I'm sorry, we're switching tack a little bit here and a specific session here talking about
what's new emerging disruptive models for high value university industry partnering.
So I've been given the pleasure of chairing this session. I'm Karen Kennedy.
I'm the director of a new office that's been created at the University of Cambridge and New Strategic Partnerships Office,
and I've been in that role for about a year now, but we're still a very new developing office, developing our ways of working.
So we're very keen to learn from what others are doing in this space and how we might learn from that best practise share,
best practise and a new ideas for functioning. So this is a perfect session for us.
And just to say, in our office at Cambridge, we have quite an interesting model in that we cover all types of partnerships,
so not just with the private sector, but with the public sector as well and across all disciplines across the whole university.
It's clearly not new activity. We've got a lot of activity happening across the university in terms of partnering, but we,
the office is really being created to bring some strategy and coordination to that activity so we can maximise the value of those partnerships.
And as I said, we're very, very keen to learn just to show how many we are.
And I have my colleague here, Catherine Halstead, who joined us as our head of business partnerships function only in April this year.
So we are very new function and that's why we're very keen to learn about what's happening in this space.
So what we want to get from this session, and I should actually here on the slide.
Credit Thomas Council Rick Stern, who's from the Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy at Kate Cambridge.
He's really done all the hard work behind this session. Design date invite invited the speakers.
And I just get the pleasure of actually chairing this kind of work.
So what's our ambition for this session?
We hope that it is going to be quite a discursive session and that you'll have a chance to engage as well as our speakers.
But what we wanted to do really was to get people talking about the future of university industry
partnering and really think about new and novel ways of working together in this space.
And as I said, really thinking about novel ways that span to disrupt the way we're working now and unlock significant
new sources of value or overcome some of the existing roadblocks that we've been hearing about,
we've heard from both Mark and Walter about some of the challenges of working in this space.
So how can we unblock some of those? So in terms of more specific objectives for this session,
we want to explore emerging initiatives and experiments in university industry partnering that have the
potential to disrupt how universities work with industrial partners to create and realise added value.
We'd like to explore some of the challenges that have been faced in getting these novel
initiatives off the ground and working in large organisations based on the university side,
but also on the industry side, and then have some reflection and discussion on the insights and lessons learnt that we can all
learn from these experiences and that we can potentially apply in future efforts in this space.
So the way that we're going to structure this session.
As I said, I hope it is going to be quite discursive and that you'll be also be able to engage in questions or ideas forward.
But we're going to start off with some short presentations from our three speakers and I'll introduce them shortly.
Will then have some discussion with the speakers to actually build on their introductory remarks and presentations.
When I will ask them some questions,
they'll also be an opportunity for you to answer some questions and also contribute any ideas that you also have in this space.
And then we'll have just some summing up. Well, we'll ask the speakers for some final points in this.
So without further ado, I will introduce our first speaker.
This is just this is the three speakers that we have here.
But our first speaker today is going to be called Costa, who's executive director of corporate relations and the industry liaison programme at MIT.
And I'm sure you don't need very much further introduction to call, and I'm aware he's also a past chair of you as well.
So without further ado, I shall hand over to call. This was Campbell Square back when I went to school.
Just a bit of a wasteland, right? And now I well, now you can see it's built up enormously.
There's another slide that will show you the difference between now and then,
and we become absolutely surrounded by well over 200 corporate technology scouting and research labs in the lake.
And you'll see here that the virus was one of the first to to come to my team decades ago.
Now, when when you moved your basic research laboratory from Basel Switzerland right into the heart of Kendall Square,
and this area continues to grow enormously in all sectors, not just biotech, but you can see Google, Amazon, Microsoft, others are here now.
Very slow this year, try this, OK, this is a better way.
So this is just shows you show how close all of these developments are to the traditional campus of M.I.T. and the office that I run.
Corporations include the industrial liaison programme and might start up exchange.
This is a bit of a picture of a linear process for innovation and towards commercialisation, which is probably a much more iterative process.
But the IRP acts as a catalyst to guide a organisation that links large corporates
productively with the myriad of activities that might be of interest to companies.
We work in the same offices of a sponsor programme, which is contract terms and conditions, and our technology licencing office,
which does all of the licencing for MIT, which Mighty remains the leading licensee of intellectual property of any university.
We have a number of other funds in the area on campus,
these here and then to work with the students to help them become more entrepreneurial in their activities.
And then there are set of new initiatives that are outside the campus.
One is the engine. I can talk about this at the break. This is a $250 million venture fund that MIT created.
It's a for-profit subsidiary of MIT. We raise money from individuals to invest in what's called tough tech.
So these are long term technologies to take a decade or more until they're commercially viable,
something that Walter alluded to in terms of the mission as well.
