Jim Wilkinson, the chief financial officer at the University of Oxford’s venture capital vehicle Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI), has highlighted investment opportunities were being missed at universities during a talk at the GCV Digital Forum this week.
Wilkinson spoke about how universities could play a pivotal role in solving the world’s biggest problems, by turning cutting-edge science into technologies and innovations.
“It is important to recognise that for a large part of the 20th century, the corporate lab was responsible for researching and commercialising many of the most important technologies of the last century. But for the last 40 years, we have seen corporate innovation dwindle.”
Research as a percentage of corporate research and development has fallen from 30% of total spending in 1985, to 20% in 2015, according to data from the National Science Foundation.
Wilkinson said: “So less corporate dollars on finding the science and more corporate dollars on development. This is translating into a reduction in innovation from corporates.”
Wilkinson expressed that breakthrough research was shifting from being conducted at commercial labs to university labs.
He detailed how OSI was working to enable scientists and entrepreneurs to build companies which would address world’s biggest challenges and commercialise academic research.