Talking Tech Transfer: Recent Episodes
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Talking Tech Transfer is a weekly interview series with thought leaders in university tech transfer, hosted by Global University Venturing’s editor Thierry Heles.
Despite the benefits of universities having a venture fund they can draw on to invest in companies they help commercialise, they are still a rarity in places with mature venture capital sectors like Europe and the US.
More top European universities have access to university venture funds than the US’s most research-intensive institutions — that’s the finding of Global University Venturing research published this summer. But the story isn’t quite that simple. Both geographies count an equal number of funds, but multi-university venture funds (investment vehicles backing spinouts from two or more institutions) are a more common feature in Europe.
One reason for that is deal flow: Ireland, for example, saw a total of 26 new spinouts founded in the whole country last year so a fund for a single institution wouldn’t be sustainable. Indeed, the Atlantic Bridge-managed University Bridge Fund is backed by multiple universities and invests throughout the nation.
Surprisingly, while raising a venture fund is a live discussion at universities on both continents, some are against setting up an investment vehicle to the point of declining money offered by alumni. There’s a few reasons for this, including financial risk, that we’ll dive into on this episode. Fill out a brief survey to help us with more university venture fund research.
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We look back at some of the highlights of season 3, which featured many a discussion about university incubator and accelerator programmes, including insights from Jim Shaikh (The Greenhouse at Imperial College London), Paul Devlin (Cardiff University), Brandon Paschal (LaunchLab at Stellenbosch University), and Duncan Johnson and Miles Kirby (NG Studios powered by Deeptech Labs).
This season also featured discussions around university venture funds (Anita Nel at Stellenbosch University and its University Technology Fund) and investing in the construction sector (Ilian Iliev at NetScientific).
We also tried to answer the question of what makes an ideal spinout founder with GUV’s own Fernando Moncada, as well as an episode guest-hosted by Imperial College London’s Simon Hepworth that specifically looked at immigrants as founders. John Dearie (American Center for Entrepreneurship), Alice Li (Cornell University’s Center for Technology Licensing), Desmond Cheung (an investor with Foresight Group) and Dorian Haci (founder and CEO of Imperial spinout MintNeuro) all contributed to that panel discussion.
Beyond the Breakthrough is taking a summer break — but keep your eyes peeled for a bonus episode or two coming later this month!
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Andy Shenk, the chief executive of Auckland UniServices, the commercialisation subsidiary of the University of Auckland, knows that collaborating with the Māori people is important. He also knows that big data and AI offer great opportunities, but tells me about some of the challenges too.
He also argues that the country’s remoteness actually makes space tech a strength for New Zealand, although the nation still struggles with a lack of serial entrepreneurs despite the fact that many people are open to trying their hands at a startup.
Auckland UniServices is also unique in that it doesn’t simply create its own spinouts and startups, but also operates businesses – including one that trained medical staff in delivering the covid-19 vaccine across New Zealand and several Pacific island nations.
Today we’re revisiting a classic episode from the archives. If you want to know more about Auckland UniServices, head on over to globalventuring.com/university where you can find a brand new op-ed from Andy’s colleague Will Charles looking at why university venture funds and low equity stakes are important.
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Setting up a venture fund in 2020 was a “huge paradigm shift” for Stellenbosch University in South Africa, because, for the first time, the executive leadership at the institution became interested in spinouts, says Anita Nel, the chief director for innovation and business development, because they understood that academic research had commercial value and a way to build, for example, local pharmaceutical expertise (the country had to wait six months longer than the northern hemisphere for a covid-19 vaccine because there were no vaccine developers or drug discovery companies in all of Africa).
External investors have taken note too: since the University Technology Fund (UTF) was launched with the backing from public-private investment vehicle SA SME Fund, there have been “hundreds of millions of rand” (ZAR100m = $5.4m) invested in the startups incubated by the university, says Brandon Paschal, the deputy director for spinout companies and funds who is also in charge of incubator LaunchLab.
The fund is a first not just for Stellenbosch University or South Africa, but for the whole continent because it invests solely in university spinouts from Stellenbosch University and the University of Cape Town (while University Mohammed VI Polytechnic in Morocco also has a fund, UM6P Ventures, though that one invests in startups across Africa).
The first University Technology Fund, which raised ZAR230m, has been deemed a success. Now, a second fund is being raised with one key difference: it will be a national fund after Nel overcame early hesitancy from other tech transfer offices in the country.
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Immigrants are profoundly entrepreneurial people: they leave behind everything they know for a new country and new opportunities, often at a financial risk. This willingness to embrace change and build a new life from scratch means it should not be a surprise that in the US alone, 43% of Fortune 500 companies have been founded by immigrants.
But there are obstacles that governments around the world put in front of such people and those they subsequently want to hire for their startups. In the US, for example, the number of H-1B visas (which allow companies to hire foreign talent) is capped and only 65,000 such visas can be issued in total each fiscal year.
And while large corporations have the financial and legal resources to navigate routes like the H-1B or Global Talent visa in the UK, startups typically lack these means and so can miss out on talent even when they’re developing technology in a field that only has a handful of experts around the world.
John Dearie, president of the Center for American Entrepreneurship which lobbies policymakers for changes, points out that “the United States is the only industrial democracy on the planet that does not have a visa category specifically designed to attract and retain foreign-born entrepreneurs”.
Dearie is joined on this episode of Beyond the Breakthrough by three people who have first-hand experience of the challenges, and opportunities, around immigration: Alice Li, executive director of the Center for Technology Licensing at Cornell University; Desmond Cheung, senior associate at Foresight Group; and Dorian Haci, founder and CEO of neural implant startup MintNeuro.
Simon Hepworth, director of enterprise at Imperial College London, leads the discussion, which marks the third and final part in our mini-series in partnership with tech transfer association TenU on building spinouts.
