Today is Simon Bond’s first day as director of Bristol Innovations , an initiative launched by University of Bristol earlier this year to accelerate entrepreneurship among its researchers, students and staff. Bond joins from SETsquared, the global number one incubator backed by the universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton and Surrey, which he had led since 2014. Bond tells us what attracted him to the new job and why it’s less of a goodbye and more of a deep dive with colleagu...
Nov 18, 2022
Douglas Hansen-Luke launched Future Planet Capital in 2015 after 18 months researching the then-nascent university venturing scene and over the past seven years has built an impact-led global innovation investment platform that is active in ecosystems around MIT, Stanford, Oxford and others around the world. Douglas tells us why Future Planet Capital focuses on these ecosystems and why they are so good at what they do. He also reveals the surprising reason the firm is no longer active in China (...
Nov 11, 2022
Mary Albertson became director of the Office of Technology Licensing (OTL) at Georgia Tech in July 2022, having previously worked for University of Utah’s PIVOT Center and having spent the majority of her career working at Stanford University for nearly 27 years. She’s been president of AUTM and received its President’s Award in 2015 for her long-standing service. She tells us what brought her to Georgia Tech, what the institute could learn from Utah and Stanford — and vice versa — and how she’s...
Oct 27, 2022
Yasser Biaz is the chief executive of UM6P Ventures, the venture fund of University Mohammed VI Polytechnic in Morocco, and he joins us today to talk about why it focuses on deeptech and builds and invests not just in spinouts from its home institution or even just across the country, but throughout Africa and beyond. UM6P Ventures is a relatively young fund — it was set up in 2019 — but that hasn’t stopped it from coming up with some interesting programmes that even Silicon Valley, where Yasser...
Oct 20, 2022
Duncan Johnson, chief executive of Northern Gritstone, is on a mission to turn the north of England into an ecosystem that rivals Silicon Valley. He’s raising £500m to do that (he’s £215m of the way there already) — money that will go not only into spinouts from the firm’s three founding universities (Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield) but into businesses throughout northern England. He tells us why Northern Gritstone is all about profit with purpose and why that attracted him to the firm, and he ...
Oct 13, 2022
I have a two-for-one this week: Glen Gardner and David Winwood of Gardner Innovation Search Partners, a recruitment firm specialised in tech transfer, are joining the show this week. Glen tells us why he set up the firm and Dave reveals why, after two and a half decades of leading tech transfer offices, he was attracted to recruitment. They ponder everything from the great resignation to the complexities of salary levels and even get candid about a few opportunities where the candidate didn’t wo...
Oct 06, 2022
Maxine Ficarra was the chief executive of PraxisAuril for nearly 20 years, stepping down today as this episode is released. Maxine has helped shaped the profession like few others have. She led the organisation through two mergers, a pandemic and concluded with PraxisAuril’s largest conference yet in June this year. She’s also usually the one interviewing others on stage, so I am very honoured that she is giving her farewell interview. She tells us how she became the first employee of Praxis eve...
Sep 29, 2022
Elicia Maine has thought and written a lot about innovation in her more than two decades as professor for innovation and entrepreneurship at Simon Fraser University. It’s no surprise then that in July this year she was named the institution’s inaugural associate vice-president, knowledge mobilisation and innovation. On this episode, Elicia talks us through a six-year study she co-authored identifying the four key pre-incorporation elements that indicate whether a spinout will be successful, and ...
Sep 22, 2022
In June this year, Kimberly Gramm became the inaugural chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer at Tulane University, which she joined after more than six years at Texas Tech University. Her mission couldn’t be more ambitious: charged with driving economic development in the Greater New Orleans region, she will be leading the brand new Tulane Innovation Institute that itself will revitalise a gigantic, defunct hospital that’s been shut since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Kimberly, who’s curren...
Sep 15, 2022
Rich Lyons became UC Berkeley’s inaugural chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer in January 2020, having previously been dean of the Haas Business School for a decade. For the past two and a half years, he’s been tying the ecosystem together in a way that makes everyone want to participate rather than forcing them to sign up. Rich tells us about the Berkeley-affiliated funds, which uniquely all donate a share of their profits back to the institution, and talks about how he helped create a...
