But to start from the beginning: I went to visit Columbia University in the City of New York today, with a couple of meetings in two different campus'... But in this post I will break the rules and won't give more details - as I met several people and some of them asked me to keep confidential that they shared with me some of the information, others haven't - but some of the information overlap, and I want to be able to capture here as much as possible...Fact is that I was positively surprised how active Columbia in technology transfer and commercialisation is... The negative surprise comes then from the fact that most of the commercialisation is done through licensing and selling IP early instead of trying to build more startups... Maybe Columbia should join forces with Babson, but that would be a different subject...
What I learnt from the meetings was that over the quarter century that Columbia has been doing commercialisation and tech transfer, they earned a 10-digit sum in dollars and currently they are at over $ 100 million of annual revenues from commercialisation... As one of my contacts said: "it's a great way to pay for new buildings"... And those are just numbers of income for the university, if we were to think about the total impact or total profits (including founders, scientists and/or investors), it would be several times more... billions... There are some 10 - 12 spin-offs from Columbia every year, total of over 100 (about 1/3 VC-backed and 1/6 successfully exited to date), and if we take a look at the popular statistics of job creation, it seems that only Columbia spin-offs created over 1,500 jobs...And what sector are most of the projects (spin-offs or licensing) in...? I said it at the very beginning - it is in healthcare... DRUGS...
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