Further listeningPart 1 of this mini-series: The key ingredients of successful spinout teams Part 2 of this mini-series: Funding for all — unlocking diversity in spinouts
Alice Li previously joined the Beyond the Breakthrough podcast for an in-depth conversation about Cornell University’s ecosystem. Listen to that episode here.
Get in touchFollow Thierry Heles on LinkedIn.
Commercialising social sciences research is such a new area of technology transfer that when you spin out a company “you might be the first to do that type of deal,” says Paul Devlin, the head of research commercialisation and impact at Cardiff University.
And Cardiff is going all in: the institution is a founding member of Aspect, a UK-based multi-university organisation that was set up to drive the creation of social sciences spinouts. Two years ago, Cardiff opened a six-storey incubator, called sbarc|spark, which is dedicated to social sciences and home to the tech transfer office itself.
Devlin — who’s been in the job for 18 months — can already claim early successes such as HateLab, a platform to detect online hate speech and crime, that began as a social sciences research project but last year was spun out as Nisien.ai.
Devlin is also working with his boss Vanessa Cuthill and vice-chancellor Prof Wendy Larner to make sure tech transfer is measured by impact, rather than just VC investment raised — a metric that makes sense for life sciences or software spinouts, but not for social sciences.
Further listeningLearn more about SETsquared in our interview with the enterprise partnership’s interim executive director Marty Reid.
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The Cambridge, UK cluster isn’t short of opportunity: the university’s research and knowledge exchange activities alone contribute £23.1bn to the economy. Investment firm NetScientific, and its fund management subsidiary EMV Capital, are among the investors that have flocked to the city.And NetScientific is now doubling down on the cluster, chief executive Ilian Iliev says, after having taken over its local peer Martlet Capital, a firm that had been the corporate venture arm of aerospace and defence company Marshall Group for nine years until 2021. The move was the natural conclusion to EMV Capital’s earlier decision to become an investor in Martlet.EMV Capital is now exploring launching new funds under the Martlet Capital brand. Already, the acquisition has helped NetScientific nearly double its assets under management to more than £100m and more than doubling the portfolio to 70 companies.Iliev, who first joined the podcast in March last year, returns also to discuss NetScientific’s decision to acquire a 30% stake in Wanda, a remote patient monitoring platform. It’s an unusual full-circle moment for the portfolio company and the investor: Wanda was majority-owned by EMV Capital until 2019 (this predated EMV Capital’s own merger with NetScientific). Noting that there can be “poetry in finance”, Iliev explains how the world’s shift to telemedicine accelerated by the pandemic has made Wanda a valuable proposition to an investor like NetScientific once again.Further listeningIlian Iliev first joined Beyond the Breakthrough in March 2023. Listen to that episode now to learn more about NetScientific and EMV Capital’s history and why the firm is bullish on deeptech, healthcare and the Cambridge cluster.Get in touchFollow Thierry Heles on LinkedIn.
Universities, by their very nature, have always been strong centres of innovation. Scientific discoveries are routinely made in university research labs – but spinning those discoveries out into an operational business comes with numerous hurdles.Academics who go on to found companies based on their research have not just a steep learning curve to adapt to the new commercial environment, but also a wider shift in their mindset. The lab, after all, is a much different place than the market.Fernando Moncada — senior reporter for GUV and host of our other podcast, CVC Unplugged — spoke to a number of startup founders and investors for an article to learn more about what some of those things are that academics-turned-entrepreneurs have to deal with and navigate through to get their brainchild out of the university and into the real world. Getting up to speed with the business world, learning to choose the most viable path for your technology, getting used to the constraints of being a business that needs investment, and effectively communicating their technology are just among some of the things they need to reckon with.Get in touchFollow Thierry Heles on LinkedIn.
Duncan Johnson argues that spinout founders in the north of England need to learn to think bigger. That’s not just a question of access to capital (his investment firm Northern Gritstone has £312m at its disposal) but also of infrastructure to mentor and nurture these founders.
Duncan took a trip to Boston last year where he realised that even the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had benefited from creating The Engine, which has a fund and a deeptech incubator.
To do something similar back home, Duncan found a willing partner in Miles Kirby, chief executive of Deeptech Labs, an accelerator and fund that began with a focus on the Cambridge ecosystem but is today attracting startups from all over Europe.
The two teamed up to launch NG Studios powered by Deeptech Labs, a 10-week accelerator programme that teaches academic founders how to approach their fledgling businesses as potentially world-changing unicorns and to go after big funding rounds. It does it, for example, by bringing in industry experts for 1:1 insights and world-class mentors like serial entrepreneur Stan Boland, who has sold multiple companies (such as fabless semiconductor manufacturer Icera to Nvidia for more than $367m).
It also does it through a demo day, bringing hundreds of potential investors to the north of England, a region historically ignored by VCs that have tended to focus on the golden triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge.
The first cohort of NG Studios are advanced materials developer Auxetec, robotics software platform BOW, cybersecurity company Cavero, microbial biomanufacturing systems developer Evolutor, single molecule spectroscopy tool producer Exciting Instruments, and protein microgel developer MicroLub.
Further listening
- Duncan Johnson on the creation of Northern Gritstone and its impact on the north of England
- Miles Kirby on using his Silicon Valley expertise to build Deeptech Labs
Get in touch
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Disclaimer: Mawsonia Ltd is a limited partner in Deeptech Labs.
Some of the most innovative clean energy and climate technologies originate in the labs of the world’s research universities. At Imperial College London’s climate innovation accelerator, The Greenhouse, startups address solutions in niche areas such as bio-textiles, waste management and green hydrogen.
It is not just venture capital investors that are engaging with these startups. Corporate investors seeking to decarbonise their supply chains are seeing opportunities to partner and finance these early-stage startups at the seed investing stage.
We take a look back at some of the key insights shared by guests on season 2 of Beyond the Breakthrough.
