News & Insights
OIC Partner George Robinson Discusses the Maturing UK Innovation Ecosystem on the FT’s PWM Tea Break
“What’s changed in the last 10 years is that we’ve got much better at commercialising science ourselves. We have a culture of entrepreneurship now. It’s now not just acceptable, but encouraged for academics to become entrepreneurs.”
OIC Founding Partner George Robinson joins Professional Wealth Management’s Yuri Bender and Ali Al-Enazi in the Financial Times studio to discuss philanthropy, technological innovation and the global economic power dynamic.
“British scientists have punched well above their weight and have produced some incredible inventions, but we haven’t been very good at commercialising them. Very often, good science migrates its way across the Atlantic and gets commercialised by American firms. What’s changed in the last 10 years is that we’ve got much better at commercialising science ourselves. We have a culture of entrepreneurship now. It’s now not just acceptable, but encouraged for academics to become entrepreneurs.
We’ve also seen the establishment of some large pools of permanent capital: Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital, Northern Gritstone. But it’s only a start and there’s still a long way to go.”
Watch the full interview here.