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Interview

  • Thumbnail for Panel discussion: The key ingredients of successful spinout teams

    Panel discussion: The key ingredients of successful spinout teams

    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.

  • Thumbnail for Kelley Rich: Fighting poverty with university spinouts

    Kelley Rich: Fighting poverty with university spinouts

    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.

  • Thumbnail for Mark Billingsley: How to launch spinouts when there are no VCs (re-broadcast)

    Mark Billingsley: How to launch spinouts when there are no VCs (re-broadcast)

    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.

  • Thumbnail for Tatiana Litvin-Vechnyak: Overcoming Georgetown’s spinout challenge

    Tatiana Litvin-Vechnyak: Overcoming Georgetown’s spinout challenge

    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.

  • Thumbnail for Jennifer Kuan: How to steal Silicon Valley’s secret sauce

    Jennifer Kuan: How to steal Silicon Valley’s secret sauce

    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.

  • Thumbnail for Tony Boccanfuso: UIDP is bridging the divide between corporates and universities

    Tony Boccanfuso: UIDP is bridging the divide between corporates and universities

    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.

  • Thumbnail for Season 1 Recap

    Season 1 Recap

    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.

  • Thumbnail for TenU: How do you build critical mass?

    TenU: How do you build critical mass?

    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 Vincent Lamande, Innovate UK’s Geeta Nathan and Northern Gritstone’s Marion Bernard (and you can learn more about that firm in our interview with her colleague Duncan Johnson).

  • Thumbnail for CVC Unplugged: Owen Thompson

    CVC Unplugged: Owen Thompson

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

  • Thumbnail for Marty Reid: How SETsquared supports founders from idea to exit

    Marty Reid: How SETsquared supports founders from idea to exit

    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 companies in the UK.