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CUE a Master of Commercialization
Cambridge University is an excellent university. Even more excellent in my view is their way of commercializing inventions coming out of CU. Obviously the "Cambridge Phenomenon", first studied by my old friends from now merged Segal Quince Wicksteed (Bill Wicksteed!), the region's history, presence of benevolent angels and so on are important for that success.
Some years ago CU merged all commercialization activities in CUE. Have a look at their recent Annual report and see how an already impressive record improves by almost 50% over just 5 years. One would assume that the quality of the (basic) research is not very volatile. Such matters take generations to build up and seldom make quantum leaps. I interpret the growth in commercialization successes as a result of the (re-)organization, really good people (look at the CVs of CUE staff: impressive) and then access to own seed funding (and, of course, lots of VCs crowding around CUE). A minor, but perhaps not less important resource is the creation of "Enterprise Champions",
faculty staff who advise CUE on different relevant matters.
PS: compare CUE's score with that of all Denmark, one of the most competitive countries and with the highest knowledge management score in the world: CUE (on the basis of 3,500 research FTE) creates almost half the results in terms of management of invention disclosures, patent filing and licensing and spin off more than 5 times the number of new companies (year 2004) - and with half the TO staff of all of Denmark!You can also compare CUE's score with other European (ProTon Europe ) and North American (AUTM ) universities and see that they are among the real masters.
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