A good example of consultancy service by university’s technology transfer office is the one that the University of Cambridge provided to the police force of Trinidad and Tobago. The Caribbean country police force needed to consider a complete cultural shift in order to lower crime rates.
The evidence-based approach to hotspot policing, that can reduce violent crime rates by 50%, simply by concentrating police resources where and when they are needed, has been most developed and championed by researchers at the University of Cambridge. Professor Lawrence Sherman, the Director of the University’s Institute of Criminology and its Police Executive Programme, was contracted by the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service through Cambridge Enterprise’s consultancy team to train over 200 police leaders in evidence-based policing, through lectures, seminars, discussions, research projects, data management, supervisions and examinations. Thanks to this consultancy, the nature of police work in the nation of Trinidad and Tobago is now transforming.
For more details please check the following link: https://www.enterprise.cam.ac.uk/case-studies/hot-spot-policing/
Oxford University Innovation gave its students the financial and institutional support to move rapidly from an idea to a trading business. Alumnus of Oxford University had the idea for an online bike-sharing scheme for students, in a peer-to-peer sharing models that could help to bridge the bike-share gap for smaller places with more limited funds, building a new network of alternative transportation in the process.
Starting from this idea, Cycle.land startup was born in April 2016. The Oxford University Startup Incubator supported the birth of Cycle.land. With that support, Cycle.land team was able to build a fast-growing bike-sharing marketplace in Oxford within a few months. They supported the team in translating their idea into a working minimum viable product, validating the business model supporting this product, and running a successful crowdfunding campaign.
Today its rapid growth has encouraged Cycle.land to look beyond Oxford and conceive plans for a global bike-sharing community.
For more details please check the following link: https://innovation.ox.ac.uk/university-members/engaging-social-sciences/cycle-of-success/
Here is an interesting example about how licensing the research of Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven) led to the commercialization of the most common anti-HIV drug. The antiviral agent tenofovir disoproxil fumarate was discovered by researchers of the KU Leuven Rega Institute for Medical Research, in collaboration with researchers of IOCB in Prague and of Gilead Sciences. Drugs containing tenofovir are effective at reducing the HIV-titre in the blood, stopping the infection from being lethal.
Tenofovir was licensed to the American biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, which further developed it and now produces and distributes the drug under the trade name Viread® in exchange for royalty payments to KU Leuven. Tenofovir is also an essential component of other combination drugs and has become the most commonly used anti-HIV drug in the world, with billions of dollars totaled by sales.
The discovery of the phosphonates, the class of compounds to which tenofovir belongs, has also contributed to the creation of the KU Leuven spin-off company Okapi Sciences, which specialises in the development of drugs for the treatment or prevention of viral infections in animals, such as swine fever and foot-and-mouth disease. In 2014, Okapi Sciences was acquired by Aratana Therapeutics.
For more details please check the following link: https://lrd.kuleuven.be/en/ip/cases/the-worlds-leading-anti-hiv-drug
An example of successful collaboration of mutual interest and benefit between universities and companies, in research and education programs, is the one provided by the alliance between Ford and KU Leuven (Catholic University of Leuven).
Ford Motor Company’s Global Research and Advanced Engineering department and KU Leuven entered in a framework agreement, which opened doors for close collaborations and had a positive impact on the number of collaborative research projects. This framework agreement set the rules for defining how projects should be managed and how they are financed, and dealt with intellectual property rights, payments and confidentiality.
Within the framework agreement two projects were approved in the first year of alliance with Ford: one in the University Department of Mechanical Engineering and a second one in the Faculty of Economics and Business.
For more details please check the following link: https://lrd.kuleuven.be/en/news/alliance-between-ford-and-ku-leuven-opens-doors-for-close-collaborations
Here we present the example of the University of Cambridge, which created a spinout from its conducted research thanks to the help of its commercialization arm, Cambridge Enterprise.
The University’s Department of Chemistry has developed a proprietary technology to characterise proteins in a rapid, accurate and cost-effective manner with high-value applications including identifying markers that indicate the onset of diseases in the human body. Therefore, Fluidic Analytics was founded in 2013.
It has raised £1.56 million in a Series A financing led by Cambridge Enterprise, including other co-investors. It funded research into versions for doctors – and later, consumers – by marketing to labs and developed different iterations of the product. The first product is now available in the market.
Fluidic Analytics perfectly illustrates how a University of Cambridge spinout supported by Cambridge Enterprise can merge the work of academics, entrepreneurs and early stage investors to bring potentially world-changing technology to market.
For more details please check the following link:
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