The Next Leap

The Next Leap

By Thierry HelesBusinessEntrepreneurshipScienceInvesting
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The Next Leap episodes

  • Patrick Speedie: AI can’t build trust in tech transfer

    It's tempting to automate tech transfer: matching algorithms, data lakes, and AI summarising research papers in seconds.

    Patrick Speedie, co-founder and chief business officer of Inpart, has built software to match university research with corporate partners. And Inpart is integrating increasingly sophisticated AI into its platform, but Patrick is no evangelist.

    He's thought long and hard about the role the technology can, and should, play in research commercialisation. His realisation? Yes, it crushes administrative grunt work. Yes, better data architecture matters. But the deals that actually close? They still live in relationships. In conference rooms. In the conversations that software can't capture.

    If you work in tech transfer and you're caught between “we need to automate everything” and “AI is coming to steal our jobs”, this conversation will change how you think about your toolkit.

    44 min
  • Empowering academic founders: policies, programmes, and pitfalls
    How can universities instil the entrepreneurial mindset in faculty, staff and students? Is this even something you can teach? And if you can, what are some of the challenges and pitfalls?
    Figuring out the answers to these questions, and more, is a panel of experts from around the world: Kirsty Collinge, the head of research strategy at the University of Edinburgh; Linda Koschier, the head of entrepreneurship at the University of New South Wales' Faculty of Engineering; Koenraad Debackere, the executive director of KU Leuven Research & Development; and Paul Cheek, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
    The panel will give insights into how you can empower students, how you can foster entrepreneurship on campus even if you live in a risk-averse culture, and how you can give people more time to focus on their business ideas.
    This episode is a recording of a ⁠TenU⁠ Hosts webinar, chaired by Catherine Headley, the CEO of the University of Manchester Innovation Factory.
    Further reading
    Paul Cheek mentions the book, From the Basement to the Dome, which offers an analysis of how MIT's culture created a thriving entrepreneurial community.
    54 min
  • Gavin Clark, Mark Mann: Here’s how to build a shared TTO
    Towards the end of last year, the University of the Arts London secured a grant from Research England to lead a consortium of six universities that would develop a shared TTO focused on creative and social sciences. The pilot project, dubbed Shared Technology Transfer Office to Accelerate the Growth of Self-Funded Spinouts (STAGE), has now come to a close so it's the perfect time to reflect on what's gone well and what needs to happen next.
    Gavin Clark, director of enterprise and commercialisation at the University of the Arts London, and Mark Mann, a consultant who helped bring the consortium together, join me to explain why they used a model from the University of Birmingham to build their project, how that approach works, and what the pitfalls are of wrangling six universities to say “yes” to an external tech transfer office run by specialists from Kindling Ventures.
    We also explore the importance of capturing data (which will be made public in the coming weeks and months), how the project has drawn international attention and even what it's all meant on a more personal level.
    38 min
  • Panel: What’s next for quantum technologies?
    What does the future hold for quantum technologies, what are the pitfalls and how can academia, startups, industry and government work together to solve the challenges ahead?
    Earlier this month, I chaired a panel tackling these questions for Bristol Innovations' first Foresight Live event, featuring Ruth Oulton, professor of quantum photonics at the University of Bristol, Zoe Davidson, a research specialist in optical networks at telecoms firm BT, and Francesco Raffaelli, head of technology at secure communications startup KETS Quantum Security.
    I'm delighted to be able to share a full recording with you today.
    If you're interested in attending the next Foresight Live event, grab tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/foresight-live-convergence-of-critical-technologies-in-ai-and-telecoms-tickets-1307798232719?aff=oddtdtcreator
    Make sure you also sign up for the newsletter Foresight Digest: https://biforesight.com/newsletter/
    And if you'd rather watch the video of the panel, you can find that on BIForesight.com, where you can also find a a summary write-up by myself: https://biforesight.com/quantum/from-research-to-reality-quantum-is-not-ai/
    49 min

About The Next Leap

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Ever wondered how a discovery in a university lab becomes a game-changing product that impacts millions of lives? Join Thierry Heles as he explores the fascinating world of research commercialisation,…