Hear from Tony Boccanfuso (UIDP), Prof Jenny Kuan (California State University, Monterey Bay), Tatiana Litvin-Vechnyak (Georgetown University), Kelley Rich (University of Notre Dame), Kevin Leland (Halo), Simon Hepworth (Imperial College London), Nii Dodoo-Amoo (Osage University Partners), Rayner Lim (Innovate UK), Allison Byers (Scroobious), Jo O’Leary (UKRI), Will Caldwell (SaVia Health), Gustavo Cavenaghi (Kortex Ventures) and Kim Moore (Global University Venturing).
Read Thierry’s article on the 1842 Fund mentioned in this episode.
I’d love to hear what stood out for you this season. Message me on LinkedIn.
Licensing intellectual property to a spinout can take frustratingly long and end with terms for a spinout that a venture capital investor might not be comfortable with — the university taking too large a share is a typical argument that you’ll hear particularly in the UK. There are initiatives to speed this up. The US has BOLT and the UK has the USIT Guides, template term sheets co-developed by tech transfer offices, investors and law firms to significantly speed up the process. Ireland even has a national IP protocol.
Germany has been lagging behind outside the innovation hotspots of Munich and Berlin, but universities across the country are exploring new models to speed up IP licensing and come up with favourable terms, while removing the upfront financial burden of buying the IP rights from the university (a stifling factor at German institutions).
Today’s episode is a conversation between my colleagues Fernando Moncada and Kim Moore. Kim recently took a look specifically at a new model developed by TU Darmstadt called IP for Shares. What’s the stroke of genius? The university only gets shares in the spinout if there’s an exit.
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How do you get beyond the many roadblocks stopping cutting-edge technology from being adopted by healthcare providers – which naturally have a lot of safety concerns, and often sizeable budget constraints too. Are hospitals moving to being completely decentralised in the future? And is AI about to revolutionise how hospitals are run? Tas Gohir, senior intellectual property, innovation and commercial research manager at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, Gustavo Cavenaghi, head of investments at Brazil-based Kortex Ventures, Eric King, investment director at Intel Capital and Will Caldwell, chief executive of healthcare startup SaVia Health discuss solutions to the innovation challenges faced by hospitals.
(Linked episode – Beyond the Breakthrough: Creating an NHS fit for the 21st century)[https://globalventuring.com/university/beyond-the-breakthrough-nhs-fit-for-21st-century/]
Today, we are revisiting another favourite from the archives.
Stanford may be a recognised world-leader when it comes to startups, but it mustn’t rest on its laurels. Sometimes that even means launching initiatives that others have long had — that is just one of the lessons that Karin Immergluck, executive director of Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing, has learnt. Karin also tells us what the US can learn from its international peers, why TenU is an important component of her work and she examines the importance of erasing bias in hiring processes, including in leadership positions.
You can find a transcript of this episode on our website.
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Diversity is not just about making sure more women and underrepresented minorities are on founding teams. When they do create businesses, they are typically ignored by venture capital investors who look for the same type of founders that have previously made money (creating a vicious circle). In the US, female founders raised just 2% of the VC money in 2023, and in Europe it was even less at 1.8%, according to PitchBook.
In terms of spinouts, these founders not only face this bias in fundraising but even when it comes to negotiating with tech transfer offices. Often, they sit at the negotiation table in front of a white man, as was the case for serial entrepreneur Allison Byers.
Byers has learned to fight back — she helped pass a California bill that will force any VC active in the state to disclose diversity numbers for their portfolios from 2025.
She tells us more about that work on this panel discussion, the second in our miniseries on startup teams and hosted once again by Imperial College London’s director of enterprise Simon Hepworth. Rani Saad, founding partner of Apex Black, and Jo O’Leary, head of equality, diversity and inclusion at UK Research and Innovation, also offer actionable insights for founders, universities and investors.
ResourcesAll Raise, an advocacy group for female and non-binary founders and funders
The USIT Guide, a template for life sciences spinouts
No Limits, a platform by UKRI to connect researchers to new opportunities
Narrative CVs, a tool by UKRI to help researchers build better resumés
Peer Exchange Platform, a collaborative take on narrative CVs by the Marie Curie Alumni Association
The key ingredients of successful spinout teams, part one of our miniseries with TenU on building startups
Get in touchConnect with Thierry Heles on LinkedIn or via email.
Imagine your corporate R&D team is facing a problem so complex it requires the world’s top researchers to solve. How do you find the right expert? You could scour endless academic papers or slowly build relationships with individual universities. You could invest in startups that are developing a solution. Or you could go to Halo, a matchmaker for cutting-edge research and real-world problems.
Here’s how it works: corporates throw out their toughest challenges as precise questions like “how do we remove nitrogen from stormwater runoff?” (an issue that causes river pollution, and a problem Halo helped solve for Oldcastle Infrastructure). Researchers on the platform can then submit a proposal through a process that takes about half an hour — much quicker than writing most grant applications.
But what if the right professor isn’t on the platform? Halo also uses an AI tool to scan patent filings and contact experts directly. And it works with tech transfer offices to ensure they can bring opportunities to their researchers (and keep track of applications so all the paperwork is handled properly).
Best of all for researchers, tech transfer offices and startups: it’s completely free. Corporates pay an annual fee depending on the features they require. The model has allowed Halo, incubated at the University of Chicago’s innovation unit Polsky Center and founded in 2020, to attract more than 4,000 researchers across more than 100 countries. Its corporate clients include Takeda, PepsiCo and Unilever.
Kevin Leland, founder and chief executive of Halo, tells us how Halo grew out of an idea for a crowdfunding platform for early-stage drug development to a marketplace that now even handles philanthropic initiatives like Bayer’s Grants4Ag and enables startups to easily apply to corporate-run accelerators.
Further listening
Learn more about the University of Chicago’s Polsky Center, where Halo was incubated, in episode 34 of the Beyond the Breakthrough podcast.
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A PhD student who sets up a spinout and becomes its CEO is 21% better at returning an investor’s money than a serial founder would be if installed in the same spinout. Even more impressively, a PhD student turned chief executive is 46% better at making a venture capital fund money than a former CEO from a large company would be.