Sep 08, 2022
Hailing from Australia, Anthony Francis started out as an accountant before establishing the Technology Commercialisation Group in 1999, selling it to Deloitte in 2005 and spending a couple of years with the firm. He then spent nearly a decade as managing director of Flinders University’s TTO, Flinders Partners, before landing, in 2019, at UCSF Innovation Ventures, the commercialisation arm of University of California, San Francisco, where he’s the executive director of the Office of Technology ...
Sep 01, 2022
It may sound crazy that any government could try and reclaim project funding plus 5% from a spinout, but yes, that is exactly the situation that Álvaro Ossa, the director of transfer and development at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, has been facing. The lobbying effort to get the article removed from the law is ongoing, and this is one of the topics we’ll cover in this interview. Álvaro also tells us about why it’s important to attract local VC funding first before trying to raise fro...
Aug 25, 2022
Cédric Van Nevel is a partner at Qbic, an early-stage venture fund that invests in the spinouts of its 16 partners throughout Belgium. Cédric joins us to chat about the fund’s origins, why it’s such a strength to work with teams pre-incorporation and why Qbic is happy to keep focusing on the Belgian ecosystem rather than expand internationally. He also ponders what makes Belgium such an entrepreneurial country and looks back at his own career, which brought him to Qbic in 2019 after earlier stop...
Aug 18, 2022
Lisa Ericsson is both the head of KTH Innovation and chief executive of KTH Holding, the respective innovation department and investment arm of KTH Royal Institute of Technology, which she joined in 2002 after having spun out business plan competition Venture Cup from McKinsey. Apart from telling us why KTH Innovation targets both students and faculty, Lisa also ponders the pitfalls of professor’s privilege in Sweden, and reflects why the two university venture funds launched by KTH in the 2000s...
Aug 11, 2022
When Laurent Miéville met one of his first mentors at Stanford University, he was told that Switzerland was about to become a hotspot for innovation and so he made the decision to return and join, in 1998, the University of Geneva where he set up the tech transfer office, Unitec. He’s led the office ever since, and in that time saw the sector in Europe evolve into the profession it is today. He was president of ASTP from 2007 to 2009 and also found time to write a book, in 2010, looking at how c...
Aug 04, 2022
University of Calgary is the number one Canadian institution for startup creation, according to Autm’s 2020 ranking and it’s achieved that through a range of fascinating initiatives, like its clinical trial design programme. John Wilson, chief executive of Innovate Calgary, tells us more about that programme on this episode, and also delves into why Calgary, whose economy has been built on fossil fuels, is uniquely placed to put carbon emissions back into the ground. He also tells us about UCeed...
Jul 28, 2022
Fred Farina is the chief innovation and corporate partnerships officer at California Institute of Technology (or Caltech) where his duties also include overseeing the technology transfer out of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He tells us what it was like to start his career in tech transfer by being hired by AUTM founder Larry Gilbert and what has kept him around Caltech for more than two decades. Caltech came to technology transfer much later than its peers – in 1995 – and Fred tells us why t...
Jul 21, 2022
Poonam Malik is a passionate advocate for investing in and supporting women-founded companies, a message she is able to spread both as the head of investments at University of Strathclyde and several other appointments, including a board position at government-owned economic development agency Scottish Enterprise. She joins us to discuss the importance of overcoming unconscious bias in investments, what gives Strathclyde an edge and why Scotland is big enough to attract international interest. S...
Jul 14, 2022
Shiva Loccisano has been involved in technology transfer since 2007, a period that, he says, has seen a steep growth trajectory in commercialisation activities in Italy. He joins us to discuss the more than 15 years he spent at Politecnico di Torino as the head of technology transfer and industrial liaison department (a position he left last week, after this podcast was recorded, for a new job as chief executive of BeHold, the holding company of Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna). At Po...
Jul 07, 2022
Keith Marmer is the chief innovation and economic engagement officer at University of Utah and he joins us to discuss the greenhouse initiative that means the Pivot Center is anything but a traditional tech transfer office. He also muses why the popularity of hiking and fly-fishing in Utah is helpful and ponders what his recent promotion to a cabinet level position at the university will mean for commercialisation activities. Keith places a lot of value on building relationships, and also reveal...
