We revisit the highlights from the past season and find out the key lessons from every guest, from dealing with failure to delivering entrepreneurial training for PhDs to building a cluster that spans more than a dozen institutions. Get in touch Follow Thierry Heles on LinkedIn .
Today, we’re bringing you a recording of a recent discussion organised by our friends at TenU , the international collaboration between ten tech transfer offices in Belgium, the US and the UK. The panel, led by KU Leuven’s Paul Van Dun ( listen to our interview with him in episode 31 ), tackled the question: how do you build critical mass to create innovation ecosystems? Offering their expertise were University of Michigan’s Kelly Sexton ( hear more from her in episode 13 ), Ouest Valorisation’s...
We’re bringing you an episode from Mawsonia’s other podcast, CVC Unplugged , featuring an interview with Owen Thompson, CEO of Cambridge Future Tech. Get in touch Follow Thierry Heles on LinkedIn .
SETsquared has achieved something few have: it’s built an ecosystem that spans six institutions across England and Wales and a programme that provides end-to-end support to founders both within and without the universities. Banding together means the six universities don’t just rival their peers in London, Oxford or Cambridge (portfolio companies have raised some £4bn to date), but in some areas are setting the pace: Bristol, for example, is responsible for a third of all quantum computing compa...
Superconductors can seem like magic when you watch magnetic levitation videos , but they’re far from a futuristic concept. They already have real-world applications: they are an essential component of MRI scanners, for example, which would otherwise take the energy of a small city to run (they really take about as much as boiling a kettle). Superconductors are also used in the development of fusion energy (they generate magnetic fields strong enough to contain the chemical reaction), they’re an ...
The Australian government wants to get 1,800 more PhD candidates to commercialise their work over the next decade, as part of the A$2.2bn University Research Commercialization Action Plan. But turning PhD students and early-career researchers into entrepreneurs is not a simple task. How do you identify the right people and train them to embrace a more commercial way of thinking? Nick McNaughton, CEO of PD Plus , which specialises in commercialisation services, has some ideas. PD Plus won the con...
The NHS, the UK’s national health service, is often seen as slow to adopt innovation. But Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, located in London and linked to King’s College London — has actually created a highly sophisticated unit to commercialise innovations developed at their hospitals. The Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust is unique in England. Not only does it have this tech transfer office, but the team sits within a larger, well-resourced unit — the Centre for Innovation, Tr...
Can British university research help families in South America secure a mortgage? That’s what the University of Oxford did with its social venture spinout SOPHIA Oxford , which analyses contributing factors to poverty from the state down to the corporate level and helps companies make better choices for their employees. It’s one of the successes celebrated by Mark Mann, who started out in tech transfer at the BBC, moved to the University of Oxford and now runs his own consultancy business helpin...
University of Galway has long been a leader in medtech, so it makes sense that Fiona Neary, innovation operations manager in the institution’s Innovation Office , created the country’s first medtech accelerator programme in 2018. She also helped build the BioInnovate programme, based on Stanford’s Biodesign Innovation Fellowship, which puts would-be founders into real-life clinical settings to develop products for concrete patient needs. The programme is set to expand across Irish institutions. ...
It’s time to let you know what we have planned. We’re re-launching as Beyond the Breakthrough! Over the past three and a half years, and 100 episodes, one key takeaway has been the fact that the public still doesn’t understand how university research gets into the marketplace — and that needs to change. To do it, we’re not just changing to a more accessible podcast name, we are, crucially, also expanding the scope of discussions by bringing in more voices from the entire spectrum of university i...
A global platform for tracking tech transfer data — is creating something like this even possible? That is what Christophe Haunold, head of the University of Luxembourg’s Office for Partnership, Knowledge and Technology Transfer (PaKTT), wants to get off the ground. If anyone can create this it would be Christophe, a seasoned builder who founded the tech transfer office at the Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse, as well as Toulouse Tech Transfer (one of 13 regional tech transfer compani...
Today’s is a slightly different episode of the podcast as we’re bringing you a recording of a recent webinar, Treasure hunting for seed pearls at universities and national labs . The panel featured Lisa Smith, chief executive of Midlands Mindforge, Imec.xpand partner Tom Vanhoutte, Chevron Technology Ventures’ Gautam Phanse and Stanford spinout Cala Health CEO Renée Ryan. The panel discussed a whole range of ways of increasing spinout success — from finding creative ways to bring in entrepreneur...
University College Dublin has racked up several firsts, including creating Ireland’s first spinout unicorn, Wayflyer. Tom Flanagan, director of enterprise and commercialisation at the university’s innovation office NovaUCD gives us an insider view of how the ecommerce company was born. UCD also established the first Irish quantum spinout, Equal1 ( read our in-depth profile here ), and was one of the founding limited partners — together with Trinity College Dublin and Atlantic Bridge — of the Uni...
Andreea Serban is a doctor specialising in paediatric surgery and an entrepreneur who’s founded her own healthtech, KIDoc, and joined another, PhylloPharma, as chief operating officer. She’s also a 2022 fellow of the Young Transatlantic Innovation Leaders, a US Department of State programme that invites young entrepreneurs from Europe to the United States, that brought her to the University of Pennsylvania and introduced her to her mentor Michael Poisel, a previous guest on this show. But she’s ...
Bryn Rees is the associate vice chancellor for research and innovation, and managing director of Venture Partners at CU Boulder — one of two tech transfer offices in the University of Colorado system. He’s been at the university since 2009 — apart from a few weeks in 2015 when he quit because he was done with transactional tech transfer. But then the opportunity came to fundamentally rebuild how commercialisation was done at CU, which is what he’s been doing since. Today, CU Boulder has everythi...
