Comparing Research Commercialisation Across Irish Universities

Posted on September 9, 2021 by seanmulvany

Last night Knowledge Transfer Ireland published their Annual Knowledge Transfer Survey. The survey provides an overview of Irish third level Research Performing Organisation (RPO) funding, industry collaboration levels and commercialisation activities related to research through spin outs or licensing of IP to existing companies. The survey covers universities, institutes of technology, state research bodies and technological universities.

Adapted from AKTS report.

Some €636M was spent in 2020 on research by RPOs in Ireland. I restrict myself to university performance here.

8 universities accounted for 76% of the €636M spent on research by RPOs .

One of the first challenges that arises in comparing commercialisation performance and industry interaction is that each university naturally has a different amount of funding or research scale. One way to normalise for comparison purposes is therefore to look at performance against key metrics of commercialisation success and industry interaction per €10M research spend.

Invention Disclosures per €10M Spend on Research

In the first instance, I chose to look at Invention Disclosure Form (IDFs) levels as these are a measure of how much of the research is of possible commercial interest. They are filled in and submitted to the university Technology Transfer Office when a researcher has some new work they feel is ready to be the basis of some intellectual property protection and subsequent licence to industry or a spin out. As such, IDFs can be though of as being at the start of the commercialisation pipeline in a university. The average is 6.4 IDFs per €10M spent.

Licences, Options and Assignments per €10M Research Spend

Spin Outs per €10M Research Spend

At the the other end of the commercialisation funnel, we have a measure of how many of the technologies arising from research that are captured by IDFs are then actually commercialised. This occurs via agreements to licence, assign or option (LOAs) the technology and intellectual property in question to a company. For especially disruptive technologies, a spin out or new company is often the entity an LOA is given to and these are captured here, too.

I’d note that Dublin City University (disclosure of my own – I work there) is doing comparatively well. DCU has the highest level of IDFs per €10M, NUIM the lowest but the other universities are clustered around the mean. DCU also does well in commercialising its research via LOAs and spin outs. It’s notable that spin outs suffer from the law of small numbers in that it’s a metic that can move markedly around a small base each year in each institution. Hence there are some zeros this year.

The AKTS survey contains a very good overview of other trends. For examples, there seems to be a decline overall in patentable IP being commercialised whereas other other forms of intellectual property such as the copyright inherent in software is increasing in importance to industry. An average of 28 spinouts emerge from the third level sector – this year there were 30, of which 25 arose from the universities. There were a total of 39 new product and service launches in 2020 arising from licences of IP from the third level concluded in recent years.

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Q2 2021 Investment Data

Posted on August 30, 2021 by seanmulvany
Source: https://www.ivca.ie

Yesterday, the Irish Venture Capital Association released their most recent quarterly overview of venture investments made in Irish companies. Of the 58 investments worth €392M for which they have data, details are shown here for 38 for which they’ve published further information. This quarter, it’s Software and Lifescience plays by number in the lead.

Source: https://www.ivca.ie

Looking at the amounts invested, it’s notable that just two investments (Let’s Get Checked with €123M and Wayflyer with €62M) accounted for almost half of all the investment made in Q2. A fuller breakdown of the data is available from IVCA. They note two other trends of interest. Firstly, there is a near halving of investments in the €1M to €5M range, the range we see many of our university spin outs active in. It is to be hoped that this is just a temporary blip and indeed the year to date data for Q1 and Q2 combined shows overall health for this stratum of investment. Secondly, there is a big increase in activity by non-Irish investors with some 70% of funds raised coming from abroad in the year to date. Whilst this likely reflects the quality of investments to be found here, becoming too reliant on mobile capital that can go anywhere else in the world is a risk.

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On State Aid

Posted on August 27, 2021 by seanmulvany

A big part of my job that I greatly enjoy is working collaboratively with companies and seeing them commercialise our research. The topic of state aid often comes up and requires some explanation. I think my colleague Peter Olwell has provided a great primer on the topic and why it’s unfortunately relevant but manageable. I reproduce the article here with the author’s permission.