We also have we're blessed by having lots of accelerators and innovation labs in the Came in Cambridge, Boston area.
So we don't have to develop our own accelerators.
A couple labs central in the Cambridge Innovation Centre provide services to small companies in the biotech other areas.
Okay. The AOP, I won't dwell on this, but the AOP is a programme that's been around since 1948.
We have 260 companies in the programme now. These tend to be Fortune 2000 companies.
They pay an annual fee that allows us to really be self-financing.
So that's been a big benefit to all of us in that we don't need to compete with academic programmes
and priorities in order to get the headcount and the staff to invest in new programmes.
And I know this is a big bottleneck for many of you. Couple of the new features in the programme are executive briefings,
where we bring in C-level executives from either one of their quarterly research briefings or strategy sessions.
Sometimes they bring in clients, but the idea is to expose them to some of the leading thinkers.
As an example, we had a major defence contractor came in. The CTO brought in the CTO of all of the units reporting to him.
He had an internal meeting and then we brought in speakers on the future of energy, on cybersecurity and so forth,
and so provide a bit of a catalyst to their thinking in terms of how they set corporate strategy.
We started four years ago with school at MIT Start-Up Exchange. We've assembled a platform of over 17 hundred at MIT connected companies.
These are companies not only that use Matip, but have been founded by our students, alumni, others.
This platform we're using for targeted introductions to the 260 HP members,
and it's really taken off because this resulted in these small companies having access to potential partners for
new product development because we're better than large corporates to know what the market actually demands.
Also, for partnerships for geographic breadth, so many of these companies,
for example, don't have Connexions that they can trust in Japan or elsewhere.
But we're able to provide them with introductions to key executives that we've worked with over many years at MIT.
We highlight these companies in all our events. We now have well over 20 odd major events, both at MIT, but increasingly regionally.
So we've had events this upcoming year and we'll have them in in Shanghai and Paris,
in Madrid, in Chicago, in San Diego, Silicon Valley, New York City.
And so the end, I want to just show you what his plans are for increasing what we call the densification.
We heard earlier today the importance of having people bounce off each other close proximity.
So we're renovating six parking lots here. You can see in the heart of Kendall Square.
Construction is ongoing now where we're building almost two million square feet of new space that will now have housing units.
Graduate Student Housing Retail Office, the MIT Museum. This will become the gateway to the campus and now the second set of projects which
are going underway in a couple of years is in what's called the Vote B Centre.
This used to be the centre for the developing transportation centre of the US government.
Part of our bid was to rebuild a centre for vote, which we're doing on the up in the top here.
And the rest of this will be again another almost two million square feet of space.
And we're already getting major companies that are leasing long term space, the accelerator space being here as well as.
So the idea is to continue to make the MIT Canberra Square a magnet for people who want to work there,
companies that want to visit academics, they want to do research and government officials so that hotels and thank you for your attention.
Thanks call, so we're now going to switch to a UK perspective with Dr David Temple at Benbow.
He's director of research and innovation services at Cardiff University, and I'm sure very well known to this audience as well.
Thank you. Looks like somebody is doing this remotely, which is great.
OK, thank you. That's great. Thanks, Karen, to hear me.
OK? No, it's usually a good sign.
In contrast to cause talk, which was really interesting, really impressive, I'm going to talk about a very specific project.
So development of the cluster around Cardiff in South Wales and also also stressed this is a work in progress, so we're not there yet.
So I'm going to talk about conversations in car parks, but but no brown envelopes.
I'm going to talk about individual student ships and the way that we've grown activity from from those beginnings.
So for those of you who don't know Cardiff, we are the only Russell Group universities through the most research intensive university in South Wales.
We've got a late portfolio of external research grants and contracts of of just over half a billion sterling.
I won't make the obvious joke about conversion to dollars just for when this is on YouTube.
We don't see a full service university, so science and technology, arts, humanities, social sciences, biomedicine, life sciences.
We've got about thirty two thousand students and we top ten UK in terms of scale of the institution.
Our major partner on this work is IQ, Epilepsy and IQ.
We are a leader in advanced semiconductor products. They Global HQ happens to be in Cardiff less than 10 miles from from our university campus,
and they turn over at around 150 Stirling, 250 million stealing.
We've been working with Nike for twenty five years or so now.
Certainly I've had experience and working closely with them since I first joined
the university from the lab as a research contracts officer over 20 years ago.
We've done lots of individual co-sponsored PhDs for those of you from the UK system, knowledge transfer partnerships or CPTPP,
all the usual kind of standard one on one devices that we have to support collaboration between universities and companies in the UK.
We've also done things like sponsored lecture ships,
and she has that car park story because one of my first interactions with the company was meeting with them to talk about a sponsored chair.
