From 100 to 650 Licences: A Custom Portal That Transformed Oxford University Innovation
Bespoke Software Development / UX & Product Design / Systems Consultancy
- 650+ Licences completed annually through PROcess™
- 137 Licences completed in a single day
- 6x Increase in licensing volume post-launch
Digital Trading, by creating PROcess™, have turned a previously burdensome admin and paper-heavy operation into one that just needs two clicks of a mouse. They have revolutionised the way we work. We can now deliver high volume express licensing with ease and at very low marginal cost.
Dr David Churchman
Clinical Outcomes Business Manager, Oxford University Innovation
The Challenge
Becoming a victim of their own success.
Oxford University Innovation (OUI) is the technology transfer office of the University of Oxford — responsible for protecting the intellectual property of academic researchers, spinning out new enterprises, and licensing innovations to benefit society across healthcare, science, and industry.
The work was growing. The systems were not.
Licensing operations were being managed through a combination of emails, Excel spreadsheets, and paper-based processes. For a team handling a diverse and expanding portfolio of pharmaceutical and scientific intellectual property, this created an administrative burden that was becoming impossible to sustain. OUI was, in their own words, becoming a victim of its own success — the volume of licensing demand was outpacing the capacity of the team to process it.
What was needed wasn’t just better software. It was a fundamentally different way of working.
The Solution
A purpose-built express licensing portal.
Digital Trading designed and built PROcess™ — a bespoke express licensing portal purpose-built for the way OUI operates.
The platform allows customers to browse available products and move through a clear, guided step-by-step licensing journey entirely online. For the OUI team, the admin interface was built to be equally intuitive — dramatically reducing the manual overhead involved in managing licences, records, and customer communications.
Built on a custom web platform, PROcess™ was engineered to be nimble, scalable, and user-friendly for both sides of the transaction. The goal was simple: make high-volume express licensing possible without a corresponding increase in headcount or administrative complexity.
The Result
From an administrative bottleneck to 137 licences in a single day.
The numbers speak for themselves.
Before PROcess™, OUI was completing between 50 and 100 licences per year. After launch, that figure grew to more than 650 — with the platform capable of handling thousands. On a single day alone, 137 licences were completed through the portal.
The administrative burden that had threatened to cap the team’s capacity was gone. What previously required significant manual effort now takes two clicks.
- Bespoke express licensing portal designed and built end-to-end for Oxford University Innovation
- Licensing volumes grew from 50–100 per year to over 650, with capacity for thousands
- Complex multi-step licensing process reduced to a guided, self-serve online journey
- Admin overhead eliminated — what previously required manual processing now takes two clicks
- Platform built to scale with demand, removing the ceiling on OUI’s commercial licensing activity