Universities, Industry and State Aid

By Peter Olwell

We work with a variety of companies in university technology transfer offices. Many want to commercialise the university’s research or to partially or wholly pay to co-design a research project to help compete against their competitors in the market. When companies engage with a university, they may often feel that intellectual property owned by the university should be provided to them at reduced, or less than market cost, or even for free. This belief is honestly held and based on the idea that universities are essentially charities, serving the public good by providing education and conducting research. This idea is reinforced by government policy which aims to maximise innovation and research in companies by promoting collaboration with and licensing from the university. However, what is often missing from this view is an understanding of what is permissible under competition law, and the legal constraints  a part of competition law called ‘State Aid Rules’ place on universities and on companies. Here, I outline what these constraints are and how we are obliged to adhere to them. With a better understanding of the controls that are in place and why they are there, it should become clearer how these issues can be managed in a way that leads to successful collaborations. 

What are these State Aid Rules and why do they matter?

EU Member States could distort competition if they were free to give unlimited aid to indigenous industries but withhold it at-will from their competitors elsewhere in the EU. For the purposes of this article such aid might include intellectual property owned by the university. In such a free-for-all scenario, if left unchecked, each Member State would find it necessary to maintain or increase subsidies to indigenous companies to help them compete in a market where every other company was receiving similar subsidies from their own governments. Such a scenario would disrupt free trade and unbalance the single market. The EU developed what are called ‘State Aid Rules’ to prevent this, by regulating how and when Member States might legitimately grant aid to industry without distorting competition. These rules are at the core to how the single market functions and were baked-in to its design from the beginning. Non-compliant companies are open to prosecution if they commercialise state-funded research without due regard to these rules. This last point is of crucial importance – it is the beneficiary of the State Aid, the company in the case of an Industry-University collaboration, that is liable for prosecution and fines.

How to comply with State Aid Rules

The EU Commission can exempt any subsidy from State Aid Rules, but does this sparingly using legal instruments such as the EU “Research Framework” which allows universities to licence state-funded IP without breaching State Aid Rules. 

For example, Irish funding agencies such as Enterprise Ireland and SFI co-fund programmes where companies and universities work together without breaching 

State Aid Rules through careful adherence to the Framework. To comply, these projects must be what are called ‘true collaborations’, where the project is jointly scoped and both parties share the risks and upsides of the collaboration. If it is a ‘true collaboration’ then no illegal State Aid is considered to be granted where one of the following criteria is true:

  1. the company funds the full economic cost of the project, or 
  2. all results are published with no exclusive access for the company, or 
  3. the resulting IP is divided between the company and the university according to their contribution to that piece of IP or finally 
  4. the university receives the market price for the IP, (through royalty or an assignment fee) in return for providing the rights needed to commercialise it. In most cases company’s prefer this 4th option as they require exclusive access to any IP that is generated in return for co-funding a project.

How is the Market Price for IP established?

Rulings from the EU Commission demonstrate that robust arms-length negotiation between a university and company is sufficient to establish the fair market value of a particular piece of IP. To facilitate these negotiations each Irish University has a technology transfer office funded by Knowledge Transfer Ireland (KTI) to ensure that arm’s length negotiations with companies occur in compliance with competition law. By ensuring that IP is not “given away” these offices protect the university and company from potential prosecution and resulting fines. This requirement by the Universities to negotiate the market price for IP can cause confusion among companies who view Universities as non-market players, and only makes sense when viewed through the lens of Competition Law.

Take home

We in the technology transfer offices and our researchers are keen to engage with companies. In doing so, we get to work on real-world problems and make a difference by helping bring the new products and services to the market. In outlining the relevance of state aid to such collaborations, I hope to reduce the scope for misunderstanding about how we all can effectively engage and work together. 

To learn more about this issue, I recommend you go to KTI website and read the short guide to the National IP Protocol.

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An Introduction To Sailing

Posted on July 21, 2021 by seanmulvany

This gallery contains 3 photos.

Just back from completing one of the things on the bucket list – learning to sail, or at least learning a little. The Irish National Sailing and Powerboat School offer a variety of courses from their base on the West … Continue reading →

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More Ideas For Places To Go – Ancient Art and Monuments

Posted on June 29, 2021 by seanmulvany
https://seanmulvany.github.io/PrehistoricIrishRockart/

As part of the ongoing search for ideas for day trips and things to do on longer holidays, the National Monuments Service both preserves historically important structures and provides a good deal of information about them and their history. One of their recently updated lists caught my interest, that of the locations of rock art across Ireland with many dating back thousands of years. The raw data files are available at the national open data site. I’ve used this data to put together an interactive map of the locations by rock art by type.

One of the most common ancient types of rock art are cupmarked stones. These are large stones or rocks that were worked by people in the past to have hemispherical indentation. A great explanation with lots of examples is available here.