That phenomenal stat comes from Nii Dodoo-Amoo, an investor with Osage University Partners, a US venture capital firm that backs university spinouts. But Dodoo-Amoo isn’t the only one who’s found this to be true: Herman Verrelst, founding partner of healthtech-focused investor Heran Partners agrees that what he’s dubbed the Pipi Longstocking approach — “I’ve never done this before so I think I can do it” — is helpful when it comes to spinouts, which are often businesses with a cutting-edge technology that requires a novel business approach.
Verrelst and Dodoo-Amoo are two of the panellists discussing how to build successful startup teams together with Anne Dobrée, director of programming for Founders at the University of Cambridge (a programmatic approach to building startup founding teams), and Rayner Lim, innovation lead for investment readiness at the British national innovation agency Innovate UK.
The discussion is led by Simon Hepworth, director of enterprise at Imperial College London, and was recorded in partnership with international tech transfer collaboration tenU. It is the first part of a mini-series and will continue with a focus on diversity next month.
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Can university spinouts help fight poverty? That’s a question Kelley Rich, interim vice-president for innovation at the University of Notre Dame, is trying to answer as head of the institution’s innovation hub IDEA Center. It’s part of a campus-wide initiative launched in January 2024 that will see increased poverty research taking place — it gets to the heart of the private Catholic university’s mission of bringing about positive societal change.
Rich recently signed a partnership with High Alpha Innovation, an Indiana-based venture studio operator that will put a venture studio, with a first focus on poverty, on campus. High Alpha is also the general partner running the 1842 Fund, a fund that will invest in university spinouts, as well as student and community startups. The fund, which has a target of raising $35m, will work in close partnership with the IDEA Center to fund impact-focused spinouts.
This is Notre Dame’s second university venture fund — its first, Pit Road Fund, is fully deployed. The university has decided against managing a second fund itself, in part because of a perceived conflict of interest, Rich explains in the podcast.
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Mark Billingsley, director of the University of Alaska Fairbanks‘ Tech Transfer Office and Innovation Hub, joined Beyond the Breakthrough in April 2022 and today we’re revisiting this conversation because it’s still one of the most unusual places covered on the podcast.
How do you do tech transfer when the US federal government’s definition of “rural communities” covers your whole state and rural to you means 30 people that live 200 miles from the nearest road?
Thankfully for Mark, Alaskans are an entrepreneurial culture. And while it is also a culture that is yet to fully embrace innovation, Alaska’s remoteness means startups and founders are much more resilient than they might be in the lower 48 states.
We will be back with a brand new episode next Friday — listen to the end for a sneak peek of our conversation with Kelley Rich from the University of Notre Dame’s IDEA Center, which does things a little differently to your typical tech transfer office and employs a team of more than 30 students.
Weirdly, being located at the heart of the US capital doesn’t always help Georgetown University when it comes to creating spinout companies. State universities often have economic development mandates that they can follow, but in Washington DC Georgetown is in something of a vacuum — with little direction for what to focus on, less set funding and fewer people pushing to advance the technologies coming out of the institution.
Tatiana Litvin-Vechnyak, vice-president of the Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) admits she underestimated the problem when she joined from Rutgers University a year ago, but she is finding ways to work with universities in Maryland and Virginia and creating links with federal and city officials.
One of the innovations that Litvin-Vechnyak has brought in since she joined the OTC is a highly structured — and large — internship programme. The first cohort of eight students is going through this programme right now. It’s helping Litvin-Vechnyak, who started as an intern at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, not to lose sight of what she found exciting and challenging when she first joined the profession.
UMDNJ would merge with Rutgers University in 2013, and she tells us how she navigated the complex task of negotiating a new, unified IP policy with two legacy faculties and unions.
Thinking of coming to our GCVI Summit in March? Listen to the episode to get an exclusive 10% discount on tickets!
Silicon Valley is the home of venture capital and startups — but drive an hour or two outside of the city and you are in a different world. Take Monterey, the site of our own GCVI Summit (March 12 to 14 — listen to the episode to get a 10% discount code on tickets). It is a beautiful city with a world-famous aquarium and a gorgeous golf course, but it is a city of extremes: the median household income is $98,000 while at the same time more than 10% of the population lives in poverty.
The startups coming out of Monterey’s local institution, California State University, Monterey Bay, tend to be different from the technology companies up the road: they’re coffee producers, sustainable packaging manufacturers and main street businesses like restaurants.
But Jennifer Kuan, associate professor of entrepreneurship and economics at the university believes these startups can still use some Silicon Valley tactics. Not only is she helping launch ventures in her role as deputy director of innovation and research at the entrepreneurship hub Startup Monterey Bay, she also co-founded être Venture Capital, which focuses on women and minority-owned startups across the US.
It’s part of a field experiment to replicate Silicon Valley — Kuan’s research has unearthed a few tactics employed by the original VC community in the Bay Area that might just be the secret sauce nobody else has tried, and she tells us what that is.
Tony Boccanfuso has spent the past 17 years trying to work out how to get universities and corporations to collaborate better on research.
Boccanfuso is the chief executive of UIDP, a non-profit association between large companies and leading research universities around the world. The invitation-only organisation has more than 200 members.
It all started with frustrations over negotiating sponsored research contracts, but UIDP’s work today goes beyond this. Boccanfuso tells us: “We tend to think about things in various verticals. … We also look at strategic engagement — how do you work comprehensively between organisations? — [and] we’re spending more and more time on talent and talent development and talent exchange.”
Among the guidance produced by UIDP is how to bring industrial PhD programmes to sectors outside of life sciences (where they are a common element) and educating the FBI on how foreign corporations might access research at a US university.
UIDP has also created much more ambitious programmes, such as an initiative focused on helping historically black colleges and universities in the US to become more research-intensive (which they have not traditionally been). And it is leading a US National Science Foundation-sponsored programme called Engineering Research Visioning Alliance, which is bringing together scientists, policymakers and others to drive engineering research in areas that benefit society.
