Westminster has a familiar story about UK innovation. Britain has no shortage of talent or ideas, the argument goes, but a lack of domestic capital has left homegrown breakthroughs vulnerable to the deep pockets of US investors.
The narrative has only been strengthened by Google’s purchase of DeepMind, Nvidia’s failed merger with Arm and IonQ’s $1bn takeover of Oxford Ionics. However, new data suggests the bigger obstacle lies much closer to home: scaling ideas that originate outside Oxford and Cambridge.
The scale of the imbalance is striking. Britain’s two oldest universities account for a quarter of spinouts but represent almost two-fifths of investment rounds and 59 per cent of declared funding, according to data from analytics start-up The Data City, which covers active spinouts founded since 2012.