Passage tombs are also sites of rock art. The most famous in Newgrange are UNESCO protected and, constructed over 5000 years ago, older than the pyramids. More, including how the passages are aligned to allow the sun into their inner chambers only during the solstice at https://www.knowth.com.

The more mysterious and very rare examples in this data are the cursing stones. Very few examples survive as they were systematically destroyed by the church during the 19th century. From folk tradition, they functioned as places where curses could be placed on others by creating symbols from stones and chanting a formula. A description of the ritual and some of the sites is here.

Finally, there’s the general rock art category for all other ancient markings on rock surfaces.

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Some Ideas For Places To Go In Ireland This Summer

Posted on June 20, 2021 by seanmulvany
https://seanmulvany.github.io/attractionmap/

I was looking for some inspiration for holidaying in Ireland again this year. With changeable travel rules and the rise of the delta variant, it’s hard to plan anything abroad this summer. The nice people at Bord Failte provide a list of places and locations of interest to visit in Ireland. I put together an interactive map of the data – available at https://seanmulvany.github.io/attractionmap/. Hopefully it provides some suggestions and ideas!

Note that the map Key also functions as a toggle switch for the various attraction categories.

Beach list below.

List of Notable Irish Beaches
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Improving Judgment and Decision Making

Posted on June 16, 2021 by seanmulvany

Almost a decade ago, Daniel Kahneman published ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ about a lifetime of research, with colleague Amos Tversky, into biases and shortcuts people take in making judgements. It was the topic of conversation for months afterwards with investors and entrepreneurs as they discussed how best to integrate the many (more than a hundred now) biases and shortcuts that reliably lead people astray.

In the years since, however, I’m not sure that decision making has appreciably approved anywhere by taking this information into account. Kahneman has been asked how much he has improved his own decisions in light of his findings – not very much at all is the answer. Biases are hard for their owners to detect and counteract in the moment as a sort of bias bias or bias blind spot. We know in the abstract about the things that might affect our decisions but can’t correct for them in the moment. In this light, Kahneman’s new book, ‘Noise’, on research into random variability in decision making elicited some trepidation. Hearing yet more about how terrible your brain is at doing fundamental things without a method to improve is a counsel of despair.

As a bit of definition, bias is where judgment is consistently and predictably clustered around a point of error whereas noise is the unpredictable and arbitrary wrongness of a judgment in any direction. Both compound to negatively affect good (or at least better) judgment. Usefully, the authors of Noise offer some helpful guidance here on improving decision making. In respect of bias, the appointment of a ‘Decision Observer’ is suggested. This is based on the observation that people, with some training, are better at recognising bias in others than themselves. Obviously, having a Decision Observer on tap critiquing and improving decisions isn’t feasible much of the time but it is potentially practical in particularly impactful decisions and for strategy adoption for boards and for individuals.

With respect to noise or scatter in judgments, a trichotomy is suggested. Level noise is exemplified by generally lenient vs severe trial judges. Take any judge on the spectrum of lenient to severe and, additionally, occasion noise comes into play – the time of day, the weather, how their team is faring, mood can all cause noise or random variability in decisions. Finally, there is the largest contributor to noisy decisions, pattern noise. Even taking into account the level noise (a lenient judge say) and the factors around occasion noise, decisions are still noisy and have a lot of scatter. This matters because the errors in each case don’t necessarily cancel out. The example of insurers with noisy underwriting giving a huge payout in one example and very little in another of a similar type of case leads to a financial loss for the insurer in the first and the loss of a customer in the second. Following from this, one method of reducing the noise within each case is to aggregate independent but informed decisions. Another is to use algorithms or rules – these perform better on judgments that are predictions about the future than individuals precisely because they are rules based and not open to bespoke details or particulars in their operation. A consequence of both these approaches is that this makes for a conflict between the desire to take each case on its own merits thereby making a unique, localised determination and the need across all similar decisions to be consistent, fair and avoid errors. It has me thinking about where the balance lies and how to achieve it.

In the latter part of Noise, the use of carefully structured decision making in hiring, as an exemplar, is discussed in depth and evaluated with respect to how well the selected candidate does in the role. The approach seems to have broad utility for improved selection among candidates of interest in many other realms such as venture investment, deciding among collaborations, weighing potential acquisitions, etc. The approach is explored in some depth and it is something I may expand on in a later post.

Overall, the authors make clear that this field of research is at an earlier stage and less developed than that on biases. Nonetheless, the map of the territory is assuredly drawn with as yet unknown terrain identified and, most importantly, possible routes through marked.

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