Silicon Valley is the home of venture capital and startups — but drive an hour or two outside of the city and you are in a different world. Take Monterey, the site of our own GCVI Summit (March 12 to 14 — listen to the episode to get a 10% discount code on tickets). It is a beautiful city with a world-famous aquarium and a gorgeous golf course, but it is a city of extremes: the median household income is $98,000 while at the same time more than 10% of the population lives in poverty.

Tony Boccanfuso has spent the past 17 years trying to work out how to get universities and corporations to collaborate better on research. Boccanfuso is the chief executive of UIDP, a non-profit association between large companies and leading research universities around the world. The invitation-only organisation has more than 200 members.

Beyond the Breakthrough returns 9 February. Here is a trailer with some of our upcoming guests this season.

We revisit the highlights from the past season and find out the key lessons from every guest, from dealing with failure to delivering entrepreneurial training for PhDs to building a cluster that spans more than a dozen institutions.

Today, we’re bringing you a recording of a recent discussion organised by our friends at TenU, the international collaboration between ten tech transfer offices in Belgium, the US and the UK. The panel, led by KU Leuven’s Paul Van Dun (listen to our interview with him in episode 31), tackled the question: how do you build critical mass to create innovation ecosystems? Offering their expertise were University of Michigan’s Kelly Sexton (hear more from her in episode 13), Ouest Valorisation’s...

We're bringing you an episode from Mawsonia's other podcast, CVC Unplugged, featuring an interview with Owen Thompson, CEO of Cambridge Future Tech.

SETsquared has achieved something few have: it’s built an ecosystem that spans six institutions across England and Wales and a programme that provides end-to-end support to founders both within and without the universities. Banding together means the six universities don’t just rival their peers in London, Oxford or Cambridge (portfolio companies have raised some £4bn to date), but in some areas are setting the pace: Bristol, for example, is responsible for a third of all quantum computing...

Prof Susie Speller is a fellow at St Catherine’s College and researcher in the Oxford Centre for Applied Superconductivity at the University of Oxford, where she helps corporates like Siemens Healthineers (which manufactures MRI scanners), fusion energy developer Tokamak Energy and scientific instruments company Oxford Instruments solve challenges around superconductors.

The Australian government wants to get 1,800 more PhD candidates to commercialise their work over the next decade, as part of the A$2.2bn University Research Commercialization Action Plan. But turning PhD students and early-career researchers into entrepreneurs is not a simple task. How do you identify the right people and train them to embrace a more commercial way of thinking?

The NHS, the UK's national health service, is often seen as slow to adopt innovation. But Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, located in London and linked to King's College London — has actually created a highly sophisticated unit to commercialise innovations developed at their hospitals.

Can British university research help families in South America secure a mortgage? That's what the University of Oxford did with its social venture spinout SOPHIA Oxford, which analyses contributing factors to poverty from the state down to the corporate level and helps companies make better choices for their employees.

University of Galway has long been a leader in medtech, so it makes sense that Fiona Neary, innovation operations manager in the institution's Innovation Office, created the country's first medtech accelerator programme in 2018.

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.

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 […]

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 […]

University College Dublin has racked up a number of 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 the insider view on how the ecommerce company was born. UCD also established the first Irish quantum spinout, Equal1 (read our in-depth profile […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Some snippets of upcoming interviews plus an explanation for why we’ve been on a break which involves a peek behind the scenes of Talking Tech Transfer. “Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Hello dear listener. You’re probably wondering where the latest episode is and so I wanted to give a quick update, as scheduling conflicts — life happens! — unfortunately mean we’ll be on a short unplanned break. But we are coming back — in fact I’ve got some phenomenal guests lined up for you that will […]

Jacek Kasz is the director of the Center for Technology Transfer (CTT) at Cracow University of Technology, Poland’s second oldest TTO. He tells us how the office came to also be responsible for regional SME support and Horizon Europe applications, and how Cracow’s ecosystem has been shaped by IT. But while Cracow’s ecosystem is full […]

Anton Bartolo is the director for corporate research and knowledge transfer at the University of Malta, where he built the Knowledge Transfer Office from scratch in 2009 (with help from Oxentia, Oxford’s consultancy arm). He tells us how the challenges of being the only university in a small island nation has led to an offering […]

You could be forgiven for not having had the Royal College of Art in London on your radar, but there’s a wealth of fascinating opportunities here — and Nadia Danhash, executive director of the college’s centre for enterprise, entrepreneurship and IP commercialisation InnovationRCA, tells us all about them. The RCA’s portfolio spans a vast array […]