Beyond the Breakthrough Mawsonia

Stanford may be a recognised world-leader when it comes to startups, but it mustn’t rest on its laurels. Sometimes that even means launching initiatives that others have long had — that is just one of the lessons that Karin Immergluck, executive director of Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing, has learnt. Karin also tells us what the US can learn from its international peers, why TenU is an important component of her work and she examines the importance of erasing bias in hiring processes, including in leadership positions.

Diversity is not just about making sure more women and underrepresented minorities are on founding teams. When they do create businesses, they are typically ignored by venture capital investors who look for the same type of founders that have previously made money (creating a vicious circle). In the US, female founders raised just 2% of the VC money in 2023, and in Europe it was even less at 1.8%, according to PitchBook.

Imagine your corporate R&D team is facing a problem so complex it requires the world’s top researchers to solve. How do you find the right expert? You could scour endless academic papers or slowly build relationships with individual universities. You could invest in startups that are developing a solution. Or you could go to Halo, a matchmaker for cutting-edge research and real-world problems.

A PhD student who sets up a spinout and becomes its CEO is 21% better at returning an investor's money than a serial founder would be if installed in the same spinout. Even more impressively, a PhD student turned chief executive is 46% better at making a venture capital fund money than a former CEO from a large company would be.

Can university spinouts help fight poverty? That's a question Kelley Rich, interim vice-president for innovation at the University of Notre Dame, is trying to answer as head of the institution's innovation hub IDEA Center. It's part of a campus-wide initiative launched in January 2024 that will see increased poverty research taking place — it gets to the heart of the private Catholic university's mission of bringing about positive societal change.

Mark Billingsley, director of the University of Alaska Fairbanks‘ Tech Transfer Office and Innovation Hub, joined Beyond the Breakthrough in April 2022 and today we’re revisiting this conversation because it’s still one of the most unusual places covered on the podcast.