And I turned up in my car separately to the event school event ahead of the then head to the School of Engineering.
And he took me to one side in the car park and basically said, If you screw this up, you're a dead man.
And it's an amazing tale, but that's about trust, and that's about the length of time it takes to build trust between researchers and and companies.
And it's also about the scale of investment. But you need the time investment that you need to build.
Those relationships where organisations are comfortable with each other,
are fully prepared to invest with each other, and that can't be be underestimated.
You probably have ikimi technology in your pocket, actually, if you if you have a smartphone.
So they've got kit in iPhones and Samsung, Huawei and and similar devices and between ourselves and the company.
We we foster this this joint ambition to create Europe's first compact semiconductor cluster around this in South Wales,
and this would become Europe's fifth semiconductor cluster, complementing those that already exist around Dresden, Eindhoven and Grenoble.
So our first step really was to was to form a joint venture.
A first step in really increasing the scale of our interaction was to form a joint venture.
In 2015, we established the Company Semiconductor Centre as a as a joint venture with it,
with a co-investment of something in excess of twenty five million pounds.
The idea behind the JV is that it supplies R&D support to IQ for the university.
It's about a route to commercialisation and impact for relevant technologies
coming out of our School of School of Engineering and Physics and Astronomy.
So for us, it's about bridging that body of death in terms of technology development.
The intention was to create the Typekit facility to demonstrate new technologies based on on compound semiconductors.
And importantly, the centre is an open access facility that's really important for us as an academic institution because our
objectivity is key in terms of our relationship with it with a much wider range of private sector partners.
The. IQ, and that's also important tends to cluster development that I'll come onto.
So one of the challenges that we had was we probably lacked a critical mass in academic capacity to support growth of the cluster.
We established an institute for control semiconductors. So this was an institute which spans multiple academic schools at Cardiff,
and we are moving into a new facility near £80million facility to support that activity in 2021.
Numerous funding sources have come together to support that facility.
So 12 million pounds from West government regionally. So read that recent regional investment, which is all important.
Another 15 million pounds from European regional development funds. So the EEC is also backing us.
And as a UK national level, 17 million pounds from the UK, a research partnership investment fund UK,
all PIFF and all of those elements were critical to making this happen.
We also recognise that we needed we needed more people on the ground and and the Welsh Government,
in conjunction with the European Commission and the Secondary Scheme of Stars of Wales scheme,
has funded a new academic appointment which which was a key appointment, came in from UCLA.
And that appointment has also attracted in the number of early career research fellows.
So individuals who are already well engaged with the industry and that's been important in increasing our capacity.
Success begets success, of course.
So as a result of that, we've been successful in winning a number of major awards to build capacity through training.
So we host the UK's Exercise Centre for Doctor Training and Semiconductors in conjunction with universities of Manchester, Sheffield and also UCL.
And we also attracted a £10million investment in the in the UK's future compound semiconductor manufacturing hub.
Again, things that we wouldn't have secured if it wasn't for the various capital investments that might already come in.
We talked earlier on today, I think it was Sir Mark who identified mapping exercises carried out by UK government in terms of science and innovation
strengths across the UK and importantly for us through two successive science and innovation audits at UK level.
And the South Wales corridor was recognised as a key player and a key location for the UK microelectronics industry.
So we have that UK level strategy and policy, if you like behind our developments.
As a result of that, in part, the government decided to look its on semiconductor applications,
catapult catapults with the cluster and indeed the catapult is now establishing the premises that are referred to here at Imperial Park in Newport
in South Wales and establishing those new capital facilities supported by a $58 million investment from the Cardiff Capital Region City Deal.
And those are important the importance of investment in place once again.
So the UK government's city deals have included a co-investment with 10 local authorities around Cardiff, the Cardiff Capital Region City Deal.
That's a 1.2 billion pound total investment and date selected to to to funnel
some of those funds into into our new capital development at Imperial Park.
So see as connected as as the cluster is termed includes academic institutions critical more than one of us so Cardiff University,
but also colleagues at Swansea University, just down the coast, the Catapult Centre and also a number of businesses.
So a number of major businesses IQ we able to refer to, but also Micro Semi SPSS Technologies,
Newport, we if we have a five and a load of others, but also companies in the supply chain.
So Airbus, GE Healthcare, General Dynamics and a number of other household names too.
We are currently pitching for further investment from UK research and innovation in terms of the strength in places fund process.
So we were one of 24 bids shortlisted with an initial fifty K pump priming grant to develop a further business case for CSR connected.
We look at an overall project activity of around £50million. We have fair and will be submitted not on schedule in the early autumn.
