The Next Leap
By Thierry Heles
Categories: Business, Entrepreneurship, Investing
A researcher makes a promising discovery in a lab – a drug like warfarin, the covid vaccine, or a way to build quantum computers. What happens next decides whether the idea ever reaches a patient, a factory or a customer. The Next Leap is about that stretch of work: the part between a promising result and a company. Thierry Heles talks with the people who make those calls: tech transfer officers who decide which inventions get a full patent filing and which are dropped, venture capital investors who explain why a brilliant researcher still gets turned down for funding, founders who describe the licensing clause that nearly killed their deal, and lawyers who sort out who owns an idea.Each conversation focuses on the decisions themselves: what evidence convinced someone to invest, what mistake cost a team a year, and what the people who got it right did differently. You won't get a lecture on theory. You'll hear practitioners explain their reasoning in the situations they actually faced. If you're a researcher wondering what happens after you publish, a founder negotiating your first licence, or simply curious how the products around you got made, this is for you.
14 episodes indexed on PodSearch.
Recent episodes
- Patrick Speedie: AI can’t build trust in tech transfer
It’s tempting to automate tech transfer: matching algorithms, data lakes, and AI summarising research papers in seconds.Patrick Speedie, co-founder and chief business officer of Inpart, has built software to match university research with corporate partners. And Inpart is integrating increasingly…
- Panel: AI is a recompilation engine
Is AI about to steal your job? Today, we’re tackling the messy, complicated reality of generative AI, and asking a simple question: is it actually creating anything worthwhile?Sue Turner and Richard Cole from the University of Bristol, Ben Ackland from Meaning Machine, and Megan Butler from KPMG…
- Hetti Barkworth-Nanton: Defence innovation is about protecting the vulnerable
War in Ukraine. Conflict in the Middle East. Daily cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. As geopolitical tensions spike, capital is flooding into defence, and even a growing number of universities are open to research in this space. Yet, money invested in security innovation is money not spent…
- Brechtje Vreenegoor, Sebastiaan Berendse: In agriculture, spinouts need to reform the whole system
Wageningen University & Research is a truly unique organisation combining a higher education institution with an applied research institute. This dual nature makes commercialising research an interesting challenge, particularly with Wageningen's focus on agtech and food tech, where, for decades…
- Peter Devine: We never imagined Uniseed would be around this long
At the end of last year, Uniseed CEO Peter Devine stepped down after two decades at the helm of a venture fund that has not only survived and thrived for a quarter of a century, but which has completely reshaped the Australian innovation ecosystem. It was a good excuse to sit down with Peter and…
- Empowering academic founders: policies, programmes, and pitfalls
How can universities instil the entrepreneurial mindset in faculty, staff and students? Is this even something you can teach? And if you can, what are some of the challenges and pitfalls?Figuring out the answers to these questions, and more, is a panel of experts from around the world: Kirsty…
- Károly Szántó: Hungary will be the blueprint for university funds in Eastern Europe
There aren’t many university venture funds in central and eastern Europe but that could all be about to change if Károly Szántó has his way. The COO of OUVC, the venture fund and studio set up by Óbuda University in Budapest, is working on a playbook that other institutions in the region can use…
- Gavin Clark, Mark Mann: Here’s how to build a shared TTO
Towards the end of last year, the University of the Arts London secured a grant from Research England to lead a consortium of six universities that would develop a shared TTO focused on creative and social sciences. The pilot project, dubbed Shared Technology Transfer Office to Accelerate the…
- Panel: What’s next for quantum technologies?
What does the future hold for quantum technologies, what are the pitfalls, and how can academia, startups, industry and government work together to solve the challenges ahead?Earlier this month, I chaired a panel tackling these questions for Bristol Innovations’ first Foresight Live event…
- Nicky Dibben: People buy products, not technology
So, you’ve spun out of a university to sell your shiny new invention. How do you attract customers?You’ll need a marketing strategy, which isn’t a fancy way of saying “put ads on Google” or “post on social media”.Rather, marketing is everything that comes between your company and your customer…
- Winsome Cheung: Startups, here’s what to know when negotiating with big pharma
If you’ve never been in a licensing negotiation, you might think big pharma always has the upper hand over startups desperate to get a deal done to secure licensing fees and milestone payments. Actually, these are two parties that share the same goal, and sometimes, a startup has a product so good…
- Stuart Wilkinson: What does a sweet shop have to do with spinouts?
Stuart Wilkinson, chief executive officer of Knowledge Exchange UK (the professional body for tech transfer practitioners in Britain), has personally experienced the myriad ways university research commercialisation can impact people’s lives. It’s given him a holistic view of the sector far beyond…
- Erik Iverson, Mike Partsch: Industry doesn’t want newly hatched ideas
2025 marks 100 years since the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) became the first-ever tech transfer office. It’s been a very successful first century for the non-profit organisation as we heard last week, but that does pose an interesting challenge: how can WARF keep innovating and make…
- Kevin Walters: Vitamin D-fortified food changed universities forever
The story of technology transfer begins with Harry Steenbock’s discovery of how to create vitamin D- fortified food. Steenbock, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, established the first-ever university tech transfer office not only to license his own invention to…
PodSearch is a free, independent podcast search engine. Read about PodSearch, the privacy policy or contact us.