You can also read a full transcript of this episode.
Beyond the Breakthrough returns 9 February. Here is a trailer with some of our upcoming guests this season.
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.
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 Vincent Lamande, Innovate UK’s Geeta Nathan and Northern Gritstone’s Marion Bernard (and you can learn more about that firm in our interview with her colleague Duncan Johnson).
We’re bringing you an episode from Mawsonia’s other podcast, CVC Unplugged, featuring an interview with Owen Thompson, CEO of Cambridge Future Tech.
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 companies in the UK.
Marty Reid, interim executive director of SETsquared, sees potential in sectors that may be less obvious too, such as creative industries. Indeed, he argues, technologies like immersive gaming could have far-reaching applications — even in sectors like healthcare.
But SETsquared doesn’t just want to be for founders: it recently won a £1.5m award from Research England to transform and enable tech transfer at its member institutions, helping them to engage investors earlier and forge more fruitful relationships.
And those investors can know that they’ll get an incredibly diverse offering: some of SETsquared’s members have already reached near-parity of funding going into women-founded startups and the rest is catching up fast. Reid has immediate, tangible advice for any tech transfer office looking to do the same.
SETsquared’s conference, Investment Futures 24, is happening on November 28 2023 in Shoreditch, London. You can register on the SETsquared website.
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 integral part of the Large Hadron Collider, they’re being used in some approaches to quantum computing, and they’re being explored as transmission lines for the electricity grid and as a way to make offshore wind turbines smaller.
They’re not necessarily intuitive: superconductors must have defects to work — you might know that semiconductors are the opposite: they need to be (almost) pure. They’re also not without challenges — MRI scanners continue to rely on lead because no alternative has been found yet and figuring out how to create kilometre-long cables that could serve as power lines has taken three decades.
Prof Susie Speller is a fellow at St Catherine’s College and researcher in the Oxford Centre for Applied Superconductivity at the University of Oxford, where she helps corporates like Siemens Healthineers (which manufactures MRI scanners), fusion energy developer Tokamak Energy and scientific instruments company Oxford Instruments solve challenges around superconductors.
She is also a passionate science communicator and last year published a book on superconductors, A Materials Science Guide to Superconductors, that offers an accessible entry point into the field without glossing over the fundamental science behind it all. We find out what prompted her to write the book and how her interest in materials science began with a trip to the University of Cambridge when she was 15.
Global University Venturing chose to purchase a copy of Prof Speller’s book.
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 contract to manage the National Industry PhD programme in February 2023 and has completed the first two rounds. McNaughton tells us what he has learned from the exercise so far.
Among other things, PD Plus uses a tool called the Curiosity Index to monitor and track an individual researcher’s engagement over weeks, months and years and deploys targeted modules to guide them towards commercialisation.
Other countries are already keen to learn from this. PD Plus recently expanded overseas to upskill Britain-based researchers. The company has also expanded into New Zealand (where it’s hired previous podcast guest Anne Barnett) and plans to enter the US and Canada in the coming years.
In targeting these markets — which already collaborate on intelligence under the Five Eyes monicker — McNaughton hopes to tap into the growing awareness that emerging technologies like quantum computing are national security concerns where university researchers will play an important role.
Get free access to PD Plus in the UKPD Plus is offering complimentary access to its webinar series to our listeners in the UK through the remainder of 2023. Simply email Ben Morrell at ben@pdplus.co.uk to get access.
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, Transformation and Improvement (CITI) — that handles everything from spinouts to consultancy to identifying efficiencies that can guarantee the long-term survival of the NHS. It even has its own venture fund, KHP Ventures.
Tas Gohir, senior intellectual property, innovation and commercial research manager at CITI, talks us through his office’s work and shares advice for founders and SMEs that are looking to get their product or service into the NHS.
He also tells us why money alone won’t solve all the NHS’s challenges, like long waitlists, why CITI works with local and international partners like the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and he talks about his own research which is looking at challenges in the recruitment of tech transfer staff (if you work in a TTO and would like to contribute to this research, reach out to him).
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 helping universities across Europe build spinouts with social impact at their core.
It’s not an easy task and raising capital can be a nightmare — Mann has seen his share of failures, such as his attempt to raise a fund on behalf of social venture collaboration Impact12 in 2020. But examples like SOPHIA Oxford show that these social impact spinouts can have real benefits, and can be a powerful force in international development.
But what do you have to watch out for when setting up a social venture? How does it differ from setting up a social enterprise? And are those challenges the same in every country? (Spoiler: No. In some jurisdictions, like the US or France, social ventures don’t exist as a legal concept.) Mann has advice for universities, would-be founders and PraxisAuril, the UK’s knowledge exchange association which recently hired staff specifically to bring social venture spinouts into the mainstream.
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.
This focus on medtech isn’t without its challenges — demand for wet labs, for example, has far outstripped supply. Fiona is also keen that medtech doesn’t overshadow Galway’s other opportunities in energy, agritech and construction (and indeed, Galway is home to Ireland’s latest research centre focused on construction).
On this debut episode of Beyond the Breakthrough, Fiona also discusses the importance of US investors for Galway startups, the government’s role through economic development agency Enterprise Ireland and local investors like Atlantic Bridge, whose University Bridge Fund II is backed by the University of Galway.
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 […]
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 companies in France) and then the tech transfer office at the University of Luxembourg.
He’s currently also the president of ASTP, the European association of tech transfer professionals, a job he took on because of his passion for connecting people and generating new ideas collaboratively.
Christophe has learned much in his career, which goes back to 1992, and if he could have one wish for tech transfer, it would be to take the financial motivation out of the equation when thinking about spinouts, allowing people to focus on the impact instead. Haunold explains why.
