Innovate Together is our monthly think piece about the world of university-partnered innovation, written by Future Space Centre Director Professor Matt Freeman.
To create a culture of genuine innovation you must think and act differently. You need a whole host of ideas, processes and people at your fingertips – and all should emerge from minds very different to your own. This is why universities are so key to innovation: we know that the higher education sector is filled to the brim with research to drive new ideas, facilities to drive new processes, and a sea of student talent to drive the people needed to fuel innovation. But really it’s simply about recognising that universities specialise in alternative ways of knowing and doing that make them such invaluable partners along the innovation journey.
Still, engaging with the larger-scale collaborative models that universities promote (say, a Knowledge Transfer Partnership) takes a great deal of time – not to mention a lot of money – and many of the start-ups we house at Future Space need a considerable run-up to such collaborative activities. What, then, does early-stage university-partnered innovation really look like for a tech start-up? And how can university students open both eyes and doors to what’s possible?
To consider these questions, this month we sat down with Ali Rohafza, CEO at Altered Carbon Ltd., a man whose journey progressed from student at UWE Bristol to budding entrepreneur at Launch Space (UWE’s incubator for early-stage businesses) to founder of a thriving high-tech company now based with us at Future Space.
Altered Carbon are aiming to reshape the landscape of sensor technology, producing a technology that they describe as a ‘cost-effective, AI-powered digital nose’. Their ground-breaking technology is capable of accurately detecting a wide range of scents and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), itself proving to be something of a game-changing solution for various sectors and use cases across food storage, health wearables and environmental management.
Support is there – but it’s fragmented
Altered Carbon have been tremendously proactive in engaging with UWE Bristol. And the key to understanding their approach is similar to how Future Space now conceives of its own university-partnered innovation strategy – that’s to say, as a vortex. At one end of the proverbial vortex is the university’s academics, students and facilities, while at the other end is our businesses. And it’s in the middle where the innovation happens. This vortex model brings with it all kinds of opportunities, because as Ali says, ‘everything is there for businesses – there’s some support in different areas, be it higher-end funding support or lower-end clinical support.’
But at the same time, it’s how businesses access this support that is often a challenge, particularly for lower-cost engagements that can act as a run-up to bigger projects. At Future Space, one of the things we’re doing is working closely with the Bristol Business School, offering up Business Student Consultancy Projects as part of a student’s final year but also embedding our companies into the Business Management programmes to create a far stronger relationship between students and businesses, driving engagements across the entire degree.
Still, creating live student projects that fulfil the needs of both a university degree and a commercial company isn’t always easy, as Ali observes. ‘We once did a marketing report project working with students. It took a lot of our time, and it didn’t work out that well. But actually, if there was a template brief that we had, rather than writing our own brief that doesn’t align with what they need to do, it means that we’d all have [a project] that we know a department will accept.’
The student as early validator
Ali’s right, and at Future Space we’ll be doing exactly that going forwards – creating standard template briefs that fit both business and academic needs. It’s key that we get these project briefs right, as ‘they help a company like ours to progress so much quicker.’ And more than that, it’s about facilitating an environment that allows a start-up to succeed.
Ali recalls how Altered Carbon once needed to run trials to find out if their product worked, but they couldn’t afford expensive trials at the start. It’s a catch-22: without the trials, says Ali, ‘no one would give you investment without that proof. So we had to run those tests at UWE to find out if it worked. And if it did, amazing, then we got the investment.’
For Ali, the student project is of paramount importance to finding investment. ‘The student project really helps as an early validation. Working with a student in the lab, we can do some work and then at the end I get a report that I can take to our investors and say, “look, this is what we have so far”’. In short, ‘it’s a really good proof case for small businesses’, not to mention a genuinely valuable stepping stone in the student’s own career.
For as Ali stresses, the reality is that this kind of early-stage trial and testing is ‘less feasible for us to do ourselves, particularly in a very short period of time. We need lots of data, lots of samples, and we need people to run these data points. That you cannot do as a small company unable to hire that many people that early and that quickly. Instead, we can collaborate.’
The PhD as R&D playground
Looking beyond undergraduates, though, how should a postgraduate fit into the innovation journey – and how is this calibre of academic skillset best utilised in the growth of a tech start-up? For Ali, working with undergraduate students is indeed best saved for those early-stage trials ‘when you can’t afford a lot’, whereas PhD students become most valuable for mid-stage trials when a company is looking to develop its products through longer-form research: ‘After you’ve done some of the work and proven your earlier needs, now you’ve got your investment and you’ve got your product, so we’re going back to the same thing but bigger’.
A PhD student can step in here, conducting advanced research that is rigorous but commercially focused. ‘For a company’, Ali admits, ‘it can be hard to wait three years for the novel outcome of a PhD, but you can build in research models with the academics that allows us to say, “okay, your overall goal is to figure out x or y, and in between the broader research ambitions of the PhD you can test certain things for us.’ This model, Ali further notes, ‘is good for the student because they learn new skills, and it means that a company can engage with university facilities.’
Arguably, these kinds of advanced PhD projects are typically best suited to aspects of R&D that are not business critical and aren’t needed instantly but instead feed into the company’s longer-term R&D strategy. ‘What are the side projects you need to do that you can’t do in-house? Those are the ones you hand over to the university.’ Almost by definition, universities should be understood by businesses as sandpits of infinite research and development opportunities – as R&D spaces designed to push boundaries and encourage a trailblazing mindset. As Ali puts it, ‘I have my MVP and I have my designs – now what can I do next?’
It always comes back to the student
Of course, such lofty ambitions still need practical mechanisms that work for what are essentially two different entities. Collaboration across academia and industry is not just the best but also the fastest route to making innovation happen, for as Ali observes: ‘Academics don’t always know how to deploy research, but they don’t need to know how to deploy research, because we know how to deploy it.’
Again, though, making this deployment actually happen – at least in the context of those initial, entry-level university-business collaborations that are so important – rests very much on the shoulders of the student. As Ali insists, ‘it always comes back to the student’. Which makes sense: students are at the heart of the entire university experience, and so they must be at the heart of the innovation and growth journey for university-partnered businesses, too.
Let’s face it, a university like UWE Bristol has become a prosperous R&D playground for its entire student body: these students have research insight and facilities at their fingertips, and increasingly they have access to a whole host of innovative businesses that, in the case of Future Space businesses, are based on their campus. Crucially, students bring businesses like Altered Carbon not just capacity – they bring alternative ways of knowing and doing that, if nurtured correctly, can make the difference between a successful company and a trailblazing one. What’s more, through the student, collaboration between a business and a university becomes almost second nature, with the student being a key to unlocking the door between the worlds of academia and industry – two worlds that are so close yet so far apart.
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