And the joint ambition under that business case is to create 2000 high value jobs in the South Wales region,
which is very much aligned with our institutional KPIs as a university and also with the potential to unlock close to 400 million pounds of further.
Private sector investment,
so it gives you some idea of where we are in terms of in terms of the maturity of our developing cluster and very happy to take questions later.
Thank you. Thanks, David.
So we're going to switch to an industry perspective now, and a final speaker in this session is Wade Brown,
who's from Novartis, where he's executive director and global head of operational alliances.
Thank you. I have to say go without slides,
but I wanted to take a second to thank you HP and the organising committee for having us here today to to talk about this important topic.
All right. My name's Wade Brown, as it was just said, but I am here representing Novartis and more specifically,
the research organisation inside Novartis called Neighbour. As Carlyle said, We are headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and announced that a relocation to Cambridge and two to what really is the centre of the world to us now in Cambridge about 20 years ago.
But share on research operations, primarily with our corporate headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, as well.
The group that I lead is responsible for the negotiation and execution of all of the
academic collaborations that are put in place globally for the research organisation.
So from Discovery right up until the clinical clinical stage, there is those agreements run through through my team and to give everyone some scale.
Last year, we executed almost 800 agreements with about 400 individual universities globally.
So we have done. We are. We're out there and we love working with everyone who's in this room right now, but not surprisingly,
do a lot of work close to home with places like MIT and Harvard, but also here at Oxford Imperial, lots of big partners across the world.
We have been, historically, I would say, brilliantly reacted to the needs of our scientists, which isn't to say as proactive as we should have been.
Our scientists have done a great job of identifying wonderful collaborators around the globe,
and it's fine to the shoulders of my predecessor and my team now to help make sure that these
the identification of great collaborators turns into the realisation of great collaboration.
With that being said, we need to make a pivot as well, and in doing so have worked really,
really hard to identify those institutions, those collaborators,
those groups of institutions where we do want to work and to build longer term durable relationships that extend well
beyond an individual as array that we need to get done this year to make sure that our science gets done this year.
And in doing so, you know, we come today to talk about innovation and what's new.
But here I am to argue that everything that's old is new again and to really think about bringing it back to the relationship.
And for that reason, Neighbour has really started to think about what can we uniquely bring to the relationship with our academic partners?
And we've got great science, we've got great scientists.
We have some money, not as much as we want or you probably want.
But what we do have is some some expertise and some capacity that may not exist elsewhere, particularly in the academic community.
And we're working hard to try and deploy some of this expertise in a way that is really easily accessible to academic partners.
And specifically, we have built on a programme that we refer to as Fast Lab,
which is facilitated access to screening technology to allow for academics to
bring assays that they may have developed themselves to bring them in-house,
to scale them up, to make them high throughput, and to use those assays against our screening desks on our screening capabilities.
And this allows for academic researchers to come and use a capability that probably they would.
They're not going to be able to have in-house and to screen against tens of thousands of publicly available compounds and to take the data home.
And that's it. We don't own anything. It's all for the researchers.
The data is yours. The data is yours to publish. The data is yours to take to Pfizer, which I would recommend against that.
If that's what you wish to do. This is what we've done and we've worked to set this up to for two things.
One is we have the technology, we have some capacity and we think that we're in a great position to share that capacity with people who might not.
And as my general counsel is to say, we have an evil plan.
We'd like to show you that it's easy to work with us and it starts here.
It starts with. Easy to work with us scientifically,
so it's easy to work with us transactionally and cecilie it when you screen our desks with your essay and find something awesome.
The first place you're coming back is to me now to France.
With all due respect to my colleagues at Pfizer, and I really think that it is true this where each of us, my colleagues,
across my life, my colleagues in the audience and academia to really think about what do they have that is unique,
that they are able to be kind and giving away and to bring this to the table because it's on this foundation,
it's on these relationships that we can build the bigger collaborations, the bigger programmes that we're talking about up here.
But without these relationships, without this ease, we don't believe that it moves forward.
So it is really in this relational application that we are really looking to move forward.
And I want to thank everyone for their time today and you move on to the next portion of our.
Thanks, Wade. So we're going to switch now to a bit of a facilitated discussion,
so I'm going to join the speakers and ask some questions and then we'll move over to questions from the audience and
then if anybody else has any contributions that they'd like to make about ways of working in this space as well.
Three quite different perspectives there. It's been very helpful to hear those.
So I have a few questions here that I've been trying to say.
I think maybe I'll start with you, David, if that's OK.
And so thinking about the new model that you had to put in place, why did you feel that you needed a new approach?
What weren't you able to do? What was the barrier? We've heard a lot about barriers here of not being able to move forward.
But why did you need something new? Why wouldn't the existing models sufficient for you?
