And Then There Were … Four

Last year we opened our new lab — Blockpass ID Lab — and we will have seven new PhD students running in it by the end of this year. But our big news is that we now are working on our fourth spin-out, and another in the line of high impact companies. This one is again based on visionary PhD work, and will focus on cryptography. But, we can’t say too much just now.

Over the years we have produced three highly successful spin-out companies: Zonefox, Symphonic and Cyan Forensics. All of these spin-outs, too, were based on novel research work, and backed up with research papers and patents. These were not companies which contributed a little bit to new areas, these were all each aimed creating high impact in their focused areas.

We are so lucky that our university has a strive to invest in the high impact companies of the future, and the returns from the sale of Zonefox are already being invested into new PhD studentships in our lab, and — hopefully — creating the next batch of spin-outs.

So what is the magic sauce?

Being big doesn’t help

Often these are large companies who are struggling to make their innovations successful, and they ask us for our thoughts on how they can improve. One engagement last week really sticks out for me, in they went through each of our projects, and kept…