Today I interviewed a senior lecturer in genetic medicine who attended a previous Scott Shane worksop at Newcastle University.  This is a series of follow up interviews.

Fact. The hair sheath – that blobby bit that one sees on the end of a hair that falls out of, or is pulled from, the head – contains enough human tissue so be cultured into stem cells.

Lyle ran a bio research consultancy before joining Newcastle Uni working in designing stem cell lines.  (With semantic magic I have just shrunk this man’s double digit years of success into a single line) What Scott Shane taught overlaps with what Lyle has been involved with and has done.  Lyle has patented and developed and he is currently spinning out.  He attended the workshop to see what others (other universities) are doing in terms of the IP development processes and commercialisation.  He found it interesting to see how IP is handled in the case studies used.

He differentiates postdocs {and what needs to be noted here is that all the people who are being discussed are working at a very high level, have been picked from a high achieving pool – already the best of the bunch}  into a. Pure researchers who just want to pursue knowledge, do not want to interact with the real world if at all possible, and are fantastic and amazing at what they do, b. Communicators whose technical skill is less specialised but who know how to convince and facilitate and co-create, who know how to sell that which they do.  These are entrepreneurs.  And c. The group who are doing postdoc because they want to defer going out and getting a real job, and hope they never have to decide. These are managed according to their personalities, are given activities to direct their skills towards.  In this group are the people who work to a high level of skill when given clear targets and another group who are better communicators.  Again it is the communicators who are more inclined to being entrepreneurial.

There has been no new interaction between staff as a result of the workshop.  {This is a lagging opportunity!}

Postdocs (and academics) should be encouraged to see that it is not just cutting edge science and discoveries that will lead to a good business, that often a better way of doing what is already being done can deliver a good business which is quicker to market and has lower start-up costs.

He says that there is an urgent requirement for a module that teaches the nitty gritty, nuts and bolts “this is how to set up a business”.  A module that teaches all the way from partners and formal business structure and getting funding, filling in forms, sources of funding, legal stuff, taxes.

I am reading a paper called “Instilling the Entrepreneurial Spirit in Your R&D Team: What Large Firms Can Learn from Successful Start-ups”.  Is this a large firm problem?  Certainly the University is a large firm.  Are individual teams under their PI’s successful small start-ups or subdivisions of a large organisation?  If they are classed as start-ups sitting loosely within the large organisation i.e. the Uni, there must be a creative dissonance, a stable creative dissonance, between the two that produces good results.  It seems more likely that it is as with the case presented about the large firms in the paper above i.e. that large firms develop bureaucratic processes that slow things down, develop unofficial no-go areas, have fewer opportunities for knowledge sharing between co-workers from different organisational silos.

And in another aside: is it possible that successful start-ups are frustrated by what they find in large companies when they follow the promise of expansion?  Spaces like Ignite100 or The Alchemists assist small fast growth companies into becoming big companies using best practices from… from where exactly?  Are the best practices coming from the big ß to the à small?  Their websites imply that the big companies are the owners of best practice because after all the big company is, you know, BIG.  But I would hazard that the big has as much to learn here.