Years ago, tourist guides used to tell their punters that the main difference between Oxford and arch-rival Cambridge was that Oxford was a large town with an industrial life of its own, while Cambridge's economy was totally dependent on its university.

For a while during the late seventies it seemed that the positions had been reversed, as Oxford lost most of its motor industry jobs and hi-tech companies flocked to Cambridge and the so-called Silicon Fen.

Oxford missed a trick by not opening a science park until 1991, and by then Cambridge's, with a 20-year head start, had generated hundreds of jobs.

But since then Oxford has been catching up, with latest estimates showing that its biotechnology sector has created several thousand jobs in the last ten years.

Now there is a move to use Oxfordshire as a model for other areas - as an example of how science and technology research can be commercialised to create wealth and jobs.

On November 4, the South East England Development Agency, Seeda, is linking up with Oxford University to mount an exhibition showing the business success story to London's "opinion formers".

Visitors at the Department of Trade and Industry conference centre will also be treated to talks from university professors and industrialists on why business and science will both benefit from closer links. Seeda is using Oxford as the model for its plans to create another 25-30 "enterprise hubs" around research institutions.

And regional development agencies in the West Midlands are aiming to set up a network of hi-tech businesses between Coventry and Birmingham, drawing on five universities.

Richard Flint, chairman of the Heart of England TEC, believes Oxfordshire should be used as a "test-bed" for economic growth.

He said: "Encouragingly, many of Seeda's proposed solutions are based on what they have seen happen in Oxfordshire. Seeda should see Oxfordshire as a place to test new ideas like enterprise hubs and innovation programmes."

Many of the area's new companies are cashing in on research from Oxford University, which estimates that more than 100 spin-off companies have been set up over the last 25 years.

One of the earliest spin-offs was Oxford Molecular, which employs more than 50 people at Oxford Science Park - also the home of one of the newest, Powderject.

Five years ago, Powderject was run single-handed by husband-and-wife team Paul and Elspeth Drayson.

Now the company has 150 staff working on its painless injection device, called the Powderject, which won it the innovation category award - sponsored by Newsquest (Oxfordshire) and FOX FM - in this year's Oxfordshire Business of the Year Awards.

Dr Drayson was voted Oxfordshire business person of the year.

Powderject's workforce is due to expand to 250 in the next year. Two other university spin-off success stories are based outside the city, near Abingdon. At Oxford Asymmetry, staff numbers have grown from 151 at the start of the year to 178, and are likely to reach more than 200 by December.

The company has outgrown its Milton Park base and spent £7m on buildings in the last six months, with another £4m in the pipeline. It has an option to expand into a second bigger block with total space for about 450 staff.

The company, set up by Prof Steve Davies, of Oxford University, who pioneered a new way of making chemicals with either the right or left-handed versions of molecules, is now valued by the City at about £140m. Oxford University owns about eight per cent, and Prof Davies's department gets five per cent of profits until the end of the century. In return, the company has the rights to technologies developed in Prof Davies's world-beating chiral chemistry research lab.

Oxford GlycoSciences has expanded from Abingdon Science Park to a second building at Milton Park. Its expertise is in proteomics - how diseases are linked to genes and the proteins they produce.

Like Oxford Asymmetry, it seeks pharmaceutical companies as joint partners and has leased a new building at Milton Park to manufacture new compounds to be tested by drug companies.

Story date: Wednesday 27 October

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.