ACES profile: Champagne and connections

Tom Hockaday, managing director of Isis Innovation Ltd, Oxford University’s technology transfer company, has three test-tube racks filled with champagne corks in his office. Every time Isis successfully launches a spin-out company, a bottle of champagne is cracked open and the cork popped on the rack. He has 61 corks so far and each one tells a different story.

One that Hockaday considers a particular success is NaturalMotion Ltd. The company was formed in 2001 and combines biology and computer science to create interactive character animation for films and computer games such as Star Wars – The Force Unleashed. “The company has had a big impact in the industry,” Hockaday said in a telephone interview from his Oxford office.

The idea of champagne corks and test tubes came from his predecessor at Isis, Tim Cook, who Hockaday says has been an inspiration in his professional life. “He’s very open, very clever, willing to share and not afraid to help people,” he said.

The two met at an event organised by Unico, the UK tech transfer network that Hockaday later chaired. Hockaday had been working at Bristol University for seven years when Cook asked him if he would consider moving from number 1 in tech transfer at Bristol to be number 2 at Oxford.

Attracted by the higher volume of research activity at Oxford and the university’s commitment to developing tech transfer, Hockaday accepted the new challenge and joined Isis in 2000. Born and bred in Oxford, Hockaday also had a personal fondness for the city. That said, Isis’s 1960s building and his office view of a car park are not what one typically associates with the city of dreaming spires.

Hockaday became managing director of Isis in 2006. He now manages 50 people and is still enamoured by the “incredibly varied” nature of his job. As well as creating spin-out companies, Isis also concludes consulting and licensing agreements. One example of Isis’s licensing work is the development of a tuberculosis vaccine that is due to go to the next stage of clinical trials this year. According to Isis, it is the world’s most clinically advanced vaccine candidate to prevent tuberculosis.

Isis’s managing director enjoys working with the university and researchers on the one hand and the investors, lawyers and other types of business professionals on the other. The challenges associated with connecting the “so fundamentally different” worlds of university research and industry are one of the job’s great appeals, Hockaday said.

“The reasons why people have chosen to work in each of these fields are so very different, the whole ethos and mentality are different, the way of operating is different,” the 44-year-old said. “But they’re all people, and it is all about connecting people, finding common ground and common interests.”

It is this work in bridging the gap between academia and commerce that was recognised in awarding Hockaday the Academic Enterprise Awards Europe 2008’s Bridge Award. The prize was also an acknowledgement of his involvement with the Unico network and Praxis, the UK’s training programme for tech transfer professionals.

Hockaday was chairman of Unico in 2002–2003. Unico meetings are held twice a year and are an opportunity for those working in tech transfer to share best practices, which according to Hockaday often means sharing “war stories”. During his time in the network, attendance at meetings has grown from 30 to 40 to about 140 today.

One area that Unico didn’t serve was that of detailed training. That gap in the market was filled by David Secher of Cambridge University and Lita Nelsen of MIT who set up the Praxis training programme and asked Hockaday to be on the initial organising committee.

Hockaday is a great believer in the practical benefits of Praxis because it is “taught by the doers”. It is very important that it is people in the profession who are running the courses, he says. Hockaday is no longer on the committee, but still lectures with Praxis. Courses he has given include creating spin-outs and advanced licensing skills.

A lot has changed in the tech transfer world, or the “twilight zone” linking university research and business as Hockaday refers to it. When he started out at University College London almost 20 years ago, the industry had only just started to develop in the UK and few people knew what his work entailed.

“I’ve experienced the growth and development over the years. It has grown as a profession,” Hockaday says. “You can now get a job in tech transfer and be proud enough to tell your mum about it!”

Given how much has changed in the past, Hockaday is convinced the ways in which university and industry interact will change a lot in the future too.

The most immediate challenge is the economic downturn. Isis hasn’t yet noticed any drop in investments, but Hockaday acknowledged that the financial crisis “certainly makes the situation different” and means looking for potential investment from new sources. University research will continue and the new ideas will keep coming, he said, and “we will see soon” how demand develops.

Hockaday is proud of Isis’s steady annual growth. His personal goal is “to continue working hard at the challenge of leading Isis”. Part of that goal will no doubt be adding a few more champagne corks to the remaining slots on the test-tube racks.