The rest of us…
After talking to the grand lady of MIT, what else would I need to know about successfully combining scientific excellence and spinning out companies? That maybe it is not as easy as MIT makes it sound?
If you are the top university in the world, with exclusive mentoring programs, exclusive accelerator programs, millions in donations from alumni, you can afford to say: it is not about revenue, but about impact.
For other universities is has to be about revenue though. In Boston alone, there are over 30 universities and research institutes. The smaller ones sometimes only have one person responsible for Tech Transfer and not all these programs to support spin outs. Then how do you create impact and guard the academic standing?
Luckily in Boston there is an Association of Massachussets Tech Transfer Offices (MATTO), headed by Abi Barrow. She organizes The Platform about 30 times a year: a podium for academic spin out companies, to showcase their business or finding to a group of handpicked experts from the Boston innovation network. Sometimes investors, sometimes serial entrepreneurs’ sometimes academia. Who ever Abi and her team see as relevant for the further development of the startup.
Besides these deep dives for startups the society of TTO’s organize thematic conferences for all their members 3 or 4 times a year, where all the spin outs on a subject get to be showcased.
A humble initiative compared to everything MIT offers their spin outs, but an effective way to help the smaller tech transfers offices! And something StartupDelta would be able to offer spin outs!
After lunch there were two more meetings, with a tech transfer officer from Harvard, Vivian Berlin, and the founder of CIC in Boston, Cambridge, St Louis and Rotterdam, Stas Gayshan. If anything these two talks showed me there is not ‘one way’. Essential is the combination of bringing together research, entrepreneurs, funding and customers. But it doesn’t have to all be in one program, as long as all the elements will eventually come together.
Stas was being quite frank: look at the results and decide what model works best. And he vowed for MIT. An excellent university surrounded by excellent facilities to help en support entrepreneurs. Without doing the work for the entrepreneurs, but giving them a fair chance by not taking too much equity and not expecting revenue on the short term.
As StartupDelta that would mean helping create the right programs around the universities. Thematic, where funding, entrepreneurship and the right amount of market pull come together.
