It’s not rocket science, but we get more innovation when researchers have more control over their work.
As Stuart Buck from The Good Science Project argues for the US, and we argued in Academic to Entrepreneur for the UK, numerous empirical studies show that we should give direct rights to patent and exploit discoveries and inventions to the researchers and inventors responsible, rather than handing these rights over to the universities that employ them.
Take recent Nobel winner Katalin Karikó. She was driven out of academia over a decade ago due to the unpopularity of her work on mRNA – the same discoveries that allowed us to weather the pandemic. Nevertheless, the University of Pennsylvania, which repeatedly demoted her and eventually drove her out, is now making $1.2 billion in royalties from patents on her work – significantly more royalties than any other university in the world.
Buck runs through a lot of the evidence that we also cited in our report. To some extent, the Government-commissioned independent review into spinouts listened to us and others making the case that things aren’t working for spinout founders. But while we expected to be outliers in wanting a return to Professors’ Privilege – which gives academics ownership of the intellectual property they create – until we see evidence to the contrary, we’ll keep making the case for a return to a system that gives power back to innovators.
Growth Boards
The Government’s Women-Led High-Growth Enterprise Taskforce has released its final report. It’s 18 months in the making and covers a lot of ground, but one practical new policy stands out. The idea is to “roll out Female Founder Growth Boards across the regions of England.”
Zandra Moore, co-founder and CEO of Panintelligence and Taskforce member spearheaded a pilot in Leeds to level up local ecosystems for women with high-growth potential with support from the likes of Data City. “These Growth Boards bring together groups of local public and private sector stakeholders to deliver change in the ecosystem, a process kept on track by the Female Founders Dashboards. The dashboards monitor the supporting data, identifying gaps that may negatively impact female entrepreneurs and the progress of their high-growth ventures.”
We also learned from the report that a piece of research we put out back in 2017 has gone on to have a very welcome unintended consequence:
“Research by The Entrepreneurs Network suggests that only 57% of MPs had heard of EIS (and 39% had heard of SEIS) in 2017. This figure has not increased in recent years, which implies MPs could still do more to champion EIS and SEIS in their constituencies. The Taskforce worked with Government to prepare a letter sent to all MPs raising awareness of the schemes amongst MPs and calling to action their local advocacy to female founders. This letter was signed by the Minister for Women, Maria Caulfield; Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Enterprise and Markets, Kevin Hollinrake; and Victoria Atkins, then Financial Secretary to the Treasury.”
It would be good to run this MP survey after the next election. If anyone wants to partner on this with us, do get in touch.
Actual Rocket Science
On the back of my report on Space Startups and Scaleups, UKSEDS – the UK’s National Student Space charity – has got in touch to ask us to share details of a new initiative that they are piloting that aims to challenge the established notion in the student community that space entrepreneurship is only for rocket scientists or STEM majors.
The project seeks to make starting a new space business a more accessible dream – empowering students and young professionals by teaching them about the space industry and entrepreneurship, through a combination of online learning and an in-person event running over March 22-24th in Edinburgh.
They’re looking for anything from sponsorship, training or mentoring support. Drop them an email if you’re keen to help.
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