Ireland, despite its small size, is home to major global tech and pharma companies, and punches above its weight in terms of spinouts that tackle global challenges from sustainable agriculture to cancer vaccines to AI-driven language monitoring, Trinity College Dublin’s Neil Gordon tells us. Gordon — who was the first startup development manager at an Irish university — also talks about the importance of overseas markets for spinouts, building a portfolio and ecosystem with strong gender diversi...
Earlier this year, TenU — an international collaboration between 10 tech transfer offices in the US and Europe developing best practices — launched the University Spinout Investment Terms (USIT) Guide. Developed together with law firms and VC firms throughout the UK, the USIT Guide aims to accelerate negotiations between universities and investors and solve some of the common sticking points in these discussions. In June, members of TenU — Orin Herskowitz, Anne Lane, George Baxter, Jim Wilkinson...
Some snippets of upcoming interviews plus an explanation for why we’ve been on a break which involves a peek behind the scenes of the podcast. “Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Jacek Kasz is the director of the Center for Technology Transfer (CTT) at Cracow University of Technology, Poland’s second-oldest TTO. He tells us how the office came to also be responsible for regional SME support and Horizon Europe applications, and how Cracow’s ecosystem has been shaped by IT. But while Cracow’s ecosystem is full of opportunity, challenges remain and Poland sometimes struggles to retain its brightest minds, who continue to be drawn overseas to Silicon Valley. Jacek also talks...
Anton Bartolo is the director for corporate research and knowledge transfer at the University of Malta, where he built the Knowledge Transfer Office from scratch in 2009 (with help from Oxentia , Oxford’s consultancy arm). He tells us how the challenges of being the only university in a small island nation have led to an offering that isn’t actually all that dissimilar to that of institutions in larger countries — including tech transfer internships, an incubator open to all, TAKEOFF , and a mas...
You could be forgiven for not having had the Royal College of Art in London on your radar, but there’s a wealth of fascinating opportunities here — and Nadia Danhash, executive director of the college’s centre for enterprise, entrepreneurship and IP commercialisation InnovationRCA, tells us all about them. The RCA’s portfolio spans a vast array of sectors, from climate tech to consumer to medtech to agtech and more, and it’s been investing in its spinouts for the past 12 years. It’s also set up ...
Alison Campbell, a GUV Lifetime Achievement awardee and former chair of AUTM , took on a new challenge in April last year when she left Knowledge Transfer Ireland (KTI) after nine years to take over as CEO of the newly established UK Government Office for Technology Transfer (GOTT) — responsible for some 800 departments, agencies and arms-length organisations. She tells us what convinced her to take the job and why it’s been a year full of wonderful surprises, such as finding innovation everywhe...
Marc Sedam is the vice-president, technology opportunities and ventures, at New York University where he sits within NYU Langone Health. But his team is also responsible for tech transfer on NYU’s overseas campuses, and Marc tells us about the challenges this poses. Marc talks about why his team hired an analyst for its venture fund and he discusses what it takes to be an ally — from making sure job adverts are posted in places where minorities will actually see them and arranging office hours a...
Ilian Iliev is the chief executive of NetScientific, an AIM-listed investor that specialises in helping its medtech, therapeutics, sustainability and robotics portfolio grow in three key markets: the US, the UK and Israel. Ilian, who came to NetScientific after the firm acquired his VC EMV Capital, also tells us how that merger came to be, how the combined group isn’t afraid of acquiring startups to help turn them around before seeking external funding once more, and why the financial regulation...
Michael Poisel is the executive director of PCI Ventures , the unit responsible for University of Pennsylvania’s spinout portfolio — which is more than 250 companies strong. He tells us about Penn’s fairly unique system which does not allow faculty members to serve in any executive function at their spinout and which also forces faculty members to have a minority stake in the business. He discusses his wish for Penn to have its own startup fund, the importance of diversity in leadership and he p...
We’re kicking off the new season with something a bit different: senior editor Maija Palmer asks regular host Thierry Heles the questions to talk about his recently published analysis looking at 10 years’ worth of spinout deals. From a collapse in UK funding since Brexit to the rise of Japan, and from the continued strength of life sciences to an increased focus on climatetech, the data tells a lot of fascinating stories. You can find the full article, for free, with lots of charts on our websit...
Bernhard Weber is the managing director of Unicorn, the innovation hub of University of Graz which opened its doors to spinouts and startups in April 2021. Unicorn offers co-working space and runs programmes like Spin-Off Lab and Startup Werkstatt, which support researchers and fledgling entrepreneurs, and it taps into the EU ecosystem through its participation in healthtech-, greentech- and smart city-focused programme Urban Tech. Bernhard tells us more about all of these and Unicorn’s decision...
Lithuania is a relatively small country of just under 3 million people that only regained independence in 1990. It’s also only started taking tech transfer seriously over the past decade, but in that time has seen exponential growth. Vilma Purienė is the director of the Knowledge and Technology Transfer Centre at Vilnius Tech, having started the office from scratch in 2014. She joins the podcast to talk about the lessons she has learned to date, particularly in those first years, and why members...
Randi Elisabeth Taxt is the senior adviser at VIS, the regional tech transfer office for Vestlandet (its owners include University of Bergen, Haukeland University Hospital, the Institute of Marine Research, Siva, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, and NHH Norwegian Business School) and she tells us about the history of tech transfer in the country, which means its regional approach emerged organically. She ponders whether the model is here to stay, and what the opportunities and chal...
Ole Kristian Hjelstuen is the chief executive of Inven2, the tech transfer organisation owned by University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, which doesn’t just handle all of the typical research commercialisation aspects but also manages clinical trials at its partner institutions (which include all the health trusts in the South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority). Ole’s been in the job since 2012, when he joined from GE Healthcare, and he also holds positions with the Oslo Cancer Cl...
