Boosting ideas from universities to the market has no secrets for him: for 30 years, Tom Hockaday has contributed to the development of knowledge transfer in his country, England, where he has led some of this area’s most important institutions.

He began his professional career in 1989 at the University College London, in the very early days of universities starting to manage and organize their interactions with industry. After some years there and at the University of Bristol, in 2000 he returned to his hometown to join Oxford University's technology transfer office. For ten years he directed this office, a worldwide reference called Oxford University Innovation (previously known as Isis Innovation). Since 2016 he works as an independent consultant for different investment funds and universities, the UPF among them. He is also a member of the evaluation panel of the UPF INNOValora program, the University's proof-of-concept support program.

–How would you explain what knowledge transfer is to those who are not familiar with this concept?

In this field there are different terms that mean different things. At the most general, we are talking about how universities and industry, business and investors interact. This is sometimes called university-business collaboration. If you focus in a lot more, you get to a very specific activity called technology transfer. This involves the identification, protection and marketing deal making of research outputs, which are then transferred to industry, either existing companies with licensing, or setting up new spin-off companies. But technology transfer can be seen as too narrow, because there is a lot of transfer which is not technological (in social sciences, for example), so the term knowledge transfer was introduced. Then some people said: knowledge transfer implies a one-way transfer from the university to business, and this is more an exchange, so they refer to this as knowledge exchange between universities and business.

–You leaded the transfer office of the University of Oxford, which became a worldwide reference. What was the recipe for your success?

In knowledge transfer, lots of people are constantly searching for the silver bullet, the single thing you need to do to make everything work, but there are many different factors, it takes a long time and you have to work very hard. I think Oxford was successful because it took a long-term view: they realized that investing in the technology transfer office was important and it was going to take a long time before results came through. Then it is important the people you have in your office: we had people who were PhD scientists and who had worked in the industry, so they could understand the language and the culture of both worlds. And of course, Oxford is a very strong university, so the supply of high quality science was there.

–What success story would you highlight about your career in Oxford?

There are many success stories and, of course, this depends on what’s the understanding of success. We can look at a project that made a lot of money, which was setting up a computer software animation translated into a computer games company, called NaturalMotion, which was then sold to a large American company for over 500 million dollars, and the university received about 50 million. Some of it went back to the departments where the research was done, so this was a positive loop. You can look at examples in healthcare: one of the companies we set up, Oxford Immunotec, is successful commercially around the world. You then have projects in areas related to global challenges, like climate change and clean energy: we had some great projects with developing electric motors and now they’re developing electric vehicles of a very high speed, so you know, depending on what you think success is you have some great stories.

–What should be the priority for the university research, financial returns or social impact? Can they live together?

They can live together, yes, no question about it! And the priority for university has to be impact, because it is a public institution and society does not want universities turning themselves into profit making companies. Sometimes, universities see technology and knowledge transfer activities and think “hey, that is going to make us a lot of money!”, and they’re wrong. It’s not. In a very few cases, after many, many years, maybe you will make some money, but that is not the reason to do this, the reason is to help the research results in the university have some positive impact on the society outside the university.

“I think Oxford was successful in knowledge transfer because it took a long-term view”

But, in many cases, the best way of creating impact for university research is to be commercial. We can see an obvious example of this is in life sciences: you can do some brilliant research, but it is too early stage and needs a lot of money to develop it into a product. In these cases, the only way that research will be useful to society is to transfer it to industry, because they will invest to develop it further into new products and services that benefit people. And then you have this combination of income and impact.

–How do universities and the productive sector benefit from knowledge transfer?

Universities benefit by being able to justify the public investment in research, it helps to demonstrate the tax payers who funds them the impact that their research has on society. Also it provides researchers with a way of seeing how their ideas or results can be implemented at a larger scale and how they would be received by customers, and it connects university people with people in business and investors. And business is provided with access to new ideas, new inventions, new technologies… Today, good companies are open minded to bringing in ideas from outside, and where better than university to find good ideas?

–What would you say to a researcher who has not considered transferring the results of their research? What benefits could they get?

They get the benefits of seeing their research results developed and used in society and maybe they’ll get some money. But getting involved in commercial activities is not for everyone. Some of the researchers are probably already doing broader non-commercial knowledge transfer activities, but if they don’t want to do this particular activity of commercial technology transfer, that’s fine. The approach we always took in the technology transfer office in Oxford was to work with those who wanted to work with us. So, of course, the next step is how you encourage people to want to get involved in this. And I think a lot of this is about building trust and relationships, because just as business people have prejudices about university, university people have misconceptions and prejudice about business: some academics think that patenting prevents publication, which is just not true, or they think their ideas will be stolen by the industry, so you need to talk to them about confidentiality agreements. And there is one point that you can never get away from, which is that this will involve the academics’ time, you need to be realistic about that.

“Knowledge transfer provides researchers with a way of seeing how their ideas or results can be implemented”

–There is a very big leap between doing research and being an entrepreneur. What advice would you give to a researcher who wants to set up a company?

My advice would be: build a team, do not think you can do it on your own. It’s all about teams, the chances of a company to be successful with just one person are very low. If you are a researcher you have a certain set of skills, but you need some other skills you don’t have, so you need to bring people in to the team. Also, there comes a time when the researchers have to make a choice between the company and the university, because it is very rare for an individual to be able to maintain an excellent academic research career and be successful in leading and running their business.

–What are the future trends in the field of knowledge transfer?

I think one of them is about opening up from technology-based transfer to a more general knowledge exchange linked to the broad full range of research activity in any university. In UPF, for example, you are very strong in social sciences. How can we think about commercializing the research results from these areas, and how could we just connect the results to benefit society? Another area is the proof-of-concept funding. Everyone talks about the gap between research and industry, the ‘valley of death’, and the access to this funding is gradually getting better.

 “Business people have prejudices about university, just as university people have misconceptions and prejudice about business”

–In fact, you have been one of the experts of the evaluation panel of the UPF INNOValora program, which funds proof-of-concept projects. How do you rate this initiative?

Usually, the public-sector research available funding gets you to one stage where the opportunity is not recognizable by industry, because they say it’s too early stage, they need more data, they want to prototype, to see more experiments, the intellectual property needs to be improved... So, as I said before, it is really important to have this kind of proof-of-concept funds in the university, it demonstrates how committed UPF is to knowledge and technology transfer. And I would say that, at the moment, the amount of funding is relatively small but, even so, we are identifying some great projects and helping them accelerate their pathway towards investment and industry.