Reception in Honour of CEOs & Founders of Campus Companies
Saloon, Provost's House
18:00, Wednesday, 30 January 2013
Good evening,
I’m delighted to be here and to see so many of you present – so many of our Trinity entrepreneurs, founders and CEOs of campus companies.
I’ve been Provost now for eighteen months – which seems hard to believe; time has flown. Since the start of my tenure I’ve highlighted, in speech after speech, Trinity’s success in innovation. Our core mission in education and research is increasingly inseparable from success in innovation. When I think about it the biggest change in college life since my student days has been the emergence of the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship to the mission of the university.
Since the strength of your ideas and the success of your companies has been such a feature of what I say about Trinity around the world – and is such a feature of Trinity’s roadmap for the future – I felt it was about time to get you all together to recognise your achievements, and to focus together on innovation in Trinity, and on ways in which we might make it even better.
***Trinity Innovation***
As we know, Trinity is the highest ranking university in Ireland, and is ranked 21st in Europe. This is a good rating, but in terms of innovation and commercialising research, Trinity performs even better.
Twenty percent of all spin-out companies in Ireland stem from Trinity, which is a remarkable figure. Under its first Enterprise Ireland grant, 2007-2012, Trinity achieved 200 percent of its target number of campus companies.
Since 2009 we have averaged seven new spin-outs a year. We exceed not just European but International comparative figures and we achieve this technology transfer metric very cost-effectively. And among Irish start-ups, Trinity companies are frequently successful at raising finance. In last quarter 2011, three of Trinity’s lifescience companies raised a total of €6.5 million in venture capital funding.
Trinity is, in fact, among Europe’s leading innovation universities.
A great deal of this success in the early days was down to the leadership of Dr Eoin O’Neill, Trinity’s first Director of Research and Innovation Services. I’m pleased to see here too the former Bursars who led on this “in the early days”: Professor Vincent McBrierty and Professor Sean Corish. A more recent impetus is down to the Technology Transfer Office’s new revised procedure since 2009 for the approval of campus company formation.
This revision was at the instigation of the Associate Director of TR&I, Dr James Callaghan, with approval from the Finance Committee for a derogation from the College’s IP Policy. The simplified process led to an immediate, significant increase in numbers of new companies.
***Trinity’s Innovation Pathways***
I’ve been impressed in recent years with the Trinity’s Technology Showcase where we see clearly the results of a “funnel” that Trinity has set up with the support of Enterprise Ireland, where ideas can progress from being research projects with commercial potential, to licenses, to business partners, to investments, to sales - each development stage being tracked.
This funnel is of course just a way of visualizing an “innovation pathway”. The rationale behind creating innovation pathways is that academic entrepreneurship isn’t something that just happens automatically. Staff and students often need encouragement to identify the commercial opportunities in their research, and this process has to be supported by the university.
Innovation pathways should draw on an institution’s core strengths, and will be different in different universities. In Trinity, two of our core strengths lie in our interdisciplinarity and our global connectivity.
We are a large, multidisciplinary university of 24 Schools and five interdisciplinary research institutes. We encourage collaborations and joint programmes between schools and departments.
What this means in terms of innovation, is that the products and services arising from Trinity research tend to be multi- and inter-disciplinary. Admittedly we have a prevalence of spin-outs from certain disciplines such as ICT and Life Sciences, and an insufficiency from other disciplines. This is something we need to address.
Trinity is also an outward-looking university with an international heritage, a large intake of international staff and students, and a wide-flung diaspora.
When promoting innovation pathways, we draw on these core strengths.
For example, a recent innovation pathway is the TCD-UCD Innovation Academy, aimed at incentivising PhD students to become entrepreneurs. This Academy specifically encourages link ups between students in different disciplines, and it’s exciting to imagine what ideas may arise from this.
Student entrepreneurship, and not just at postgraduate level, needs support and encouragement. We have to find more ways to incentivise and reward because fresh minds give rise to fresh ideas. We know for instance that the powerhouse of social networking started with Harvard undergraduates.
