Oxford overhauls spin-out policy

OXFORD academics will no longer be forced to hand over half their companies to the university, after it overhauled its spin-out policy in the wake of Covid-19 breakthroughs.

The University of Oxford has introduced a new policy which means that academics or professors will automatically retain a larger stake in the businesses they set up while at the university.

Up until last month, the university took as much as a 50pc stake in businesses spun out of academic research, something it argued was justified because it provided resources such as “the setting for the development of the technology and the spin-out”.

However, Oxford has now revamped the policy so that it will take only a 20pc stake in most spin-out companies. In some cases, the split will be 90pc for researchers and 10pc for the university.

Oxford University said the change was pushed through to “foster innovation and entrepreneurship in order to maximise the global impact of the University’s research and expertise”.

It comes after The Daily Telegraph revealed frustrations within various university departments in 2017 over the policy. One professor branded Oxford “the worst university in the world for commercialisation”.

Nando de Freitas, a former Oxford University professor who co-founded Dark Blue Labs, now part of Google’s artificial intelligence company Deepmind, accused the university on Twitter of “destroying UK innovation”.

Oxford said the decision to overhaul the policy was made by its academics.

Nando de Freitas, a former Oxford professor, accused the university of ‘destroying UK innovation’