Yorkshire post-docs: form a new business around your research

The inward investment agency Yorkshire Forward, based in the UK, is launching the Yorkshire Enterprise Fellowship pre-incubation scheme to enable post-doctoral researchers from all Yorkshire universities to form businesses based on their research.

The scheme, based on the Bioscience Yorkshire Enterprise Fellowship (BYEF) pilot programme, covers bioscience, chemicals and healthcare technologies, and will provide GBP 2.145 million to support 60 fellows over 30 months.

BYEF helped to establish nine new spin out companies and secure over GBP 4 million of additional funding.

Dawn Coverley, who founded the first BYEF company, Cizzle Biotechnology Ltd, said, “When I started I had a good idea and I knew what I wanted to do, but had little idea of how to do it, or of what it would entail. I have learned an enormous amount during my BYEF year and benefited greatly from the Fellowship.”

The objective of the Enterprise Fellowship is to increase entrepreneurial and commercial activity in Yorkshire and Humber universities and to accelerate and support the formation of new science-based businesses in the county.

Fellows have to demonstrate a real and sustained ability to develop compelling and world-class science, to understand market opportunities and how to exploit them. The fellowships are open to applicants from the nine universities in the Yorkshire and Humber region.

The scheme provides a development programme covering topics including Financial Acumen for Directors and Raising Finance.  Each fellow is given a personal business mentor with specialist commercial expertise.

Dianna Bowles, professor of biochemistry at York University said, “These fellowships provide a really helpful mechanism to encourage scientists to take commercialisation forward and meet others with the experience and interest to mentor them on their way into a new world of finance, marketing and SME promotion.”