So I guess the striking characteristic of of the sudden growth in scale of our relationship
with the company at the core of what's what's developing into the cluster is the joint venture,
the joint venture company, and we recognise jointly with the company that we had to do something to kick start things,
to take things to a new level of effectively organic growth, if you like,
through securing any number of external grants for collaboration takes you so far
and and you can kind of grow critical mass at a particular pace doing it that way.
But we recognise if we were really going to make this thing happen on a a reasonable time scale that would
attract an additional industry would would act as a kind of a honeypot facility to induce new investment,
then we have to make investment on that kind of scale.
On a joint venture for us was the natural way of creating a structure where the investment that went in from
each party was secure and that we had ownership and control joint ownership and control over the assets.
OK, thank you. Divisor, if you want to comment on that or would you like to sort of propose another reason for doing something in a slightly
different way that's enabled you to move forward against some of the barriers that can be in this space this year?
I would say that the there's what I mentioned, Walter mentioned as well on this sort of core valley of death,
which is a bit of a cliché anyway, is, you know, how do you fund invention to take it more to a commercial practise?
And so we've for the the engine is an example of that might be setting up a venture fund of its own.
But we've also been in discussions with, you know, is there a role to set up a venture type funds for different research consortia?
And what would those look like and what are the difficulties there?
We're also taking advantage of, again what you mentioned the advanced functional fibres of America Manufacturing Institute.
So we took advantage of the money out of commerce.
For that, we've assembled a consortium of well over 100 companies and others in that and spun it off campus, whether it's his own lab.
And so we're trying to find new models that allow us to bridge across the divide between what comes out of the university, which, by the way, I mean,
our experience in licencing is the large companies rarely licence technology,
intellectual property that comes out of M.I.T. They prefer to have a derisk by smaller companies.
Hence, this programme of trying to link these start-ups with the large corporates in a mutually beneficial way has turned out to be
a good model for driving innovation to commercialisation in a less risky way as compared to what a large company would want.
You know, I think for us, the reality is that 20 years ago, when we came to town,
we were the only one in Cambridge, and I could talk about Cambridge specifically given who's sitting next to me.
That's not the case anymore. And I think that there is there is a big competition for great ideas.
And I think that what we are really looking to do is to make sure that Novartis is known.
Novartis is known as it as a good partner, and Novartis is known not only to our colleagues in the business offices,
but also to expose ourselves to up and coming faculty who might otherwise be thinking about taking a route towards venture or spin out.
We love them to take a staff with us first. I mean, if it's only for a small collaboration to really understand what's working with industry
would look like because it is that kind of gateway drug that we would like to facilitate.
Do you have any comments about how challenging it was to convince people because it is a slightly different model,
was it hard to actually convince your sort of internal stakeholders that you wanted to it, you didn't want to own the IP?
Or was it an easy sell? It really depended on the population that we're talking to.
Our scientists love it because it brings scientists into our facility because not to do the screen.
One of the things that we request is that someone comes on on site to learn how to do the screen with us.
So if it brings new ideas and new talents very close to us and I think scientifically that's rejuvenating,
that's something that our scientists are excited about. It's working with new people and a slightly different way of looking at a problem.
I think that there are a portion of IP practitioners who were less enthusiastic, to be frank, but it was not such a hard sell.
At the end of the day,
I think that it was something that we really saw something that where we could provide with little risk to us and much more upside.
OK, so do you want to add something then?
Yeah. So in our case, we we de-risk the joint venture investment by having discussions with some of our major funders,
and we quickly realised they thought it was a it was a very positive and beneficial thing for us to be doing.
I'm looking that closely in conjunction with industry,
and it's starting to form a clear route to market for things coming coming out of the laboratory.
So that made it more of a palatable sell, I think, within the organisation.
OK. OK. So I think, David, you also alluded to the fact of some sort of serendipitous discussions as well,
and I wondered if you wanted to comment on how much we can design these structures or how much is very bottom up and can be very serendipitous.
Yeah, I mean, I I suppose in my experience, it's often it's often about the people and in terms of taking concepts and R&D ideas to government,
it's increasingly certainly in the UK context about about joining shoulder to shoulder with industry and demonstrating the very,
very strong industry need for the for the technologies that are being designed and developed.
And I guess the serendipitous part for us was we had a very enthusiastic and and and proactive CEO of the company we were working
with who was prepared to kind of fulfil that role and really championed what we were doing to to to national government,
to regional government to to our funders. And and that doesn't always happen.
And I've certainly got experience of consortia in other areas where we've kind of lacked that, you know, we've had industry buy in,
but really not that, but that kind of level of leadership, if you like, which I think is key to unlocking things in in the current investment climate.
I think it's, you know, it's it's also it's all about relationships, but it's a numbers game also.
