Isis reports sales up a third, consultancies soar

Isis’s Hockaday: “impressive and steady growth”.

Isis concluded 74 licensing and option deals and 102 consulting deals, while creating four new spin-out companies and filing 68 new priority patent applications. It also reports a “significant rise” in the value of the university’s share portfolio in spin-outs.

Tom Hockaday, Managing Director, told Science|Business there had been “impressive and steady growth across all of the areas”. One big advance was in the number of consultancy deals, up from 89 in the previous year and from 59 in the year to March 2006. These deals, brokered by Isis’s Oxford University Consulting division, “reflects a growing interest among researchers in consultancy and in developing business–university linkages, and consulting is one of the best ways to do that”.

Spin-out formation was lower than in the previous two years, but Hockaday does not see this as evidence of a trend. “The fact that the number of new spin-outs formed is lower than in previous years reflects more than anything the lumpy nature of the activity,” he said. “We set up new companies only when it’s the right thing to do. We certainly avoid setting up companies just to keep the numbers up.”

The university seems happy. It is to double its subvention to Isis in the coming year to £2.5 million. Isis will publish its full Annual Report later this year.