Whisky may not be the first industry to come to mind when you think of university innovation, but for the University of Kentucky — based in a US state known around the world for its bourbon industry — it's an obvious next step in its tech transfer activities.

Researchers with promising technology in the UK can apply for public innovation agency Innovate UK's pre-accelerator programme ICURe, which supports them in reaching out to 100 potential customers to understand the market viability of their idea.

Just over a fifth of academic institutions in Asia have access to a dedicated university venture fund, with a third of all funds found in Japan — that’s the finding of GUV’s latest regional analysis published last week.

Should professors be spinout founders? An increasing number of universities are pushing their faculty to be more entrepreneurial but data suggests that that's not always a good thing — for the professor, the spinout or the students.

Despite the benefits of universities having a venture fund they can draw on to invest in companies they help commercialise, they are still a rarity in places with mature venture capital sectors like Europe and the US.

We look back at some of the highlights of season 3, which featured many a discussion about university incubator and accelerator programmes, including insights from Jim Shaikh (The Greenhouse at Imperial College London), Paul Devlin (Cardiff University), Brandon Paschal (LaunchLab at Stellenbosch University), and Duncan Johnson and Miles Kirby (NG Studios powered by Deeptech Labs).

Andy Shenk, the chief executive of Auckland UniServices, the commercialisation subsidiary of the University of Auckland, knows that collaborating with the Māori people is important. He also knows that big data and AI offer great opportunities, but tells me about some of the challenges too.

Setting up a venture fund in 2020 was a “huge paradigm shift” for Stellenbosch University in South Africa, because, for the first time, the executive leadership at the institution became interested in spinouts, says Anita Nel, the chief director for innovation and business development, because they understood that academic research had commercial value and a way to build, for example, local pharmaceutical expertise (the country had to wait six months longer than the northern hemisphere for a...

Immigrants are profoundly entrepreneurial people: they leave behind everything they know for a new country and new opportunities, often at a financial risk. This willingness to embrace change and build a new life from scratch means it should not be a surprise that in the US alone, 43% of Fortune 500 companies have been founded by immigrants.

Commercialising social sciences research is such a new area of technology transfer that when you spin out a company “you might be the first to do that type of deal,” says Paul Devlin, the head of research commercialisation and impact at Cardiff University.

Last month, EMV Capital, a fund management subsidiary of British investment firm NetScientific, took over Martlet Capital, a Cambridge, UK-focused investor that had been the corporate venture arm of aerospace and defence company Marshall Group for nine years until 2021. The decision was the natural conclusion to EMV’s earlier decision to become an investor in Martlet and allows the investor to further tap into the Cambridge cluster, NetScientific CEO Ilian Iliev says.

Universities, by their very nature, have always been strong centres of innovation. Scientific discoveries are routinely made in university research labs – but spinning those discoveries out into an operational business comes with numerous hurdles.

Duncan Johnson argues that spinout founders in the north of England need to learn to think bigger. That's not just a question of access to capital (his investment firm Northern Gritstone has £312m at its disposal) but also of infrastructure to mentor and nurture these founders.

Some of the most innovative clean energy and climate technologies originate in the labs of the world’s research universities. At Imperial College London’s climate innovation accelerator, The Greenhouse, startups address solutions in niche areas such as bio-textiles, waste management and green hydrogen.

We take a look back at some of the key insights shared by guests on season 2 of Beyond the Breakthrough.

Licensing intellectual property to a spinout can take frustratingly long and end with terms for a spinout that a venture capital investor might not be comfortable with — the university taking too large a share is a typical argument that you’ll hear particularly in the UK. There are initiatives to speed this up. The US has BOLT and the UK has the USIT Guides, template term sheets co-developed by tech transfer offices, investors and law firms to significantly speed up the process. Ireland even...

How do you get beyond the many roadblocks stopping cutting-edge technology from being adopted by healthcare providers – which naturally have a lot of safety concerns, and often sizeable budget constraints too. Are hospitals moving to being completely decentralised in the future? And is AI about to revolutionise how hospitals are run?

Stanford may be a recognised world-leader when it comes to startups, but it mustn’t rest on its laurels. Sometimes that even means launching initiatives that others have long had — that is just one of the lessons that Karin Immergluck, executive director of Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing, has learnt. Karin also tells us what the US can learn from its international peers, why TenU is an important component of her work and she examines the importance of erasing bias in hiring...

Diversity is not just about making sure more women and underrepresented minorities are on founding teams. When they do create businesses, they are typically ignored by venture capital investors who look for the same type of founders that have previously made money (creating a vicious circle). In the US, female founders raised just 2% of the VC money in 2023, and in Europe it was even less at 1.8%, according to PitchBook.

Imagine your corporate R&D team is facing a problem so complex it requires the world’s top researchers to solve. How do you find the right expert? You could scour endless academic papers or slowly build relationships with individual universities. You could invest in startups that are developing a solution. Or you could go to Halo, a matchmaker for cutting-edge research and real-world problems.

A PhD student who sets up a spinout and becomes its CEO is 21% better at returning an investor's money than a serial founder would be if installed in the same spinout. Even more impressively, a PhD student turned chief executive is 46% better at making a venture capital fund money than a former CEO from a large company would be.

Can university spinouts help fight poverty? That's a question Kelley Rich, interim vice-president for innovation at the University of Notre Dame, is trying to answer as head of the institution's innovation hub IDEA Center. It's part of a campus-wide initiative launched in January 2024 that will see increased poverty research taking place — it gets to the heart of the private Catholic university's mission of bringing about positive societal change.

Mark Billingsley, director of the University of Alaska Fairbanks‘ Tech Transfer Office and Innovation Hub, joined Beyond the Breakthrough in April 2022 and today we’re revisiting this conversation because it’s still one of the most unusual places covered on the podcast.

Weirdly, being located at the heart of the US capital doesn't always help Georgetown University when it comes to creating spinout companies. State universities often have economic development mandates that they can follow, but in Washington DC Georgetown is in something of a vacuum — with little direction for what to focus on, less set funding and fewer people pushing to advance the technologies coming out of the institution.