Beyond the Breakthrough

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...

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...

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 c...

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 in...

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 sponso...

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 w...

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 a...

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 fusio...

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, C...

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 tra...

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 tra...

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 dev...

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 ex...

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 Po...

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 who...

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 t...

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 Pen...

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 c...

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 import...

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 th...

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...

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 l...