Further listening
Christophe references the work of Alison Campbell to harmonise knowledge transfer metrics in Europe, a project she undertook on behalf of the European Commission. You can find out more about this project in our conversation with Campbell.
“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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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 entrepreneurs to having corporate partners as “builders” rather than “consumers”.
This is an edited version of the webinar — you can find the full version at GlobalVenturing.com/The-Next-Wave which includes slides with interesting data. Visit that link to sign up for future webinars as well — it’s free.
University College Dublin has racked up a number of 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 the insider view on how the ecommerce company was born. UCD also established the first Irish quantum spinout, Equal1 (read our in-depth profile […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Some snippets of upcoming interviews plus an explanation for why we’ve been on a break which involves a peek behind the scenes of Talking Tech Transfer. “Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Hello dear listener. You’re probably wondering where the latest episode is and so I wanted to give a quick update, as scheduling conflicts — life happens! — unfortunately mean we’ll be on a short unplanned break.
But we are coming back — in fact I’ve got some phenomenal guests lined up for you that will absolutely be worth the small wait. So: stay subscribed and, if you’re still a little new here, do take this opportunity to catch up on the back catalogue — there have been many wonderful guests on Talking Tech Transfer since the very first episode that you might not have heard yet.
Thank you for listening. We’ll be back in a few weeks!
“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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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 about how sometimes government programmes are actually fantastic and how CTT’s involvement in the EU project IMPACT — which aims to improve the teaching of sustainability-oriented innovation and entrepreneurship — is adding value to his work.
And with the Ukrainian border just 250km away, Jacek also discusses how his university, and CTT itself, are helping refugees.
“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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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 has 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 master’s in entrepreneurship.
Malta has historically had a very low proportion of its GDP going to research and development, and many companies are subsidiaries that leave research to their overseas parent, and Anton ponders how this is affecting his work and what can be done to remedy it.
And finally, Anton talks about why two of Malta’s three spinouts thus far were set up in other countries and, of course, he follows Talking Tech Transfer tradition and reveals his magic wand wish.
“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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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 an angel network and is in the process of launching a (first of hopefully many) SEIS fund of up to £5m.
Nadia ponders how commercialisation has become less of a dirty word at the RCA and explains how the fascinating, two-term-long programme AcrossRCA is fostering an entrepreneurial, interdisciplinary culture on campus.
She also discusses how the RCA is increasing diversity and tells us why her magic wand wish is about students coming to IP workshops.
“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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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 everywhere from the National Physics Laboratory to Kew Gardens to the Government Internal Audit Agency.
She also ponders the differences between government and university tech transfer, explains why GOTT’s remit does and doesn’t cover the whole UK and tells us how GOTT’s grant fund operates on a very flexible model.
If you want to hear more about Alison’s earlier career, you can listen to her first appearance on Talking Tech Transfer where she discusses everything from KTI and AUTM to her work on harmonising knowledge transfer metrics for the EU.
“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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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 at a time that’s actually convenient for women all the way to setting up an EDI committee at AUTM that reports directly to the board.
He also tells us why, if it’s ever appropriated, the funding for tech transfer offices in the CHIPS and Science Act could prove truly transformational for the US economy.
Find out, too, what Marc learned when he moved from the tech transfer office at UNC Chapel Hill into one of their spinouts in the 1990s.
“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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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 regulations around being a publicly traded company are a positive.
He also ponders how living through the fall of communism and then South African apartheid has shaped his views, and how his education at Cambridge convinced him that investing in a local fund, Martlet Capital, made sense.
“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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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 ponders how he’s found a new appreciation for the rollercoaster of emotions a CEO goes through since he became acting chief executive of his own startup.
Outside the US, Michael recently discovered a passion for Romania after an exchange programme brought him to the Eastern European country, which is still at the beginning of its tech transfer ecosystem. He shares his hopes for the nation and how he might be able to help.
“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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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 website now.
We’ll be back with regular interviews starting March 3!
“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
We’re taking some time off to celebrate the end of 2022 but will be back in the new year. Thank you to all our guests this year and all those who have listened and subscribed.
“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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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 to house corporate incubators rather than setting up its own.
He also shares his views of what is, and what isn’t, working in the Austrian ecosystem. And he talks about the one component he’s identified through supporting more than 250 startups to date that indicates if it might be a success or failure.
“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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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 membership in the European Union has been incredibly important for her work and the country overall.
She ponders both the opportunities, like fintech and space tech, in Lithuania, and the challenges that are ongoing, like building more of an entrepreneurial culture among citizens and halting a brain drain to other countries in Europe.
Vilma also reveals what attracted her to the tech transfer profession after nearly eight years of working for the Ministry of Economy, and what she would still like to change if given a magic wand.
“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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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 challenges are that lie ahead.
She also discusses how a lifelong, continuing desire to learn led her to VIS, where, as part of her job, she’s working on a PhD in innovation management.
