Entrepreneurship is not at odds with academic life

It’s an exhausting and fraught process translating novel science through to the market, but before the process can even get underway, academics must be tempted to move out of their comfort zone and encouraged to focus on the commercial potential of their research.

This aspect of technology transfer continues to be a struggle, according to one of the veterans of the field, Eleanor Mitchell, describing the approach taken by the commercialisation body Scottish Enterprise in supporting academics to take technology out the lab and onto the marketplace.

“Generally, we need to be much better at talking about entrepreneurship,” Mitchell said. “We need to get academics to see that entrepreneurship is not at odds with being an academic,” she told the British Science Festival in Aberdeen this week.

Mitchell, who is Commercialisation Director of Scottish Enterprise, said that Scotland has a “reputation for delivering innovation to the world” citing inventions ranging from television and penicillin to cloning, as embodied in Dolly the sheep. The reason why the country has such a “phenomenal reputation” is to do with the strength of the university base, which is third in the world - per head of the population - in generating research papers.

Inspiring, dogged, determined

However, Mitchell said, “Publications are only one way of proving our innovative skills.” What matters more is turning this research into new companies, establishing new markets, and creating new jobs. “This really is an exciting space to work in. There is some really brilliant science out there. But it is a hard slog [to commercialise it],” said Mitchell.

Academics who want to get their ideas out there and translated into products need determination and doggedness. They also need to be inspiring, Mitchell said. “They will need to build a group of people around them, because it will be impossible to go it alone.”

It follows that not all academics will be cut out for entrepreneurship. For those that are, Scottish Enterprise offers a number of support mechanisms, including point of concept funding  to get research into a commercialisable form, for example providing cash to build a prototype or scale-up a process; enterprise fellowships in which academics get business training; business mentors; advice on raising money; and help in finding and attracting skills and expertise.

Emerging companies

Some of the latest companies coming along the Scottish Enterprise conveyor belt are:

• Celtic Renewables, a spin-out from Edinburgh Napier University, which is developing a process for turning the by-products of the whiskey industry into biofuels for cars. The intention is to integrate these processing plants into whiskey distilleries.
• Sirakoss, an Aberdeen University spin-out which is developing a synthetic bone graft technology.
• Blackford Analysis, an Edinburgh University start-up that is commercialising algorithms originally developed for spectral analysis in astrophysics research, in application areas including medical image analysis and the real-time interpretation of seismic data sets in the oil and gas industry.

Unlocking entrepreneurial DNA

There’s a small price that the scientific founders of these and other start-ups may have to pay in return for the support of Scottish Enterprise, and that is in acting as role models to inspire other academics to follow in their footsteps, whilst advising them on how to avoid the pitfalls along the way.

One such founder, Harald Haas, told delegates in Aberdeen that putting a new interpretation on the impact factor of research is one of the keys to changing the academic mindset. “[Journal] papers are only part of it,” he said. Haas’ own research provides the scientific underpinnings for PureVLC, a company which is developing a technology for using the visible light spectrum for wireless data communications. This will allow light-emitting diode light bulbs to double up as wireless data routers, overcoming the so-called “spectrum crisis” or overloading of existing networks, which is seeing the amount of data transmitted over existing mobile networks grow at a compound annual rate of 80 per cent.

PureVLC’s technology is creating a parallel set of pipes, Haas said. “We’ve taken a step out and looked into the entire electromagnetic spectrum. There’s 100,000 times more capacity in visible light than the radio spectrum and it’s free – no government has yet put its fingers on it. We are using free spectrum to do something smart.”

Haas told delegates he has been working on the research foundations of ‘Li-Fi’ for the past ten years, but has only recently got “commercial traction” after moving from Germany to Edinburgh University and being directed to Scottish Enterprise. “I quickly found out what brilliant services [it] provides.”

However, Haas has not given up academic research, working one day per week as chief technology officer of PureVLC. “I like the freedom I have in the university to pick up ideas,” he said.

Attracting private investment

As Mitchell said, there are impressive start-ups emerging from Scotland’s universities. But commercialisation is not a numbers game: companies need to be funded. “The challenge is to respond to the experiences of the past. We have had good spin-outs but have struggled [in] attracting enough money,” she said. It’s particularly difficult now because Business Angels in Scotland are focussing resources on keeping the companies they set up in the past afloat.

This is leaving Scottish Enterprise with a delicate balancing act, said Mitchell. “At what point have we done enough to attract private investors into a company that the public sector has funded until then?”