ICURe — a journey of Research to Commercialisation | Part 1: Before it all started

This post is part 1 of the series: ICURe — a journey of research to commercialisation. It will be about my personal experience in ICURe — the Innovation to Commercialisation of University Research, a UK government funded programme with an ambition to help early-career researcher commercialise their research in a hope to bring in more jobs, vitalise UK’s economics, create more industrial impact, and ultimately a better position for the UK in this competitive world. A few more parts are lined up waiting to publish on Medium here. So stay tuned!

Motivation

The whole idea is clear — just like any other kinds of incubator, ICURe is university-centred incubator that exploits universities’ and partners’ resources as well as government fundings, to boost the commercial viability of university-based innovation and more ambitiously, maximise the chance of the survival rate of spin-outs from universities. It’s just so true that, 9 out of 10 start-ups fail because of various kinds of reasons, not to mention the start-ups from university. Academics in the UK sometimes are reluctant to building any businesses around their hold-dear technologies. On contrast, it’s different for students. The ever-growing start-up culture has been blooming surprisingly fast over the past few years in digital technology community, and of course the many success of digital companies such as Facebook, Uber, AirB&B etc, that more than half of the undergraduates in the states are thinking about becoming his/her own boss after/during university. Similar happens in the UK, too. Clearly academics are lacking behind in this trendy start-up culture. Their stereotypical mindsets have to be changed, and it must act now.

That’s why SETsquared comes in. It’s a pilot programme within the UK, that brings in the resources of five universities (Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Southampton and Surrey) to help make start-ups. I am so fortunate to be part of it — in fact, we as team 5G technology had already finished Phase 1, and we have made it to Phase 2 to develop an business plan for a InnovateUK fund application for start-up. Since Phase 2 is still underway, so this series will be centred around what I have been through and what I have learnt from Phase 1 in this ICURe journey.

Something is wrong…

From May 2014, I have been employed as a senior research assistant at University of Southampton. Prior to that, I was a PhD candidate. I had been involved in research for quite some time now, but everything that came out of my research stayed on a sheer ‘useless’ paper. Further steps of development was very unclear to me, leaving me thinking: what’s the point of doing research then, if nothing creates value to the society? Something must be wrong here.

Realising the need for change, I decided to act. Though it wasn’t easy at all, I started to get involved in and also organise entrepreneurial activities as the vice chairman of ECS Entrepreneurs Society from early 2013, right in the middle of my 3rd year PhD. Over the past two years, me and Zilong (the Chairman) have organised more than 10 entrepreneurial talks/competitions, created and run the student incubator programme Seedling, pulled off the first ever student-focused Dragons’ Den on campus together with our faculty. That was loads of success, conveying the entrepreneur spirit around the University. Although from this sort of activities I gained quite a few contacts and management skills and all that on personal level, things are still missing — the gap between ideas/prototypes/skills and product still undoubtedly exists. I knew I needed to do something about it again.

The hook

In mid of June, I was told there’s a workshop about ICURe hosted by SETsquared team. The word SETsquared has been flying around my ears in months, but I never get a chance to attend any of it. So I went there, and that was one of the best decisions I made by far in my post-doc life.

The workshop itself turned out to be not important any more. What’s then important is the momentum, the route, and the hope for real change. Straight after the workshop I visited my boss and talked him through about ICURe. To my surprise the whole idea of ICURe really resonated in his mind. At that point I must know his mindset lies exactly on my side. Without any hesitation, he asked me to further investigate and get prepared for the application for ICURe.

It all went down pretty well. We spent quite a few days on the application, iterated our internal review back and forth, and then submitted. It wasn’t as difficult as I originally thought though. In fact, the application seeks to find the market potential of one’s technology and more importantly, who comprises the team. For that, it’s trickier than it sounds. Technology-wise, we know exactly what our technology can offer in terms of performance, advantages and disadvantages; but business-wise, it’s a completely different story, and this shall be covered in later parts of this series. Onto team structure, our team consists of 4 key members: me as the junior researcher, my boss Rob as the senior researcher, Bruno as our business mentor, and David as our Technology Transfer Officer (Reuben is part of our team too, but only acts as a substitute when needed). The background of the team has to be strong to gain judges’ appreciation, and I personally believe ours is one of the strongest teams, as all four members are very committed to ICURe, and more importantly we are very passionate and feel confident about what we can achieve. With that, eventually out of >50 applications we were selected to join the cohort 4, and I was so happy about it. So now, what’s waiting for us next is the ICURe bootcamp and the 3 month market validation afterwards!

Never late to adapt to change

People feel uncomfortable about making changes. It is hard, radical, and sometimes it hurts. Admittedly, comfortability is human’s need, but that has to be under control. Just like the quote below, that

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. — Mark Twain

The majority around you are after cozy life. But as a innovator/entrepreneur, soon after finding yourself getting too ‘soaked’ in your comfort zone, you must stop to reflect, think deep, and then act accordingly and decisively for your own good, not following the rest majority and feeling secured.

That’s why I took the chance for change. I am literally risking my good track record of being a proper researcher and the foreseeable engineer’s happy family life. Even worse, it’s rather difficult for non-European to compete with local peers that already fit in so well in their mother land. But I dare to accept the challenge, and I am sure I won’t regret every single bit of it. That’s the spirit.