WHO? Dr Diarmuid O'Brien, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Innovation and current CEO of the University's innovation arm, Cambridge Enterprise.
WHAT? Responsible for how Cambridge creates impact from its research through its innovation partnerships and world-leading innovation ecosystem.
WHY? "So that Cambridge research translates into positive social and economic change. My job is to make sure that we are always doing that to the very best of our abilities, by asking ourselves some tough questions."
When did you first become interested in the idea of translating research into something that will make a real difference to the world? Probably not until I started my PhD. Until then, science had simply been an exciting set of discoveries, interesting in their own right.
My PhD was in organic electronics and early on I was reading about how the field was going to revolutionise the electronics industry. I suddenly realised that all this stuff I was having fun with in a lab may actually result in something that transforms the way we live our lives.
After my PhD I did a postdoc at Princeton, where we were patenting our research on small molecule display technologies. I began to see how a technology can quickly go from the lab to a license to a company.
When I talk to researchers and they say 'but I’m just interested in the science', I was that person for a long time. I didn’t necessarily see the relevance or the importance of the pathway for the science to innovation. I think that makes me empathetic to that kind of mindset.
Did you think you were on a conventional academic career path? I went from being a postdoc at Princeton to a lectureship at Trinity College Dublin. But I only lasted a year before joining a university spinout. Clearly, my experience at Princeton had started to colour where I wanted to spend my time.
Over the following seven or eight years, I worked in three different university spinouts, looking at how to make products, how to bring them to market, how to talk to customers, how to manage supply chains. Suddenly, I found myself energised by a whole new set of topics that hadn’t previously been on my radar.
What's interesting is that I went through my whole undergraduate degree without having had any conversations about how research can have societal impact. Now when I talk to students in Cambridge, they are exposed to enterprise training and entrepreneurship and they know all about IP, venture capital, angel investment. The change that has taken place over the last 20 or 30 years is extraordinary - and welcome.
Was there someone who inspired you in the early part of your career? The key person for me was Steve Forrest, a professor at Princeton. Everyone else defined themselves as a scientist or a business person or an entrepreneur, but Steve was all of those things. He could publish five or six Science and Nature papers a year, start a company, raise venture capital and run a department, all at the same time.
The really top people often excel both academically and entrepreneurially. Researchers who think differently about things and are really disruptive in their science and the kind of breakthroughs they can achieve, definitely have an entrepreneurial mindset.
What characteristics make the biggest difference for people driving successful innovation? I look at this through a rather simplistic lens. There are people who say 'why?' and people who say 'why not?'. The 'why not?' people are the ones to back. Their attitude is, ‘I get it’s hard and and I get it’s disruptive but why can’t we do this exactly?’ I really embrace that as a philosophy.
As Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Innovation you will also be championing the University's collaborations with industry partners. What are the mindsets needed for successful partnerships? The biggest challenge with that kind of enterprise partnership is to align projects so that you are creating a win-win opportunity.
Too often they start on an uneven footing. Either the academic is looking for a particular piece of research to be funded by the industry partner or the company is coming at it with a very fixed agenda. What really works is if you can build a collaboration where there’s a listening capability as well as a speaking capability.
You need to hear what everyone wants to get out of it and then design a programme that meets everybody’s needs. That’s why having something like a strategic partnership office is so important. People who sit in on those meetings on a regular basis, can spot the tell-tale signs of miscommunication and say: 'You are both hearing what you want to hear but we need to go a step further'. By adding value to those conversations you can scale up the ambition of what can be achieved.
What are you most proud of in your career? I love getting things started. That’s what’s energises me: seeing an opportunity and finding a way to deliver something. Before Cambridge there were two highlights. One is a partnership I set up between Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin to create a venture fund called University Bridge Fund.
Neither of those universities could have done it by themselves. We needed the collaboration and scale that you could only get through partnership.
The other highlight was setting up what’s now called Trinity East, a new campus for Trinity College Dublin - and imagining what it could unlock not just for Trinity but for Dublin as a city.
The first couple of buildings are now open and there's a real sense of momentum behind it. We won’t know its full impact for another 20 or 30 years but to be the original parent of that idea and to deliver the first funding to support the buildings on that campus was a wonderful project to be involved in.
And what about at Cambridge Enterprise? When I arrived the goal was to evolve it from being focused on transactions such as patenting or licensing to being more of an enabler, by understanding how we can better leverage the ecosystem here and how we better support translational funding and company creation.
We've been adding richness to that enterprise story by setting up a number of new initiatives that I'm really excited about such as Founders at University of Cambridge and the Technology Investment Fund.
But I guess the big thing that I've really loved being involved with is Innovate Cambridge. It is a very collaborative initiative between the University, Cambridge Enterprise and Cambridge Innovation Capital - and a lot of other organisations - to define and deliver our ambitions for the Cambridge ecosystem.
When you look around the world you see a hundred different cities developing their innovation districts, coming up with new ways to organise themselves and making bold declarations about what they aspire to be into the future.
Cambridge - in spite of all its strengths - can't afford to rest on its laurels. To get to the next level, we need a forward looking story that is ambitious, engaging and exciting.
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Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge.
Image: courtesy of the University of Cambridge.
