Empower ECRs to commercialise their research

At the University of Edinburgh, the Wellcome-funded Institutional Translation Partnership Award (iTPA) team has built a community of 1,000 early career researchers (ECRs) who are working with industry, charities and the NHS on a host of human health and well-being projects, including demand data-driven placement of defibrillators in Scotland, a toolkit for parents and teachers of neurodiverse children and a point-of-care tool to assess the viability of liver transplants. They have turned £1.8 million of Wellcome Trust project funding into £12.2 million of further investment. That’s a return on investment of 600 per cent!

So, how have they done this? iTPA programme lead and entrepreneur-in-residence Lysimachos Zografos reveals six elements that have proved key.

1. An entrepreneurial approach

We approached building a culture of innovation around ECRs like we would the development of a new service. The “lean start-up” methodology means listening to your clients and taking an iterative approach – measuring success and improving or discarding as you go – and it’s worked well for us.

To do this, you start by building a funnel to attract people, which we did by running events (with pizza) for postdocs, inviting speakers, providing scientist-to-entrepreneur training and taking cohorts to inspiring conferences such as Wired Health.

Another way to get people into the funnel has been to offer small grants of £1,000. We’ve given out 66 of these. We then run calls for bigger grants of £5,000, £20,000 and £50,000. We’re stingy, though; if other entities, such as the Medical Research Council or the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, will fund a project, that’s great, because it means we can fund more ourselves. Amelia Hodgson, our project manager, makes sure that everything runs smoothly. We have the luxury of not being tied to commercial-only KPIs, so we also fund impactful not-for-profit activities, such as community interest company EPIC, which produces resources for parents and teachers of neurodiverse children.

2. No idea too early, none left behind

We never send anyone away, but we do ask tough questions such as: who is it helping? Does it solve a problem? Does it scale? Why are you better placed to deliver this? We try to reply with appropriate kindness, so we might say: “Check back in a year once you’ve done this and this,” but we never say: “No, that won’t work.” Don’t ignore something because it failed once.

3. Building a community

Don’t just count numbers; nurture a lively community. To do this, it’s important to have an open-door policy where people can reach out directly or through an online platform. Answer any questions within the day. When you spot a need that others might share, run quick surveys and then organise training accordingly. Always ask for feedback after training and events to understand what works and what doesn’t.  

We facilitate design thinking for new ideas and encourage cross-college collaborations. For instance, if someone from the College of Science and Engineering is building tech for haemodialysis, have they talked to a nephrologist, from medicine? We deliberately try to mix junior and senior people, along with those working on different kinds of technology that could be complementary. We provide tailored information to researchers, such as market analysis and competition maps, as well as evergreen resources such as online courses.

4. Mentorship

We started with two entrepreneurs in residence five years ago and have since added another one. Jeff Wright and I specialise in start-ups and spin-outs and commercially developing technologies. Now we also have Andrew McBride, an expert in clinical and biomedical translation. Along with innovation executive Joe Murphy, we provide a non-academic perspective.

• Resource collection: Research excellence: what is it and how can universities achieve it?
• Resource collection: What innovation needs to thrive in higher education
• We can make research more ethical without compromising its quality

Offering this support and mentorship to ECRs on a one-to-one basis gives us a deep understanding of individual and project-specific needs and means we can provide tailored advice. This can be from technical input and project management to how to build better relationships between start-up co-founders.

5. Using tech to scale

We leverage technology to help us scale the community. We have an online platform that pulls in data from the university’s research expertise database, which helps us build collaborations. We are also using AI to develop tools that recommend funding on the basis of activity and interests.

6. A fertile environment

Using the methods above, we have tapped into a diverse demographic of underserved and bright people, and for that, we can’t really take credit! It’s also important that we’re part of a growing entrepreneurial culture at the University of Edinburgh, partly resulting from the strong performance of our commercialisation service, Edinburgh Innovations, of which iTPA has been a part over the past six years. Achieving impact from research is now central to the university’s strategic direction and this provides fertile ground for our work.

Lysimachos Zografos is Wellcome iTPA programme lead and entrepreneur-in-residence at the University of Edinburgh. 

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