It’s time to let you know what we have planned. We’re re-launching as Beyond the Breakthrough!

Over the past three and a half years, and 100 episodes, one key takeaway has been the fact that the public still doesn’t understand how university research gets into the marketplace — and that needs to change.

To do it, we’re not just changing to a more accessible podcast name, we are, crucially, also expanding the scope of discussions by bringing in more voices from the entire spectrum of university innovation — whether those are tech transfer leaders, chief innovation officers, student entrepreneurship programme leaders, incubator managers, investors, founders, lawyers, valorisation experts, policymakers or others.

We are also moving the podcast to series (or seasons) and we will use that new format to tell bigger narratives and stimulate conversations.

Goodbye, Talking Tech Transfer. Hello, Beyond the Breakthrough.

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Follow Thierry Heles on LinkedIn.

“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

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.

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Follow Thierry Heles on LinkedIn.

“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

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, find the full version on our website. Visit that link to sign up for future webinars as well — it’s free.

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University College Dublin has racked up several firsts, including creating Ireland’s first spinout unicorn, Wayflyer. Tom Flanagan, director of enterprise and commercialisation at the university’s innovation office NovaUCD gives us an insider view of how the ecommerce company was born.

UCD also established the first Irish quantum spinout, Equal1 (read our in-depth profile here), and was one of the founding limited partners — together with Trinity College Dublin and Atlantic Bridge — of the University Bridge Fund in 2016. And it continues to set the pace: earlier this year, Tom’s team welcomed an expert in international innovation through a French embassy programme that looks to increase collaboration across borders — this, too, is a first in Ireland.

UCD is also leaning into a unique advantage in agtech: it’s the only university in Ireland — and one of only a few in Europe — that owns a farm, where it runs a programme for pre-seed startups to develop their products. I asked Tom what prompted him to create the programme and what he’s learned from it thus far.

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Andreea Serban is a doctor specialising in paediatric surgery and an entrepreneur who’s founded her own healthtech, KIDoc, and joined another, PhylloPharma, as chief operating officer. She’s also a 2022 fellow of the Young Transatlantic Innovation Leaders, a US Department of State programme that invites young entrepreneurs from Europe to the United States, that brought her to the University of Pennsylvania and introduced her to her mentor Michael Poisel, a previous guest on this show.

But she’s not only spent time in the US or her native Romania, she’s also been at various institutions in Paris, like Institut Pasteur, in Luxembourg, where she was a resident at the children’s hospital Kannerklinik, and in the UK, where she worked at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.

Andreea is, as long-time listeners will recognise, the first founder on the podcast, so this episode is a little different — but it’s incredibly fascinating and we cover everything from a fledgling tech transfer infrastructure in Romania to tax incentives to what the US could learn from Romanian communication skills.

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Follow Thierry Heles on LinkedIn.

“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Bryn Rees is the associate vice chancellor for research and innovation, and managing director of Venture Partners at CU Boulder — one of two tech transfer offices in the University of Colorado system.

He’s been at the university since 2009 — apart from a few weeks in 2015 when he quit because he was done with transactional tech transfer. But then the opportunity came to fundamentally rebuild how commercialisation was done at CU, which is what he’s been doing since.

Today, CU Boulder has everything you’d expect from a tech transfer office that produces more than 20 spinouts a year: from a startup-friendly licence to a dedicated investment affiliate, the Buff Venture Fund.

It’s been a long and fascinating road to arrive at this stage (though the university is famous for having created the pharmaceutical giant Amgen a few decades ago, and the faculty co-founder is still launching spinouts today) and Bryn is going to tell us all about that journey.

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Follow Thierry Heles on LinkedIn.

“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Ireland, despite its small size, is home to major global tech and pharma companies, and punches above its weight in terms of spinouts that tackle global challenges from sustainable agriculture to cancer vaccines to AI-driven language monitoring, Trinity College Dublin’s Neil Gordon tells us.

Gordon — who was the first startup development manager at an Irish university — also talks about the importance of overseas markets for spinouts, building a portfolio and ecosystem with strong gender diversity, and how a new €38m innovation hub called Portal will be a shop front for TCD’s innovative output.

He also talks about how family offices can play a key part, why Trinity College Dublin helped create the original University Bridge Fund (and returned for Fund II) and how state agency Enterprise Ireland has become one of the most important funders in the country.

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Follow Thierry Heles on LinkedIn.

“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Earlier this year, TenU — an international collaboration between 10 tech transfer offices in the US and Europe developing best practices — launched the University Spinout Investment Terms (USIT) Guide. Developed together with law firms and VC firms throughout the UK, the USIT Guide aims to accelerate negotiations between universities and investors and solve some of the common sticking points in these discussions.

In June, members of TenU — Orin Herskowitz, Anne Lane, George Baxter, Jim Wilkinson, Karin Immergluck — together with Sofinnova Partners’s Maina Bhaman and TenU chairman Andy Neely came together for a discussion of the USIT Guide’s origins and ambitions in front of a live audience at London’s County Hall.

This is the full recording of this discussion, including audience questions.

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Follow Thierry Heles on LinkedIn.

“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

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)