Yiannis Ventikos
Professor Yiannis Ventikos’ career-long history of entrepreneurship and tech transfer success – including his role as Co-Founder and Non-Executive Director of First Light Fusion – both informs his deep understanding of the benefits of industry engagement and strong networks and underpins his amplification of enterprising activity within the Faculty of Engineering.
What does it take to be an entrepreneurial researcher?
In the not-so-distant past, entrepreneurship in academia was the premise of a limited set of specialisations – engineering, surgery, maybe parts of physical sciences.
This doesn’t apply any more – it’s possible for academics and researchers from across the entire spectrum to engage in entrepreneurial activities, if they want to.
These two words – ‘want to’ – are, as far as I’m concerned, key to the approach individuals and institutions must assume regarding the translation of academic work.
On one hand, there are great benefits in pursuing such activities – excitement, novelty, financial rewards and, most importantly, seeing the fruits of one’s research put to good use. On the other hand, it must be recognised that time and intellectual commitment are needed, and these types of commitment, parallel to more traditional academic activities, are not for everyone.
The indispensable perspective that must be in an academic’s mind to start engaging in entrepreneurial activities is that the effort and time necessary are worth it, because the outcomes are worth it. Once this mind set is firmly in place, the additional building blocks can always be incorporated in the picture.
What were the stand-out moments in your career that spurred enterprising collaborations with industry?
Before I answer this question, I would like to put a disclaimer in place: working closely with industrial partners, especially for engineering academics, should be a particularly important element of one’s activities portfolio - enterprising or not.
It provides a source of interesting, challenging and relevant problems, can provide resources (not only money) that can be difficult to access otherwise, and can introduce a valuable partner in the trail to translation of technologies and ideas to practice. As such, in many if not most cases, it is advisable to try to forge such links and forge them early in the trajectory of a research endeavour.
However, there is an exception to this adage – sometimes, when the circumstances dictate, it may be advisable to keep third parties at an arm’s length, because of the nature and stage of a particular research activity. The most common scenario where this happens is with very early stage, high risk and high reward research that could lead to the establishment of spinout activity that would compete with a dominant corporate entity in a specific sector. In such cases, there is a ‘too early’ element – such research should be kept within the University until it reaches a volume of evidence that is protectable as disclosures.
That being said, and out of a few interesting examples, I will highlight one personal experience that has been seminal and transformative in my academic career; one that is also quite atypical.
Most of my research involves computational modeling of physical and technical processes and phenomena, including the establishment of computational simulation models that mimic the behavior of a system of interest. A very common example of this type of work is the computer simulation of fluid flow, such as the evaluation of interesting engineering characteristics, like the lift and drag of the wing of an aircraft.
There are great practical advantages in having such models. For example, in the aircraft wing case, you would avoid the need of a large and costly wind tunnel to evaluate these important parameters.
The computational modeling sector is dominated by a few major international commercial software houses, and there’s also an endless series of individual code developers (mostly academics), plus bigger open-source communities.
Very early in my career, through a personal contact, I developed an interesting symbiotic relationship with one such major commercial scientific software manufacturer. This partner gave me access to their simulation platform – a resource of substantial financial value if it were to accessed commercially.
Then, my research group explored computer modeling of problems that were outside the current range of capabilities of that platform, by developing code that could be used together with the commercial platform and extend its capabilities in domains that were – originally – of deep scientific interest to me and my research group.
These algorithmic adventures were high risk. Sometimes the outcomes were not what we expected or wanted. More often however, we showcased that something deemed very difficult to compute algorithmically was feasible with the right approach. Demonstrators of this type included cavitation, arbitrary grid remeshing and multicompartmental poroelasticity in a finite element framework.
In those cases – and when the commercial interest justified the resource – the external academic rough code would be incorporated into the main commercial platform, while for us these first-of-a-kind methods resulted in interesting publications.
This mutually beneficial arrangement survived changes of ownership and a significant turnaround of technical staff for the commercial partner, and three changes of affiliation for me over the span of almost twenty-five years. It has been one of the most transformative elements in my research trajectory.
What challenges did you have to overcome at the beginning of your journey?
Perhaps contrary to the experience of most young academics attempting to explore technology commercialisation, the initial raising of funds was not the biggest challenge for me.
Instead, I was challenged by my underestimation of how important it is to deeply understand the commercial domain within which our technology would eventually operate.
This indispensable step is not different in its essence to what a researcher would do when writing a paper: you’d always do a thorough literature review and write an introduction that maps the landscape.
In a very similar mindset, you need to do the same thing regarding the commercial landscape within which your technology will need to function, and compete. This is not the business plan per se, but it is an absolute prerequisite to a business plan.
Size and share of market, competing technologies, investment habits and practices and other elements of this nature need to be addressed in parallel with the technology questions.
Being more of a technologist than an entrepreneur, I quickly realised I was hindered by having a ‘not invented here’ attitude towards the ‘what else is happening’ question. I had to work hard over the years to train this kind of thinking out.
What advice would you give to your young self on how to have an enterprising mindset?
There are three essential ingredients, and you need to put these in place as early as possible.
The idea, the market and the network.
The ‘idea’ is the core element that you are trying to port from an academic to a commercial setting. There must be clarity of what that is, and why it is worth pursuing this translation. Not all ideas are.
The ‘market’ is the recipient of this idea – what is the need, existent or emerging, who else is fulfilling this need and what is the possible share of that market you could hope for.
The ‘network’ – sometimes underestimated – is the group of people you know, and by extension their connections – that you can pick up the phone and ask for help. This needs to include the technology transfer office of the University of course, but you also need to have the flexibility and ease to talk directly to patent specialists, fund managers, policy and government executives. This can save you from many mistakes and false starts.
I have two exercises to propose to up-and-coming academic entrepreneurs:
Firstly, write your company’s (or you company founder’s, i.e., yours) Wikipedia page as it would look five, ten and fifteen years into the future.
Secondly, script and ‘direct’ the first 30 second TV advertisement of your product. The more Hollywood the better.
You will find that these thought experiments – the acid tests of public scrutiny – focus your mind and suddenly you become your best critic.
What’s the best lesson you have learned on your journey?
It has been an important realisation for me that, in spite of what is said, most things are negotiable.
When parties present rules and procedures as written in stone, they usually are not – they are effectively the starting point for a negotiation. That being said, it is also a fact that different parties enter negotiations with different levels of receptivity and different degrees of open-mindedness. The real lesson for me here has been that if you are not ready to walk out of the discussion regarding commercialisation, then it is not a discussion at all.
It must be appreciated that the multiple challenges of building up an academic career do not necessarily prepare us for the commercial thinking that tech transfer necessitates and as such, academics need – and should seek – all the help, advice and training they can get.
As a parting thought, I would like to advocate again for open-mindedness, awareness and flexibility by quoting something a very experienced and highly successful businessperson, entrepreneur, CEO, Chairman and friend once told me: “The first business plan is always wrong”.