Transcription
What are the essential qualities of a successful business? I think that the absolute essence of a business, or a successful business, is one which manages to manufacture and sell something—whether that's a product or a service—but manages to sell it for more than it cost to produce it. So you are generating profit from delivering a product or service, and you're getting more money in than is going out. And I think that is absolutely at the heart of a successful business.
Now, in our context at Isis, we are creating businesses which are based upon developing very early-stage technology. So actually, it's going to take quite a few years for the company to go from those initial phases to actually having a product or service to sell. So at the early stage of a technology business, really what we're doing is we're investing in the technology to take it through various stages of development, so that we can demonstrate it has increasing value, so that we might be able to attract more rounds of venture capital investment or finance from other sources. But one day, of course, we are aiming for a product or service which we can sell for more than it cost us to produce.
Which business success stories inspire you? I think the ones that are based upon a great team of people, where you can see the passion and the vision and the clarity of thought that has led to the creation of a successful business. So, from within Oxford, the work of Isis Innovation in the last 10 years, we've helped set up 65 new companies—what we call University spin-out companies—based upon Oxford University Technologies, Oxford University researchers, where we've got investment and management. And it's probably unfair to pick out one from that list; nevertheless, there is a company called Natural Motion which was set up in 2002. So we already has had many years of development from its start, and I had the good fortune to be involved working with the people who set that company up at the beginning. It's had those qualities of passion, vision, and clarity, and it's gone on to be a very successful software animation company. So its software tools are used in the film industry, in the computer game industry, to help make software characters look more realistic in those formats. And it's been fantastic to see the individuals involved working together from their early vision for what this company might be and seeing that being delivered with, you know, passion and enthusiasm throughout those years. Of course, there have been some challenges along the way, but it's been the clarity with which the team have taken forward their vision over the years which has been so impressive.
Which types of business do you expect to succeed in the next five years? That's a very difficult question to answer, of course, because we're predicting the future. But it does seem to me that one of the areas in which there's so much attention and so much focus at the moment is in environmental technologies, low-carbon technologies, alternative energy technologies. So in that overall area within Oxford, we are already seeing an increased focus of research attention on those areas, and we've successfully created some companies based upon developing technologies all aimed towards reducing carbon emissions, reducing energy consumption, to address the global challenge that we face at the moment. So, for example, we have set up a smart metering technology company, so that domestic households will have far more information about their energy consumption, and with that, with that information, they can begin to modify their behavior. And we're also working on projects for tidal energy and wind energy and lightweight electric motors for the next generation of cars, all aimed at addressing this extraordinary problem we face of the carbon emissions.