‘We are not the technology police’

Cambridge Enterprise director Willey: "I have a high tolerance for ambiguity."

There are lots of reasons why Teri F. Willey was picked earlier this year to run Cambridge Enterprise, one of the largest tech-transfer operations in Europe. There’s her background, as one of the architects of the University of Chicago’s successful tech-transfer strategy.  But, she suggests with a smile, there’s also this: “I have a high tolerance for ambiguity.”

That’s just as well, for there are few universities in the world with as politically charged an atmosphere as Cambridge. Willey’s task, since taking office in August, is to put Cambridge Enterprise onto a solid business footing – with business plans, internal management controls and a new legal status. But at the same time, she’s working off-campus to win new business and investors, and on-campus to keep the natives friendly.

Quick starter

So far, she’s off to a fast start.

She’s striving, in a string of meetings, to persuade Cambridge’s famously fractious professors that a new intellectual property policy, strengthening the university’s legal rights to lab discoveries, won’t hamper their academic freedom – and in fact will help them. Moreover, she vows flexibility in implementing the new policy: Cambridge Enterprise will step out of the way for professors to do deals on their own, provided all the innovators involved are in agreement and all contractual terms to third parties have been met. “We are not the technology police.”

She’s working to convert Cambridge Enterprise by 31 December from a department of the university to a new legal status as a limited liability company wholly owned by the university. The change is profound, as it means the organisation will be run like an independent company, with a board of directors and the planning and forecasting tools expected of a company. “It provides a more business-like structure,” she says.

For now, she plans only “organic” growth in Cambridge Enterprise, without tapping additional university or external capital. But she says she’s open to considering a “purely financial” deal that would allow outside investors to share in Cambridge Enterprise’s future returns  – provided it doesn’t limit the freedom of the university or its researchers to choose who they work with to commercialise their ideas..

Something that won’t happen: floating Cambridge Enterprise on the stock market. “Absolutely not,” she says, when asked if the university plans to list the newly incorporated Cambridge Enterprise on London’s AIM market. “We want to work with the best parties possible to commercializse our technology; and one of the things we want to do is to make sure we don’t enter into agreements that restrict who we can work with to commercialize our technology.”

Improving on the record

What happens to Cambridge Enterprise is, in the world of technology investment, important. As a university, Cambridge comes first in Europe by most international rankings; and as a place for spending lab money it’s among the first – generating, in the year ended last 31uly, an estimated £196 million in research grants and contracts, putting it in the same league by that measure as Yale and MIT.

The campus is also the most prolific start-up incubator in Europe, with more than 1,500 spin-outs created with a market value of more than £40 billion. But most of that has, in the past, happened largely because of the researchers themselves rather than because of Cambridge Enterprise, the official tech-transfer office. As a result, Enterprise itself is a distant competitor to its US counterparts, with license income in the year ended 31 July 2005 of just £2.71 million and consultancy income of £1.58 million.

To improve on that record, Willey brings to Cambridge a background of several years in the worlds of US tech-transfer and venture capital. She was most recently a managing partner at ARCH Development Partners, a seed and early-stage investment fund for spin-outs – mainly from universities in the US Midwest. Before that, she was a vice president of the university’s internal tech-transfer operation, and is a past president of the US tech-transfer network, the Association of University Technology Managers.

She’s also something of a diplomat. When asked to explain the gap between European and U.S. tech-transfer revenues, she avoided any criticisms: She said the Europeans simply haven’t been at the tech-transfer game as long as the Americans, and so naturally haven’t yet grown their revenues as much. Moreover, she says: “You probably have more innovation in how you’re doing tech transfer in the UK than in the US .In the US most of the programmes are very similar. What Imperial is doing [floating its technology-transfer office on AIM last July] is a bold financial experiment, and you don’t see too many in the States quite like that.”

A controversy over IP

Her immediate task is implementing the university’s new intellectual property policy. It went into effect last December, before she arrived at Cambridge; and the fight over it was bitter and public, culminating in a vote by the Cambridge faculty. Critics claimed that would kill the spirit of enterprise that created Silicon Fen, whereas supporters said it would accelerate the growth of both the region and the university –and bring Cambridge into line with many other big universities around the world.

Since September, Willey has been mounting a hearts-and-minds campaign – meeting with faculty, university boards, local business leaders and London financiers to explain the new policy. Legal niceties aside, this is how she describes the practical effect of the change: “We go from a position where most of the inventions made at the university were owned by the university and a few weren’t, to now all of them are owned by the university but a few of them are granted back” to the researchers.

By that, she says she means that, if a professor wants to commercialize his or her idea without Cambridge Enterprise’s involvement, she will allow that – provided any co-inventors and corporate sponsors agree, and provided the inventors also agree to pass back to the university 15 per cent of their net returns from the venture.

Flexibility is the aim, she says. “There was concern that this was going to become a more bureaucratic university” with the new policy. “We aren’t. We have a number of faculty members who have been very successful in commercialising their ideas without engaging in a group like ours, and we don’t want to throw a wrench in that.”

The reorganisation of Cambridge Enterprise, she says, is aimed at being more helpful to faculty, rather than less. “It allows us to set up our finances so it’s transparent, so it’s clear what the costs and returns are. We will have more flexibility in acting as a trusted business advisor.

“So we’re hanging out our shingle: We’re not here to work for anybody else but the academics at Cambridge who like our services.”