“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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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). […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
There are no new episodes of Talking Tech Transfer this week or next as Thierry is off getting married. We will be back with another interview on Friday 29 April 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 […]
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 […]
Tony Hickson is the chief business officer of Cancer Research UK, where he leads the Commercial Partnerships team responsible for commercialisation. He joins us on the podcast to discuss taking a very long view of shifting culture towards more entrepreneurialism and the importance of transparency around ethnic diversity and inclusion. He also discusses the changes […]
For the 50th episode of Talking Tech Transfer, we are excited to bring you a discussion between Ian McClure, the associate vice-president for research, innovation and economic impact at University of Kentucky, the executive director of its commercialisation office UK Innovate and the incoming chairman of AUTM, and Orin Herskowitz, senior vice-president of intellectual property […]
Stanford may be a recognised world leader, but it must not rest on its laurels – sometimes that even means launching initiatives that others have long been doing. That is just one of the lessons Karin Immergluck, executive director of Stanford University’s Office of Technology Licensing (OTL), tells us today on Talking Tech Transfer. She […]
Andy Shenk, chief executive of Auckland UniServices, the commercialisation subsidiary of University of Auckland, joins us on Talking Tech Transfer to discuss how the office collaborates with the Māori people and why that matters, what the opportunities and challenges are around big data and AI, and why being a remote country is an asset for […]
Alice Li is the executive director of the Center for Technology Licensing (CTL) at Cornell University and she joins us on Talking Tech Transfer to discuss how this Ivy League institution remains agile and open to experimentation, what questions the profession needs to ask today to be prepared for the future and what the challenges […]
Albert Domingo is the director of technologies and digital areas at UPF Ventures, the spinout management arm of Pompeu Fabra University, and he joins us to discuss the opportunities and challenges of building an ecosystem in Barcelona. He also explains why UPF Ventures works with spinouts from other institutions and why Spanish bureaucracy is a […]
Riam Kanso is the founder and CEO of Conception X, a non-profit organisation in the UK that helps PhD students develop their entrepreneurial skillsets and launch deeptech startups. She tells us about how Conception X grew out of a pilot programme at University College London, why not taking any equity in the portfolio companies is […]
Otomar Sláma is the chairman of Charles University Innovations Prague, the commercialisation subsidiary of Charles University, and he joins us today to talk about how his passion led him to become only the second person in the Czech Republic to gain RTTP accreditation and why it will take a societal culture shift to drive entrepreneurship […]
Rohan McDougall is the director of commercialisation at Curtin University and he joins us to discuss the challenges faced by a remote ecosystem such as Perth. We also talk about driving innovation in a region known for mining – which led to one of Curtin’s most prominent spinouts to date – and what the success […]
Alexis Dormandy has been the chief executive of Oxford Science Enterprises, the investment company set up by University of Oxford, since January this year and he joins us to talk about the changes he has already enacted (which included rebranding the organisation from its original name of Oxford Sciences Innovation), what he plans to do […]
David Coleman is the chief executive of University of Birmingham Enterprise, and he’s a passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion. That is just one of the topics covered in this interview –he also tells about the importance of MICRA and its ambition to raise a fund, how the TTO has grown over the years and […]
Itzik Goldwaser is the president and chief executive of Yissum, the technology transfer company of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he joins us to discuss how the country’s mandatory army service helps foster an entrepreneurial mindset. He also tells us about his journey from running a Hebrew University spinout to heading its TTO, how the […]
Christy Wyskiel is the executive director of Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures (JHTV), the tech transfer office of Johns Hopkins University, and senior adviser to the president for innovation and entrepreneurship. She reveals why she is so passionate about the Baltimore ecosystem that she goes above and beyond her day job and talks about why having […]
Tim Boyle is the director of innovation and commercialisation at nuclear research institute ANSTO and the chair of ATTP, the global body responsible for RTTP accreditation. He joins us to talk about what makes ANSTO different and how a chance encounter on Imperial College London’s campus pushed him into a career in tech transfer. He […]
Christina Takke is a managing partner of V-Bio Ventures, a venture capital firm she co-founded to invest in spinouts from research institute VIB and other promising companies across Europe. She tells us why she helped set up V-Bio Ventures, why it is qualitative money that is missing in continental Europe and what can be done […]
Rich Chylla is the executive director of MSU Technologies, the tech transfer office of Michigan State University. He joins us on Talking Tech Transfer to discuss the importance of collaboration across institutions and countries, as well as tell us more about his experience of being a chair of AUTM, why MSU Foundation plays a crucial […]
Thomas Schmidt is the head of technology transfer at University of Southern Denmark, or SDU, and he joins us on Talking Tech Transfer to discuss the importance of time management skills, the challenges – and opportunities! – of being a regional university, and why senior leaders are the ones who really ought to consider becoming […]
Jay Schrankler is the associate vice-president and head of the Polsky Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at University of Chicago, having spent the first part of his career in industry. He’s here to tell us about the transformative experience that convinced him to join the world of university tech transfer, what makes the Polsky Center […]
Helen McBreen is a partner at Atlantic Bridge, overseeing the spinout-focused University Bridge Fund – backed by Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and University College Cork. She talks about the importance of diversity on both sides of the table and give us an insight into how the fund works with researchers for as long […]
Sean Fielding was, until a couple of weeks ago, the director of innovation, impact and business at University of Exeter, where he built the tech transfer office from scratch in the mid-90s. He joins us on Talking Tech Transfer to discuss how the requirement to generate impact has changed the way universities think about research […]
Paul Van Dun is the general manager of Leuven Research and Development, the tech transfer office of KU Leuven that has a unique framework which allows faculty to generate income for their labs without incorporating spinouts. He is here to tell us more about this as well as his vision of having universities ranked based […]
Brijesh Roy, seed investment manager at Imperial College London, started out in hedge fund management before joining Oxford University Innovation and then Mercia. On this episode, he talks about his storied career, why Imperial decided to bring spinout funding back in-house following the Touchstone acquisition and what his vision for a tech transfer operation fit […]
Michael Kearney is a principal at The Engine, the tough tech incubator and patient capital fund backed by MIT and Harvard, and he joins us to talk not only about the importance of hiring diverse teams (in spinouts and in funds), but also about the highly unique ecosystem in Cambridge, MA and the reasons why […]
