Beyond the Breakthrough

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...

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 ta...

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 j...

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...

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 discusse...

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 lo...

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...

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 t...

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 eme...

Ole Kristian Hjelstuen is the chief executive of Inven2, the tech transfer organisation owned by University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, which doesn’t just handle all of the typical research commercialisation aspects but also manages clinical trials at its partner institutions (which include all the health trusts in the South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority). Ole’s been in the jo...

Today is Simon Bond’s first day as director of Bristol Innovations , an initiative launched by University of Bristol earlier this year to accelerate entrepreneurship among its researchers, students and staff. Bond joins from SETsquared, the global number one incubator backed by the universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton and Surrey, which he had led since 2014. Bond tells us wh...

Douglas Hansen-Luke launched Future Planet Capital in 2015 after 18 months researching the then-nascent university venturing scene and over the past seven years has built an impact-led global innovation investment platform that is active in ecosystems around MIT, Stanford, Oxford and others around the world. Douglas tells us why Future Planet Capital focuses on these ecosystems and why they are so...

Mary Albertson became director of the Office of Technology Licensing (OTL) at Georgia Tech in July 2022, having previously worked for University of Utah’s PIVOT Center and having spent the majority of her career working at Stanford University for nearly 27 years. She’s been president of AUTM and received its President’s Award in 2015 for her long-standing service. She tells us what brought her to...

Yasser Biaz is the chief executive of UM6P Ventures, the venture fund of University Mohammed VI Polytechnic in Morocco, and he joins us today to talk about why it focuses on deeptech and builds and invests not just in spinouts from its home institution or even just across the country, but throughout Africa and beyond. UM6P Ventures is a relatively young fund — it was set up in 2019 — but that hasn...

Duncan Johnson, chief executive of Northern Gritstone, is on a mission to turn the north of England into an ecosystem that rivals Silicon Valley. He’s raising £500m to do that (he’s £215m of the way there already) — money that will go not only into spinouts from the firm’s three founding universities (Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield) but into businesses throughout northern England. He tells us why...

I have a two-for-one this week: Glen Gardner and David Winwood of Gardner Innovation Search Partners, a recruitment firm specialised in tech transfer, are joining the show this week. Glen tells us why he set up the firm and Dave reveals why, after two and a half decades of leading tech transfer offices, he was attracted to recruitment. They ponder everything from the great resignation to the compl...

Maxine Ficarra was the chief executive of PraxisAuril for nearly 20 years, stepping down today as this episode is released. Maxine has helped shaped the profession like few others have. She led the organisation through two mergers, a pandemic and concluded with PraxisAuril’s largest conference yet in June this year. She’s also usually the one interviewing others on stage, so I am very honoured tha...

Elicia Maine has thought and written a lot about innovation in her more than two decades as professor for innovation and entrepreneurship at Simon Fraser University. It’s no surprise then that in July this year she was named the institution’s inaugural associate vice-president, knowledge mobilisation and innovation. On this episode, Elicia talks us through a six-year study she co-authored identify...

In June this year, Kimberly Gramm became the inaugural chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer at Tulane University, which she joined after more than six years at Texas Tech University. Her mission couldn’t be more ambitious: charged with driving economic development in the Greater New Orleans region, she will be leading the brand new Tulane Innovation Institute that itself will revitalise a...

Rich Lyons became UC Berkeley’s inaugural chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer in January 2020, having previously been dean of the Haas Business School for a decade. For the past two and a half years, he’s been tying the ecosystem together in a way that makes everyone want to participate rather than forcing them to sign up. Rich tells us about the Berkeley-affiliated funds, which uniquely...

Hailing from Australia, Anthony Francis started out as an accountant before establishing the Technology Commercialisation Group in 1999, selling it to Deloitte in 2005 and spending a couple of years with the firm. He then spent nearly a decade as managing director of Flinders University’s TTO, Flinders Partners, before landing, in 2019, at UCSF Innovation Ventures, the commercialisation arm of Uni...

It may sound crazy that any government could try and reclaim project funding plus 5% from a spinout, but yes, that is exactly the situation that Álvaro Ossa, the director of transfer and development at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, has been facing. The lobbying effort to get the article removed from the law is ongoing, and this is one of the topics we’ll cover in this interview. Álvaro...

Cédric Van Nevel is a partner at Qbic, an early-stage venture fund that invests in the spinouts of its 16 partners throughout Belgium. Cédric joins us to chat about the fund’s origins, why it’s such a strength to work with teams pre-incorporation and why Qbic is happy to keep focusing on the Belgian ecosystem rather than expand internationally. He also ponders what makes Belgium such an entreprene...

Lisa Ericsson is both the head of KTH Innovation and chief executive of KTH Holding, the respective innovation department and investment arm of KTH Royal Institute of Technology, which she joined in 2002 after having spun out business plan competition Venture Cup from McKinsey. Apart from telling us why KTH Innovation targets both students and faculty, Lisa also ponders the pitfalls of professor’s...

When Laurent Miéville met one of his first mentors at Stanford University, he was told that Switzerland was about to become a hotspot for innovation and so he made the decision to return and join, in 1998, the University of Geneva where he set up the tech transfer office, Unitec. He’s led the office ever since, and in that time saw the sector in Europe evolve into the profession it is today. He wa...