OXFORD University’s innovation arm is launching support for the creation of social enterprises, allowing academics the opportunity to create impact-led spinout companies based on research.

Social enterprises are companies which combine the impact-centric agenda of a charity with the profit-generation strategies of a business. How this is achieved differs from company to company, but fundamental to all social enterprise is the concept of replacing a focus on profitability with a focus on enacting positive societal or environmental change.

What Oxford University Innovation (OUI) is doing is allowing such organisations to flourish by encouraging academics and students the chance to give their ideas the necessary backing.

To date, the innovation side of the University has supported creation of two types of business: regular start-up businesses created by the student body, and ventures based on intellectual property from the University supported by OUI, known as spinouts. Typically, spinouts are formed around a patentable technology, such as a potential therapeutic candidate or an engineering project. This model has been successful for turning Oxford research into reality, with the University, creating over 160 spinout companies since OUI opened its doors in 1987, 19 of which were launched in the past year.

OUI is now supplementing this spinout creation activity by offering the social enterprise option. Academics will be able to receive support for creating businesses around ideas that perhaps aren’t inherently patentable and will have the option of creating spinout companies focused on impact. Through social enterprise, OUI will be able to offer a business model that is adaptable, dynamic and supports all divisions equally.

OUI has already begun creating social enterprises, the first of which will be announced in the coming weeks. Prior to launch, OUI had already built up a pipeline of over 25 social enterprises.

We’ve created a group to meet demand for the service, which OUI anticipates will create at least an additional 10 spinouts per annum. Examples of some of the projects OUI will support include secure, cashless homeless donations app Greater Change and mobile and VR-based lifesaving emergency instruction platform LIFE.

OUI has also created a £550,000 social and environmental impact fund, SE2020, to support the development and acceleration of social or environmental ideas towards real-world positive impact.

Colleagues at the University want to get as many of these great ideas deployed as widely as possible. To do that, you need a broad range of methods to maximise an idea’s impact. With our new social enterprise service, we can now get far more of the great ideas generated in Oxford deployed across the world and improving people’s lives.

The legal and financial space is a complex one, but we can help academic teams to navigate it and to get the best solution for everyone.

Our Chief Executive Officer, Dr Matt Perkins, is right to say the social enterprise option ‘opens the door to innovation for impact-driven staff across all divisions of the University’, from the serial academic entrepreneur to the researcher looking to make their first innovative steps.