Building on the work I’ve been doing for the University of Exeter that led up to the ARC Accelerator launch I’ve also been running bespoke impact and commercialisation sessions for various clients including the University of York, and most recently the University of Leeds.

The Research Commercialisation team at Leeds had attended the ARC Launch sessions and felt that the approach used there would work well for some of their emerging commercialisation candidate projects. Whilst they arranged their own content on Intellectual Property I delivered a 2-day programme covering much of what I’ve done for ARC, Exeter, and York. They were also keen to work in-person.

Content Breakdown

I used methods and tools drawn from User Research, Design Thinking, Systems Thinking, and Entrepreneurial Venture Creation throughout the workshops, including:

• Empathy and Journey Mapping
• Systems Maps
• Ideation and Creative Thinking
• Value Proposition Design
• ‘Elements of Value’
• Business Model Canvas
• Lean Startup
• Prototyping

The most transformative elements are typically breaking down different stakeholders (beneficiaries, users, and customers) and how they all require different value propositions and embracing the idea of ‘fast failure’ through using principles of Lean Startup and Prototyping so valuable academic time is not wasted.

‘Success’ and ‘Failure’

I start these programmes with a conversation about ‘success’. I highlight that pursuing the success of an idea might make unexpected demands on an academic career and vice-versa. It’s important to also highlight that ‘success’ might look different to the academic, their colleagues, their management, the commercialisation staff who support them, any investors, any research partners, and even the family of the academic. Who is measuring this and how are they ascribing success? What does everyone think can be sensibly sacrificed to achieve it? Most academics like being academics and don’t always want to leave the lab or the library to pursue start-up or even ‘impact’ so how much can we ask them to do to get these ideas into the real-world? It’s thorny and complex territory – but well worth highlighting – and I find it helps the rest of the content work much better because participants have a clearer sense of what they want from it.

One frequent follow-up to this discussion is a later conversation about ‘failure’. Most start-ups fail, most patents never get commercialised, so is there a point to encouraging academics through this process for unlikely gains? Yes, partly because some do succeed, but more importantly because the experience of trying to commercialise, even if it ‘fails’ on that occasion, provides skills, insights, experiences, and connections that lead to subsequent industry-engaged projects and successful spin-outs! This phenomena was mentioned by both academics and commercialisation staff as a ‘net positive’ for this kind of training provision although it requires long-term vision over short-term results. 

Response to the work

100% of participants rated it as both ‘excellent’ and ‘useful’.

“Really enjoyed the day. It was valuable to have the time and space to think about the opportunity with a more commercial focus and to have questions posed to us that made us think about things from a different angle.”

Participating Academic

“I found it both interesting and thought provoking. The day was well organised, flowed well, and had a good blend of taught information, and individual work. I think that this could be very useful to new academics to demonstrate how their research may proceed in a commercial direction.”

Participating Academic

“It is very different from other types of training courses, it is engaging and interesting.”

Participating Academic

“Dave delivered two insightful, fascinating workshops on value proposition and business model canvas for our internal accelerator scheme. The sessions were packed full of hands-on, practical learning with real world examples, and significantly advanced the cohorts’ understanding of the topics”.

Dr Blake Prime, Head of Opportunity Development, University of Leeds.