UK IP Amnesty Act
How the UK can mobilise its IP quickly to help reboot long term growth
I think UK the is getting its act in gear to create better conditions for technology value creation and capture.
But the UK is heavily in debt and huge strains on national resources. How can we onshore resources and use clever policy to beat money?
Deng Xiaoping once said “the Middle East has oil, China has rare earths”. Both dug them out of the ground.
Well, the UK has science IP (besides timezone, language, and other indestructible advantages), and I recommend we start doing the same with that incredible resource. We must continue to fund our universities and research institutes, but we need to unblock IP and get it flowing back out and generating wealth and tax revenues for the country.
Here’s my proposal to make the UK global No 1 for IP mobility.
UK IP Snapshot
We’re sitting on a colossal IP reservoir in the UK:
Research quality: UK has highest FWCI (citation impact) amongst peers; 1.55, vs US 1.35, China 1.11, India 1.03. Rate/quality of ideas is exceptionally high
Research volume: 4th globally in 2019–23 behind China/US/India
Highly cited papers: 12% of papers, 3rd globally (proxy for frontier research)
Citable-document H-index: WIPO ranks UK 1st globally (proxy for “deep knowledge inventory”)
But we need better “Nation State UX” to help get it to work fast, generating growth and tax revenues.
Policy Summary
The UK IP Amnesty Act would comprise two components:
Universal Exit Terms for Startups and allow IP evacuation within 30 days
UK IP Register formalising claims similarly to what the Land Registry did for UK property in the 1990s
The Problem
Every university has a Technology Transfer Office (TTO), the gatekeeper deciding what IP gets commercialised, by whom, and on what terms. IP is either licensed to industry (GSK wants a cancer therapy) or assigned to a new spinout.
The spinout experience can vary quite wildly, between universities, and even sometimes within them, depending on which officer is on your case.
Some haggle hard and exit can drag on for months or more. TTOs can demand:
Non-dilutive equity or anti-dilution protections (complexity raises future funding risk)
Large absolute stakes — 20-50% in worst cases, impairing the cap table (if equity incentives are badly diluted from day one, the company’s ability to build and incentivise teams are weakened)
Royalties of 2, 5, even 10% on revenue or profit
And if the negotiation takes too much time, fundraising momentum can be lost, especially in a frenzied market where fundraising narratives shift month to month (see the AI public equities markets this year, moving its roving eye from chips to memory to interconnects within six months).
One source of drag is the following recursive loop:
Investors: “We are excited, but first, what are your IP terms?”
TTO: “Well done on the investor interest; before discussing your terms of exit, show us your offers first.”
Dealmaking requires certainty and simplicity.
A TTO officer may fight hard because a main reportable metric is how much equity / upside did you secure for the university? What’s never measured is how much value did you add or destroy in the process? You cannot ever (obviously) prove the counterfactual on any single deal. If a TTO asks 50% and investors never come in, the dead company is never really visible. The startups that died or flew a low flight due to bad terms are invisible to the public, and even to the university / TTO itself. The only way you could estimate the death rate is by having much more transparency over the whole IP exit process, and that is what I propose here.
Americans will tell you IP drag is an uniquely British pathology.
But it isn’t.
Yes, Stanford and MIT do fast, clean spinouts on the whole. But I’ve seen very famous US universities haggle just as aggressively and slowly as UK universities.
In any case, parity with America is the wrong target. The aim should be a UX upgrade across all our universities, and for every UK TTO to operate better than the best US TTOs.
As James Regan of Oriole recently put it: universities tend to overrate IP. IP is a decaying asset (especially in today’s world of AI assisted discovery). It is just the first leg up on a long founder journey that is full of failure risks, one after the next. TTOs tend to view IP as a golden ticket to success. This can lead to over-negotiation, and accidentally damaging the thing they mean to protect.
We need to create transparency for UK IP.
Policy #1. Universal IP Exit
Here’s a simple protocol to cut down IP exit processes from months of negotiation, and drive down to 30-day mandatory approvals:
Eligibility: A named inventor (say, a university lab lead) on a UK university patent or filed invention disclosure can invoke the Act by sending a Request for Intellectual Property Exit (RIPE) to their university TTO.
Trigger: The Technology Transfer Office is cc’d, starting a 30-day clock.
Deadline: At day 30 the university must either approve or explain refusal direct to the Ombudsman. Otherwise, deemed assignment 30 days to UK-registered company. The founder is ready to incorporate and raise a round without back and forth between TTO and investors.
Universal Exit Terms: 10% ordinary equity, fully dilutable. No royalties, milestones, no other rights. Company must repay patent costs on raising capital. University holds pro rata rights, non-transferrable from their own endowments.
Sovereignty: The IP must remain UK-bound in a UK-controlled vehicle. We may borrow British Business Bank criteria to ensure the upside IP deriving from the company ultimately accrues to a UK-headquartered entity.
Background IP: Not formally registered but presumption of rights analogous to easements in land.
International: The university may need to execute corresponding assignments in overseas jurisdictions, details to be worked out.
Fundraising Condition: £1m SAFE or equity funding must occur within 12 months of assignment. Biotech / hardware spinouts may apply for a single 6-month discretionary extension from Ombudsman.
Protection Against Flipping: Founders must fully declare all interests. If, for example, there is an arrangement over equity with strategic investors, this must be declared.
Reversion: If the condition unmet, the IP reverts to the university free of any encumbrances created by the company (this removes the historical rationale for TTOs seeking royalties)
Multi-inventor: Any single qualifying inventor may invoke the Act. Co-inventors must be notified by the registering inventor. Their economic terms will need to be guaranteed in the spin-out entity, details to be fleshed out.
Ombudsman: A statutory IP Ombudsman within DSIT mediates disputes.
Transparency: Every denial is filed with the Ombudsman and aggregated by AI into an annual public report ranking universities on:
approval ratio, median days to assignment
follow-on funding raised by assigned spinouts
Spinout survival % and outcomes (Series A, Series B funding etc) is already quite well tracked by companies e.g. Beauhurst.
Outcome of Policy #1: Over time these ratios should pressure universities to compete to maximise their spinout rates.
Policy #2. UK IP Register
Here is how we could build a digital register for UK Inventory:
Structure: Mandatory filing on patent issuance or transfer. Entry lists the patent/disclosure ID, named inventor(s), institution(s), filing date, and encumbrances (conditions by the university, claims by grant funders)
Priority of Claims: First-to-register wins, rebuttable presumption. Similar priority of rights and overriding interests to the Land Registry.
Private vs Public Data: Public metadata would include ID, inventor, coauthors, institution, filing date. Full encumbrance terms may or may not be publicly visible but certainly visible to the inventor, registered assignees, and Ombudsman. Technical details follow the 18-month UK patent publication clock. Possible pseudoanonymisation to preserve first mover advantages, tbd.
The cost of public transparency: Whilst a fully open register might be an aid to foreign rivals, the patents register + AI indexing make UK IP very visible in any case. Govt may need to consult industrial sponsors (pharma, materials companies) who may not fund if transparency requirements are too high.
Outcome of Policy #2: Creates visibility over national IP and will help founders to aggregate adjacent IP and work out quickly if it is accessible.
Concluding Remarks
I hope some or all of the above will be adopted by the UK government and make us the global No 1 destination for IP mobility.
Thanks to Lawrence Lundy-Bryan for helpful comments