I think you have to get out and sell yourself to the corporations about what is the
unique capability or the strength that you have in your particular institution.
So our office in particular, we do a lot of events we have, you know, we're redesigning our website.
So we're where we have, you know, E bulletins go out all the time to 20000 executives.
So we're constantly trying to make the case that if you're thinking about innovation, think about MIT.
We're an easy place to reach out to work with and we're happy to to work with you.
It's even in the IRP programme, which we have two hundred and sixty three or so companies in the programme now,
you know, over half of them don't fund research or invest in anything else.
They're they're just technology monitoring. They're looking, they're they're evaluating.
And then if you're wisdom enough, things change. Executives move on, come and go.
One year, it's not invented here. Syndrome next, stop an innovation that goes back.
And so, you know, so you're ageing here,
but you have to be out there to have these relationships and network and clearly you've got a very established programme.
Have you had any what would be the what were the challenges, the key challenges if you had issues, a sort of stakeholder engagement, buy in as well?
Well, we were very fortunate because the IRP programme was founded in 1948,
so that was MIT was evolving into the research universities today after the Second World War in the Cold War funding and so on.
So we became embedded as an organisation in the culture of M.I.T., you know, 70 odd years ago.
That's very different from all of the universities that struggle because you have you different labs.
Centres or departments have their own turf, so it's very it's much harder to get buy in, but in our case,
because we also focus on young faculty, we develop relationships with young faculty when they're young.
So when they do get into positions of being, you know,
a star faculty members and they remember that maybe some of their first contacts with industry came came through our office.
So that's been very helpful. As a player like Stanford, for instance, is a very decentralised.
But they evolved in a similar timeframe at MIT, but they develop a very extensive set of department, lab and centre based organisations.
So as they've tried to do something that spans the university, it's been very difficult.
So I guess we should leave some time for some questions and the sort of comments on this topic from the audience.
So are there any questions for the panel or anybody who would like to make some comments about examples of working in this space,
what they found worked, what hasn't what we can learn from that? OK, so what sorts of questions could it be?
We're just quick question. When you're scientists, the scientists come in to do the assays.
Do you ask them to do the seminar or two to nothing other than learn the technique that we asked them to bring?
And we do some feasibility assessment up front because not everything works, but we ask them to come in.
We ask them to sit with our technologists to try to scale to the assay appropriately and then and then to run the screen inside our labs.
It's the same equipment. It's the same infrastructure that we use for our internal programmes.
This technology that they published on that we'd love it. But now, you know, we can't tell.
OK, now wait. Could I ask you?
You obviously set up a different relationship in Kennedy Square with the innovation you've described and you said,
I think you did something like 600 academic contracts last year.
Are the others that you're doing in a similar open vein or are they a mixture of traditional?
So I mean, they are primarily traditional.
I don't, to be honest with you, are we?
We have we have idle capacity for this type of school and we're trying to use that idle capacity to its maximum.
So programmes like this and right now this has been focussed on our screen capability internally.
Now we're ruminating on the idea of what other capabilities do we have that we could consider deploying in the same way.
But to date, we haven't progressed beyond this.
The screen example that I used? Excellent question.
Just a question about Kendall Square and one and Colin.
Wait, what did you say? Novartis, with the first of those kind of highlighted organisations did not in that space.
How how how did that process work from getting Novartis to now, all those different businesses?
Was there a tipping point and what what role did Novartis play in bringing those other companies that have as well?
I mean, it's not to say that they were not. There was already sizeable biotech.
I mean, Millennium was already there. Biogen was already behind. There is already a pretty good, a good critical mass, I would say.
But my perception and in full transparency, I was one of the first 100 people hired an artist when we came to Cambridge.
There are a bunch of people that came from other locations, but I was one would say that it was more catalytic than anything else.
I think that it just it sped the reaction up. And then and what that really allowed is for other large families to say this.
This would be a good place to go, but you might have already knows exactly right.
I mean, you started catalysing the fact that you were there. Other people looked at it say, Well, maybe we should be there,
that we have a great medical system that might put a lot of the investment in molecular biology.
We had a cancer institute and other. So we had sort of a core of things.
And now, as you know, building on that,
you see a lot of the tech companies coming in because digital health is an issue and data and so on and so forth.
So it it it comes back to what I think we think is that can we build a even more dense ecosystem there?
You know, how do we make it so that people can bump into each other in a coffee shop or whatever and in and exchange ideas in new ways?
And if I could say one kind of from recruiting and talent standpoint,
I think that one of the things that has been now fully embedded and we take advantage of
in our location and in Cambridge is that not only do we have a great magnet for talent,
we are able to address that,
but the lagging partner in so many relationships that there's so many adjacent industries, whether that's in health care or high tech or biotech,
that attracting families to to the Cambridge area now is really relatively easy compared to other places in the world.
