Off to Lunch in Oxford...

A framework for levelling up?

An organisation I have wanted to visit since starting Off to Lunch is Oxford Science Enterprises. This week I got that opportunity. I wanted to visit them to explore whether this is a model that can help level up the UK economy and provide the foundations to build a flourishing new tech industry.

Oxford Science Enterprises, OSE for the rest of this piece, invests in businesses spun out of the University of Oxford. It is one of the biggest businesses focused on university spin-outs in the world, if not the biggest. Similar vehicles are growing in other parts of the UK, including Cambridge Innovation Capital in Cambridge and Northern Gritstone for Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds. OSE has stakes in more than 100 businesses, which are now worth around £2 billion and employ more than 2,000 people. However, since it was founded in 2015 it has also faced reports about tension between academic staff and financiers, a high turnover of senior staff, and criticism for taking investment from Huawei in 2019.