an outstanding event.
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