We had a company you probably recognise head offices out in Andover,
and they were complaining about how hard it was to recruit staff to go to handover.
So they moved there, their research headquarters to Kendall Square, and now they had no problem hiring young people.
It's unbelievable and always wanted 30 miles outside of Boston Max.
So I mean, just having that dynamic, there is a powerful question you said now that there wasn't really a very
strong ecosystem or interaction between the different elements of the centre.
So what is the advantage of having critical mass? Putting people together.
So what is the what is the advantage of putting people together to assess an area
if it's not a problem of building this into action and cross collaboration?
I think in some sense the same dynamic is why do why two major cities become major cities?
Why did New York emerge as a major hub or San Francisco or Shanghai or you name it?
I mean, it just the the the interaction of people with each other breeds creativity,
breeds contacts, breeds opportunity that they don't exist in one way or another.
I mean, how does it happen? It doesn't organically, so naturally happens.
We need to have a programme of actually making something happen.
I mean, I guess I would argue here is that a lot of what has happened in Cambridge and Boston area has been a confluence of some,
some good decisions and some incredible luck. Yeah, but I don't think that it was it was not.
It was not facilitated. It was some good investment by the state and by the city.
Some great good investment from the city and the corporate buying kind of started.
But it's not as though there was a tsar of Kendall Square that made everything happened.
There's an interesting study that compared the two cities in the United States,
Pittsburgh and Cleveland that both had been affected in the, you know, manufacturing moving out of the cities.
And what was the difference? Why is Pittsburgh now more of a centre of innovation and a hub than Cleveland?
And one of the findings was that in in Pittsburgh, you had collaboration between the political elite.
You had a partnership between Carnegie Mellon and the hospital systems there.
You had investment in creating those those linkages.
And in contrast, in Cleveland, you didn't have that. You had the hospital would fight with the Cleveland Clinic, fought with somebody else.
The the the the politicians were very focussed on the next election and weren't willing to invest.
But yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with Second Praxis and Cambridge, England.
The question for way through the year, you and your team are dealing with universities all over the world.
What differences do you see in working with universities in the US and the UK or in Europe?
I would say currently when there is right right now in the US,
the availability of venture fund money is changing our environment for good and for bad, depending on where you where it is.
I think that I see more and more that there is sometimes even an expectation that if you're a good API,
you're spinning something out and down the road. And to do that, at some point, you need to start edging towards the idea of,
I'm going to spin some technology out and that at least in my world complicates the conversation.
It makes it different, I would say, depending on the university I'm talking with in the U.S., when I call it technology transfer office,
they may or may not be also working in the venture office or in their incubator simultaneously.
And all of those things are coming together at the university.
That's less the case in Europe and the UK right now.
And I think it will. We'll see what happens when inevitably the venture markets consolidate a little bit.
Is there any more questions or any comments on?
I will answer that way. One of have things in the notes that you put up.
We've talked about Deerfield. Yes.
Management as a new model that ties into your wonder what your view of that approach is because we're struggling frankly at MIT,
whether that's an approach we want to follow or not. So I guess I welcome the road to the struggle.
So for those that don't know, Dick Deerfield has made some really big investments at several universities in the United States Harvard,
Brown, University of Illinois, Chicago. I believe in Hopkins.
And I think to their credit and I say this,
they put an enormous amount of funding into some great universities, and here I really want to give credit.
Deerfield looks to have a very long horizon on their investment.
We're talking 10 to 12 years before looking for that return.
As a researcher, Hallelujah, you know, this is the type of horizon that we really need to see,
you know, research really take hold and move towards commercialisation.
That that puts me in a little bit of a competitive disadvantage right now.
I don't have funding levels like that to be able to come forward.
And we right now, you know, internally talk about what does this mean for the whole ecosystem?
Because it's not just for Novartis, it's free, it's for everyone that comes and works it with his partners.
Yeah, I have one question. This is an excellent panel. Thank you very much.
Thank you. What's the top or most challenging factor you anticipate next five 10 years for a successful industry and of partnership?
Do you want to answer that individually? It's sort of what I was going to ask you to do just a little bit, but do you want to?
From your perspective, David? So from an end, from an individual university perspective,
I think the real challenge is keeping the wide breadth of your faculty happy and and and with a feeling of being invested in whilst coming to terms
with the recognition that if you really want to do commercialisation and you want to do university industry interaction on a on a critical mass scale,
there are only a limited number of areas in which you can even invest as an organisation.
And I think that's true of of universities of all sizes, from from small to the very, very large who are sharing the podium with me,
with me today and finding a way of kind of sharing and communicating that message internally.
