True innovation starts with culture

Everyone in a university, whether you’re a seasoned principal investigator or a day one student, should be thinking about how to use commercial tools to scale the impact of their work and how they can actively contribute to translating discoveries into real-world ventures. Working with industry and creating new ventures – spinout and startup companies – should be par for the course.

But too often, we may think it’s not for us. Students may feel it’s not something they can pursue during their studies; early career academics may feel it’s too early in their career to consider; more established academics can be snowed under with research and teaching responsibilities and not have the time.

It can also be daunting. Working with industry, commercialising your work, creating a new company – these are all challenging if you’ve not done them before. This is especially true if a culture of innovation doesn’t exist and isn’t role-modelled across a university.

But where do you start with embedding innovation into research culture, across all disciplines and career levels?  It might sound hard, but it can be done.

A culture of collaboration

Many university-associated innovation teams are entities in their own right. QMI is no exception. Nevertheless, rather than remain at arms-length from our university, QMI is, by design, intrinsically linked with Queen Mary University of London.

Having this linked, collaborative relationship significantly fosters a positive innovation-centred research culture. QMI colleagues regularly support their university peers to consider innovation as part of their work. It’s paying dividends.

Founding a business is often a great way to achieve social change. The work we do with partners such as London Social Ventures and Care City is leading the way in creating impactful businesses.

Looking outward, both QMI and Queen Mary are anchors of an entrepreneurial ecosystem across East London. By combining our research expertise with the clinical excellence of Barts Health NHS Trust, the diversity of our local community, and our proximity to both the City of London and Canary Wharf, we at Queen Mary are turning Whitechapel (and beyond) into the place for researchers, scientists and clinicians to work alongside businesses and entrepreneurs. Building and nurturing such collaborations in turn creates a culture in which other collaborations are encouraged and innovation, in its many forms, can thrive.

It’s never too early to start

Too often, there is a perception that only those with decades of experience can or should consider how to commercialise their research into a real-world benefit.

But this is a narrow view. At Queen Mary, we believe diversity of ideas helps us achieve the previously unthinkable, which in this instance, means opening innovation and entrepreneurship up to students, not just staff. And it’s working.

In our Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, Professor Robert Hill has a fantastic reputation for innovation, with many students seeking him out as someone to work with during their undergraduate degree. Inventor of the award-winning BioMin toothpaste, Professor Hill shares his appetite for innovation with his students, including Dr Florence Mai, who in her third year contacted Professor Hill with an idea for a new toothpaste. That vision will become a reality when Nattura, which is based on Dr Mai’s undergraduate research and is supported by QMI, launches later this year.

Similarly, RoEx, a QMI spinout that uses AI to transform how musicians produce and record new music, was co-founded by Professor Josh Reiss in the Faculty of Science and Engineering and his former PhD student Dr David Ronan. The two entrepreneurs have continued to work together on collaborative research funded by Innovate UK and facilitated by Queen Mary’s Business Development Team.

This research culture, in which supervisors and students view entrepreneurship as a key route to impact and success, is a trait indicative of top innovation universities, of which Queen Mary is one. Supervisors should be encouraged to get their teams thinking about innovation from the beginning and offer the relevant support, while students should be encouraged to broach the topic with supervisors from the get-go.

Tying innovation with recognition

A central component to building an innovation-positive research culture is to recognise innovation properly within the academic career path. That’s why I’m working with colleagues at Queen Mary to improve how innovation is rewarded within academic promotions, and to ensure academic entrepreneurs have time to dedicate to building their business, whatever career stage they’re at.

We are also developing our Invention to Impact professional development training at QMI. Through this, we deliver bespoke entrepreneurship training across technology and engineering, biopharma, and social ventures, and we run an annual spinout showcase for investors and potential early adopters. Combined, this gives academics at all stages of their career the tools they need to embed innovation into their work.

Positive culture breeds success

I’m proud to say that by employing these approaches – collaboration, supporting staff and students, and linking innovation with recognition, Queen Mary has developed a positive, successful innovation-focused research culture, which, with support from QMI, has led to the founding of multiple internationally successful spinout companies.

For example, in our School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science alone, we have a fantastic eight spinouts, including Dragonfly AI, which is trusted by some of the biggest consumer brands to test their creative content for attention, emotion and memory. Co-founder Dr Hamit Soyel and his team continue to partner with Queen Mary to keep their technology industry leading.

Colleagues in the Blizard Institute are quickly catching up, with recent spinouts including the award-winning ReFleks, game-changing Keratify and fast-growing Elcella, which has expanded into the US and is built on a decade of Queen Mary research. These examples clearly show how, once a culture of research innovation is embedded, it can take hold and lead to fantastic results.

Research with innovation at its heart

At Queen Mary, anyone who wants to build a business – from first year to professor – gets the support and opportunity to do so. By encouraging everyone to think about their research through an innovation lens, to think about what the commercial potential and real-world applications of their work, we are creating a university where innovation is at the heart of the research culture. I for one, am excited to see where it takes us next.

Read more:

• Innovation paves way to make ‘clean’ chemicals, plastics and food using solar energy
• Queen Mary: improving the drug development pipeline
• Queen Mary joins the UK Reproducibility Network
• Queen Mary scientists seek to slash carbon footprint of medicine manufacturing through new bio-based solvents.