Jun 30, 2022
We have partnered TenU, the collaboration between the tech transfer offices of University of Cambridge, Columbia University, University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London, KU Leuven, University of Manchester, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Oxford, Stanford University and University College London to bring you three panels recorded live in front of a select group of guests in London. This third panel features Lesley Millar-Nicholson , director of the Technology Licensing ...
Jun 23, 2022
We have partnered TenU, the collaboration between the tech transfer offices of University of Cambridge, Columbia University, University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London, KU Leuven, University of Manchester, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Oxford, Stanford University and University College London to bring you three panels recorded live in front of a select group of guests in London. This second panel features Andrew Wilkinson, chief executive of University of Manchester ...
Jun 20, 2022
We have partnered TenU, the collaboration between the tech transfer offices of University of Cambridge, Columbia University, University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London, KU Leuven, University of Manchester, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Oxford, Stanford University and University College London to bring you three panels recorded live in front of a select group of guests in London. The first panel features Euan Robertson, chief operating officer of Simons Foundation, Ka...
Jun 16, 2022
Diarmuid O’Brien has been chief executive of Cambridge Enterprise since August 2021, when he joined from Trinity College Dublin to take over from Tony Raven. He joins us on Talking Tech Transfer to reveal what attracted him to Cambridge Enterprise and what differences he sees between Ireland and the UK. He discusses his ambitious vision for Cambridge Enterprise to play a more active role in the regional cluster and ponders why Cambridge is doing better at having female founders than the national...
May 26, 2022
Anne Barnett is the chief executive of Wellington UniVentures, the tech transfer office of Victoria University of Wellington, and she joins us on Talking Tech Transfer to discuss her plans of turning the organisation into a social enterprise renowned throughout the world for the impact it generates. She ponders the importance of the Brandon BioCatalyst and NZ Innovation Booster funds, and examines how the pandemic has re-aligned her views on joining international groups. Barnett also looks at th...
May 19, 2022
Stephan Christgau is a founding partner of Eir Ventures, a €122m life sciences venture firm backed by six Swedish universities and, through a sidecar vehicle, University of Copenhagen. He joins us on Talking Tech Transfer to discuss the opportunities and challenges of investing across multiple countries, and ponders the unique strengths that the Nordics have in pharmaceutical. Christgau, who previously helped establish and run corporate venturing unit Novo Seeds for 12 years, also talks about th...
May 12, 2022
Sangeeta Bardhan Cook is the executive director, business innovation, at City of Hope. She joins us on Talking Tech Transfer to discuss the unique aspects of commercialisation at a hospital with a focus on cancer, diabetes and other life-threatening diseases and what it means to be surrounded by patients who often have nowhere else left to turn. She discusses the importance of City of Hope having its own GMP manufacturing facility, how the impatience of researchers to help patients is driving an...
May 05, 2022
Kalpa Vithalani is the executive director of technology transfer at Marquette University and she joins us on Talking Tech Transfer to discuss what it means to help build a tech transfer office at a Catholic Jesuit institution and why it isn’t so much about standing out from other universities nearby as it is about collaborating with them. She tells us about Marquette’s externship programme for faculty, how the university entices corporates for sponsored research and licensing and why serial entr...
Apr 28, 2022
Amir Naiberg has been the associate vice-chancellor and CEO and president of UCLA Technology Development Group since 2016, when he moved from having led Yeda, the tech transfer arm of Weizmann Institute of Science. He joins us on Talking Tech Transfer to discuss the responsibilities of leading the tech transfer office of the US’s number one ranked public university and to ponder the intricacies of being part of a larger university system. He also tells us about the differences between Israel and...
Apr 07, 2022
Mark Billingsley is the director of University of Alaska Fairbanks‘ Tech Transfer Office and Innovation Hub, having joined the profession in 2015 after first working as an engineer and then holding various legal jobs, such as assistant public defender. He joins Talking Tech Transfer to discuss how you do tech transfer when the US federal government’s definition of “rural communities” covers the whole state and rural to you means 30 people that live 200 miles from the nearest road. He also talks ...
Mar 31, 2022