I think it is a challenge. Speaking of atomic clocks there, it was only once said that, you know, all science is applied.
It's just that the time frames vary. At some point it becomes applied.
I think, you know, for a place like M.I.T., the an ongoing concern is is federal funding of for basic research,
and that's under a lot of congressional pressure.
And even though there is a very much a bipartisan view in Congress of the importance of research, the budgetary caps and so on or complicate that.
So that's driven me to do to try to diversify even more its funding sources, including industry, which continues to grow, as you know, in the field.
So I think we just have to continue to listen to the market and see what where we can work together
and recognise that the time scales and industry looks for return versus an academic environment vary.
And so how do we square that circle? Yeah.
Wait. I think building, building on that, that comment, I think that is really the biggest challenge to me is two to four given projects to
find partners that are bringing complementary skills to to the the relationship.
And I think that we see now we see academics who really hope that they can start doing drug discovery and development.
And there's part of me that says, is that the best use of our of the ecosystems resources?
There are things that we're really good at. There's and and it is not very basic research.
I think there's some of that is much better left it to our dry academic partners to really find the complementarity that make for great relationships.
And then I spoke about this earlier today, too, to find teams and to really make sure that you focus on the durability of the relationship.
I think too often relationships rest with one person, one champion,
and inevitably that champion will disappear, whether it's an academic side from the industrial side.
People move on to new posts, new positions, if they're lucky, then retire.
All of these things will happen and to make sure that we move from scientists to scientist interactions,
but team to team interactions so they can be durable for the long term.
And I think that that's something that's really, really important. So building on that?
Oh, sorry. Just one quick question. Just just to that point, why the numbers that you gave away under agreements,
four hundred institutions that were told you studied it very finely and not
looking for critical mass to have multiple champions in a single institution.
So is that your strategy to support it as fine as you can to get it where you can? Well, I would not say that that is our strategy.
I think that that has been the response to the scientific need in our organisation today.
But I do think that we will make a real science driven organisation.
And one of the things that Novartis has done, to my delight, is to really pull its research organisation away from the commercial organisation
such that we can let science lead and for us to go where the great science is.
And if at any one time that creates a feeling of how we collaborate personally, I'm very supportive of that.
If because of the way that our programmes fall, that narrows down to a few institutions where we are fewer.
Let me say that fewer institutions are partners because that's where the science leads us.
I think that that's the direction that will go. But for neither science first organisation and where good science is, that's where we'll go.
So I'm going to bring this session to a close by asking one final question to each of the of the speakers.
So building on the question about the challenges in this space, what you see as those challenges?
What is the one key thing that you feel this community should be addressing or thinking about to make this easier and more effective in in the future?
The partnering What could we do as a kid? Unity to make this easier or more effective.
David, would you like to keep up? So for me, I think the key thing is, I mean,
there's a there's an awful lot of learning that we've we've we've shared already to the different levels kind of policy strategy, car park meetings.
But you know, it's somewhere we know in that there's there's a kind of there's a toolkit approach,
I think, which is missing and we leave after three days with those kinds of basics codified anywhere.
And I just wonder if there's if there's an opportunity that we can create over this over this three day period to come back to that,
to invest some resources in putting this together for the community.
OK, thank you. Carl, what do you have? Well, I would say to build upon what I was proud to be part of, which is the internationalisation of you, ADP.
I mean, you listen to companies like Novartis. They have global strategies for how they access knowledge and how they invest and universities.
We don't we sort of sit in our silos.
And yet I keep wondering whether there are opportunities for us to partner amongst each other on major programmes with
this complementarity of faculty or start-up assets that we could then have a stronger case to the large corporates.
I mean, we're competing with, you know, universities across the globe.
The state schools in the United States are getting very good. They're also looking for industry support internationally.
I mean, Zurich, Tsinghua, China, Neo, Kyoto, Japan, you name it.
So the competition for us is global. And I think the more we can share best practise and develop the network internationally, the stronger will be.
OK, wait. I mean, I I really would say we need to keep doing what we're doing here.
I think I go out of my way to get to these meetings because they're relational because we're learning from each other.
All right now, because I'm here to get a contract through. And I think that that's really important.
And I think that I have a colleague from another large pharmaceutical organisation who I met through this organisation
called me the other day because he needed some help to get something through a corner of Novartis I did not know existed.
We got it through this morning,
and I think that it's these relationships that allow us to build from a position of commonality instead of I'm on the pharma side.
You're on the academic side, we must be far apart.
Now we're in the same room together already, and I think that that's what we need to build on and have the same goals.
Yes. Thank you. So with that, we'll wrap up this session and please join me in thanking all the speakers for their contributions.
And thank you for.