NCET2 builds on the overlap

Synergy.

Alongside words like ‘hashtag’, ‘engagement’, and ‘entrepreneurialism’, synergy has become one of the most overused and cliché buzzwords this side of the millennium – with a special mention going to ‘innovation’, admittedly one of GUV’s most overused words. You would think that given the subject of innovation and the amount of people engaged in innovation, it would be possible to innovate a more diverse selection of words to describe it.

Yet at its core meaning, synergy is “the interaction of elements that when combined produce a total effect that is greater than the sum of the individual elements”, or as the ancient Greeks put it, simply “working together”.

Therefore, it is the most apt word to describe the second day of this year’s National Council of Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer (NCET2) annual event in Washington DC. Technically two events, NCET2 hosted both the Global 1000 Meet Partner Deal event and the eighth annual University Startups event at the Walter E. Washington Convention Centre, with both events sharing one day at the same time.

It was on this overlapping Thursday that the event really came to life. A mixture of Global 1000 corporates, universities, accelerators, state representatives, venture capitalists and angel investors were all combined within one hall, leading to a great networking buzz throughout the day.

Amongst the hubbub of deals being made and contacts being exchanged, the event also hosted an array of discussions across the innovation pipeline.

A large chunk of the presentations were corporates introducing themselves to the university crowd, and universities having the chance to showcase some of their more exciting technologies and spin-outs in return. The subject of university funds came up, and while a straw poll of attendees suggested that many universities have a proof-of-concept fund or similar, few in the US are yet to make the jump to a full university venturing fund.

Universities are still considering putting together their own investment fund, such as Cambridge University’s £50m Cambridge Innovation Capital evergreen fund. However, there was some pushback from some universities on the idea of university venture capital as a tool to support university innovation, with reasons such as bureaucracy, the fund being spread too thin, and whether university fund managers are the most effective backers for new companies.

One of the more intriguing discussions was to see how universities are harnessing the power of crowdfunding. Justin Porter, senior associate at the University of Minnesota’s venture centre who led a panel on crowdfunding, said that although equity crowdfunding was yet to take hold, rewards-based programmes such as Kickstarter were having a positive impact on university startups.

Stating that crowdfunding as it stands was “not so much about money, but about exposure”, Justin added crowdfunding had allowed Minnesota to use “the university’s megaphone” to attract attention to its startups. By way of evidence, Ben Edwards, co-founder of Minnesota home management technology startup SmartThings, joined the panel. Ben said that crowdfunding had not only allowed them to attract funding at an early stage (the company attracted $1.2m through Kickstarter) and build an international client base, but that the process was also about validation of their ideas for their company.

However, there are yet some hurdles ahead for companies eager to get in on the crowdfunding action. Frank Barros, Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program analyst at the US Department of Homeland Security, said “the potential for fraud in crowdfunding could be substantial”, which has led to a lengthy implementation of rules for equity crowdfunding. Kim Peyser of the US Small Business Administration highlighted that it will be at least six months before such rules were in place in the US.

She added that although “crowdfunding is going to be major news for small to medium enterprises”, the “financial burden is still quite high for some”. This is due to sizeable fees which will be needed up front in order to run a crowdfunding campaign in order to tackle potential abuses of crowdfunding (for example, money laundering). However, the fees will still leave some smaller startups effectively priced out from equity crowdfunding at the very early stages.

Overall, the synergy felt at the event was the crux of my own keynote, where I argued that further collaboration between smaller universities was necessary to compete with their better established peers on tech transfer. Both the UK-based incubator SETsquared, a combination of five universities which has managed to attract over £1bn in external funding for its 1,000 incubated firms within 11 years, and the société d’acceleration du transfert de technologies (SATTs) in France, which have combined all tech transfer units into 14 regional offices, were fielded as examples of smaller institutions finding synergy and delivering stronger outputs as a result.

For readers looking for further examples of synergy between the different hemispheres of invention, the Global Corporate Venturing Symposium, now in its fourth year, is nearly upon us. Taking place in London on the 20 – 21^st May, the event looks to bring together vested interests from all along the innovation pipeline, and mirror the work of Tony Stanco and his team at NCET2. While tickets are going fast, some spots are still available. The agenda can be found here.