Jason Whitney, vice-president of venture development at IU Ventures and executive director of the IU Angel Network, joins us to talk about the Angel Network, why it takes care of due diligence for investors and why it emphasises educating angels. He also discusses the origins and purpose of the Sports Innovation Initiative, which focuses on […]
Sara Wallin is the relatively new chief executive of Chalmers Ventures, having only joined the incubator and venture arm of Chalmers University of Technology in December 2020. But she brought with her a wealth of experience and on this episode of Talking Tech Transfer she tells us why she took the job at Chalmers, and […]
Markus Wanko is the head of technology transfer at Institute of Science and Technology Austria and the founder and managing partner of its venture fund, IST cube. He joins us on Talking Tech Transfer to talk about why he moved into tech transfer after a career working for Qatar Investment Authority, Boston Consulting Group and […]
We chat with Adam Stoten, the chief operating officer of Oxford University Innovation, about vaccines – not just for covid but also one for tuberculosis he helped develop at a spinout – as well as the importance of REF, KEF and the Knowledge Exchange Concordat, and the success of LAB282. He also exclusively reveals what […]
Matt Perkins has been the chief executive of Oxford University Innovation for just under five years and he joins us to talk not only about why he moved from industry into academia but also about how OUI set up programmes to support diverse founding teams, the impact of Oxford Sciences Innovation on the local ecosystem […]
We chat with Brian McCaul, the CEO of Qubis, the tech transfer company of Queen’s University Belfast, to find out why it continuously finds itself at the top of rankings, why a centralised TTO would not make sense even in a place as small as Northern Ireland and what drew him back into university commercialisation after […]
We chat with Alison Campbell, the director of Knowledge Transfer Ireland, the national office responsible for policy, practice and performance of the Irish commercialisation system, about outside recognition of the tech transfer profession, diversity in leadership and working on a report for the European Commission on harmonising knowledge transfer metrics. “Funk Game Loop” Kevin MacLeod […]
We chat with Neil Crabb, chief executive of UK-based commercialisation firm Frontier IP about why the firm expanded into Portugal, why it’s important that there are many different models of university technology transfer out there and why Frontier IP takes a cluster-based approach to its portfolio rather than a sector-based one. “Funk Game Loop” Kevin […]
In this week’s episode of the Talking Tech Transfer podcast we welcome Kirsten Leute, partner, university relations, at Osage University Partners to talk about why diversity is important for a VC investor, why it is the people that make tech transfer such a great career and why it is impossible not to be an optimist […]
In this week’s episode of the Talking Tech Transfer podcast we are joined by Doug Hockstad, assistant Vice President of Tech Launch Arizona, the commercialisation office of University of Arizona. “Funk Game Loop” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
In this week’s episode of the Talking Tech Transfer podcast we are joined by Silvio Bonaccio, head of ETH transfer, the commercialisation office for ETH Zurich, to discuss how he built the office from scratch two decades ago and turned it into one of the most successful in the world, why spinout survival rates can […]
In this week’s episode of the Talking Tech Transfer podcast, we talk to Anne Lane, chief executive of University College London’s wholly-owned commercialisation subsidiary UCL Business about the importance of the UCL Technology Fund and Apollo Therapeutics, the advantages of social enterprises and working with carmaker Mercedes on a medical device to aid covid patients […]
Thierry Heles talks to George Baxter, chief executive of Edinburgh Innovations about the strengths of the Scottish ecosystem, leading a tech transfer office that also handles student startups and the importance of public funding (and giving the taxpayer their money’s worth). “Funk Game Loop” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Thierry Heles talks to Larry Loev, chief executive of Ariel Scientific Innovations, about leading a tech transfer office for a young but ambitious university, the opportunities of tech transfer in a country famed for its startup ecosystem and how to bring innovation to oenology. “Funk Game Loop” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By […]
Thierry Heles talks to Mike Zimmerman, partner at Main Sequence Ventures, about improving commercialisation activities in Australia, the importance of deep tech over the next few decades and developing a plant-based burger in partnership with Hungry Jack’s at breakneck speed. “Funk Game Loop” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Thierry Heles talks to Kelly Sexton, Associate Vice President for Research – Technology Transfer and Innovation Partnerships at University of Michigan. In this role, she supports and encourages university-wide programs for intellectual property development, innovation, and engagement with business and venture communities in the region, across the nation, and around the globe. “Funk Game Loop” […]
Thierry Heles talks to Alastair Hick, senior director at Monash Innovation. “Funk Game Loop” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Thierry Heles talks to Moray Wright, co-founder and chief executive of Parkwalk Advisors, the fund management subsidiary of commercialisation firm IP Group. “Funk Game Loop” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Thierry Heles talks to Alicia Löffler, associate provost for Innovation & New Ventures, associate vice president for Research and executive director, INVO, Center for Translational Innovation (CTI) at Northwestern University. “Funk Game Loop” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Thierry Heles talks to Nichole Mercier, assistant vice-chancellor and managing director for technology transfer at Washington University in St Louis, about increasing engagement from female researchers, the impact of the pandemic on women faculty with children and fostering serial entrepreneurs that choose to stay in the local ecosystem. “Funk Game Loop” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed […]
Thierry Heles talks to Tony Raven, chief executive of University of Cambridge’s commercialisation arm Cambridge Enterprise, about abandoning long-held beliefs in the workplace, his help in launching both IP Group and Cambridge Innovation Capital and the importance of running a tech transfer operation worthy of the Cambridge brand. “Funk Game Loop” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed […]
Thierry Heles talks to Orin Herskowitz, senior vice-president of intellectual property and tech transfer for Columbia University, and executive director of Columbia Technology Ventures, about New York’s accelerators, the upsides of Zoom meetings and why having a humanities degree is the perfect background for heading a tech transfer office. “Funk Game Loop” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) […]
Thierry Heles talks to Tony Armstrong, president and chief executive of IU Ventures, about how the organisation supports Indiana University spinouts and startups. “Funk Game Loop” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Thierry Heles talks to Lesley Millar-Nicholson, director of MIT’s Technology Licensing Office and Catalysts, about a bumper year despite the pandemic. “Funk Game Loop” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Thierry Heles talks to Peter Devine about Uniseed, Australia’s longest running venture fund that operates at the Universities of Melbourne, Queensland, Sydney & New South Wales, and the CSIRO. “Funk Game Loop” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Thierry Heles talks to Jim Wilkinson of Oxford Sciences Innovation about the company and how they invest. “Funk Game Loop” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Thierry Heles talks to Darek DeFreece, who at the time of recording was the managing director of Berkeley Academic Ventures. “Funk Game Loop” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0