Last year we launched our Global Relations Strategy which addresses a number of key actions, including increasing the number of international students, creating more student exchange programmes, and further connecting with our global alumni.
I’m hopeful that this strategy will become another surce of strength for Trinity innovation. Creating a more international campus, perhaps carrying out activities on campuses abroad – this is about getting students out of their comfort zone and triggering their imaginations.
***Systematising Innovation: EIT***
We want to develop innovation pathways in a coherent way, in an integrated way. We want all our core activities to enforce our core aims. So it’s helpful to look at ways we might further systematise our innovation process.
In this context, I want to look briefly at Europe’s approach to innovation. Trinity innovation is of course reliant on cooperation and support from the national government and the EU. Innovation does not take place in a vacuum. Trinity is part of Ireland and Europe’s innovation ecosystems – we are players within a complex environment involving private enterprise, higher education, government, and supra-governmental authorities.
Our strategies must take into account domestic and EU innovation policies.
And I also want to look at the EU’s approach because I think it offers opportunities for innovation.
I know something about this because I was recently appointed to the governing board of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (the EIT), a body of the European Union whose mission is to increase Europe’s growth and competitiveness by reinforcing innovation capacity. The EIT governing board, representing a balance of individuals active across education, research, and business. It was a great honour to be appointed to this board and I took it as a tribute to Trinity’s commitment to innovation - so the honour, indeed, is at least as much yours as mine.
EIT’s mission is to foster a new generation of entrepreneurs and innovators. It seeks to facilitate the transitions:
- from idea to product,
- from lab to market,
- and from student to entrepreneur.
How does EIT hope to achieve this? By greatly increasing and facilitating common working between the three sectors of:
- higher education,
- the business community,
- and research and technology.
Higher Education is of course universities; Business is the private commercial sector; and Research & Technology are State-funded institutes like the Max Planck scientific research organisation in Germany, or, in Ireland, Teagasc.
The EIT views these three sectors as a “Knowledge Triangle” which it hopes to integrate using different innovation pathways.
I see really useful parallels here for Trinity. In Trinity we are also looking to facilitate the transitions:
- from idea to product,
- from lab to market,
- and from researcher (student/professor) to entrepreneur.
And we also need to increase and facilitate common working between the three sectors of our own Knowledge Triangle, which we might characterise as:
- Education
- Research
- Business
My ambition is to integrate our Triangle, so that staff and students, collaborating across disciplines, with partners in Europe and round the world, emerge with viable ideas that find investment and industrial partners, thus benefiting the economy and society more generally – contributing to the public good.
***Conclusion***
I haven’t dealt this evening with the problems surrounding start-ups in a recession. I don’t underestimate these problems: I know that many excellent campus companies are still seeking investment, and I acknowledge that both the regulatory environment and intellectual property law could be improved. But I’ve chosen not to speak today about the obstacles because I firmly believe that technology transfer and commercialisation is the big Trinity success story of recent years, and we need to celebrate it.
Trinity went from creating less than one campus company a year between 1986 – 2008, to creating seven a year in the past three years, an increase of 700%. That must be one of the few growths registered in the last three years in Ireland, and in Europe!
So my main wish today is to thank all of you for your dynamism, your commitment, and your flair. I would like to have mentioned each and every one of our campus companies, which collectively offer such ingenious solutions to the issues, large and small, confronting people in 21st century Ireland.
Your companies as a whole represent a massive incentive for all academics to step up research and to make new discoveries.
Increasingly, the commercialisation of research is the academic norm, but in Ireland you are the pioneers of it; frankly I am personally in awe and admiration of your energy, courage, and risk-taking, and I know many share my views.
If Trinity has a head-start as an “innovation university”, this is down to you. So I salute you. And I look forward to working with you to ensure the continued success of your present companies - and of your future ones.
I would now like to ask the Dean of Research, Professor Vinny Cahill, to update you on several initiatives he has undertaken, and plans to undertake in the coming months, to promote innovation and entrepreneurship in the College.
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