PraxisUnico 2014 event and awards success

This year’s PraxisUnico conference – the biggest one yet with 373 delegates attending the Cardiff , Wales, venue – had as a main theme the collaboration and the establishing of ecosystems to deliver excellence in practice.
Chris McGuigan, professor of medicinal chemistry at Cardiff University, noted in his talk that Wales had been playing catch-up with the rest of the UK in terms of building an ecosystem, but that the country has mow reached a stage where “there has never been a better time to do life sciences in Wales”.
Indeed, he explained how instrumental the Welsh government was in building that ecosystem, following business minister Edwina Hart’s appointment. Some of life sciences was a long game, however, with McGuigan noting that drug discovery and development – his field of expertise – has been becoming increasingly more expensive. Some drugs, he illustrated, are more costly per ounce than gold because research and development is such a complicated and long process.
McGuigan helped set up and is chairing both the National Research Network in Life Sciences, the Life Sciences Hub, which is to open its location in Cardiff Bay next month. He also helped create and the £100m ($170m) Arthurian Life Sciences Fund, half of which was funded by the Welsh government. The aim of all of these is to retain the sector in Wales, and not lose it to other countries when companies go looking for investors.
The National Research Network has so far funded 26 PhDs, all match-funded by private industry and angel investors. The hub, meanwhile, will function solely as a business centre and not an incubator. At some 12,000 square feet and memberships being already discussed with companies, such as software provider Microsoft.
The importance of academia, the private sector and the government collaborating was underlined by Ken Skates, Wales’s deputy minister for skills and technology, who made clear that the country’s ambition must be to compete with the best in the world. Agnès Estibals, senior economic advisor at the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, also pointed out that the UK is currently facing a lack of talent and public investment – 1.8% of its gross domestic product is invested in academic research, compared to 2.9% for most other first world countries. Neither of these is an easy problem to solve, they said.
However, public investment is occurring. In fact, a panel discussing impact noted that the UK research councils invest £3bn a year, and work together closely. The panel also expanded on the idea of collaboration, stating that it needs to happen in between university departments, universities and on an international level. The European Union’s initiative, Triple Helix, is trying to support this. Both Richard Clay, senior lecturer of history of art and co-director of the Digital Humanities Hub at Birmingham University, and Iain Woodhouse, professor of applied earth observation at Edinburgh University, explained how trust is key to this endeavour.
Luke Georghiou, vice-president of research and enterprise at Manchester University, underlined that “the ability to have impact is cumulative”, a sentiment echoed by Clay who explained that “some of what we are trying to capture is incredibly hard to put into metrics, but metrics are important too”. The idea that spin-outs are never created for money finds agreement from the entire panel, although when challenged by Woodhouse it becomes evident that there has not been any spin-out that became a non-profit.
The theme of collaboration continued through the panel on technology transfer in other countries. Sara Matt-Leubner, from Innsbruck University tech transfer office Transidee, looked at why small and medium-sized enterprises tend not to work with universities. To combat this issue, Transidee created a competency database, publicly searchable, which lets companies find university staff with specific skills that are explained in English. Based on this push for collaboration with industry and the public, Transidee has digitalised all local newspapers from 1947 to 2010, and is now operating a translation service that is run similar to an agency.
Kerry Faul, head of South Africa’s National Intellectual Property Management Office, meanwhile elaborated on a slightly different approach. As the country is so far behind on other nations, its government took the more radical approach of legally mandating tech transfer offices at all universities. All research and development at South African universities must now be declared to the respective tech transfer office within 90 days. The scheme has created 48 full-time positions so far, with the government paying staff for the first three years and the universities paying for at least two more.
Ireland took yet another approach. Tom Flanagan, from the Dublin Institute of Technology, explained how the country decided to create seven consortia of tech transfer offices in order to increase collaboration among them.
Japan on the other hand created an entirely new set of problems for Takafumi Yamamoto, CEO and president of Tokyo University’s tech transfer office Todai TLO, when it invested $500m in the university’s research. The sum may sound impressive, but as Yamamoto repeatedly stated: it is too much money at once for a single university to handle.
William Cullerne Bown, chairman and founder of Research Fortnight and Research Europe, in his talk presented the Open Academic Environment. The platform, which appears to be the logical – and long overdue – next step of virtual learning software such as Blackboard and Moodle, has been developed by universities for universities. Current platforms are didactic, and this environment aims to change that by being a networking tool, an intra and extranet, and let researchers collaborate and peer review – all while being scalable to millions of users.
Although all these efforts for collaboration may sound perfectly reasonable to Europeans, Richard Clay pointed out that this is cultural. Indeed, on a recent trip to Chicago University, he was astonished to find that it had not occurred to American institutions to collaborate with each other.
The most memorable comment, however, was not about the importance of collaboration or establishing ecosystem, but about higher education in general. Iain Woodhouse left the audience with food for thought when he countered the often-heard argument by industry that universities need to make students more employable: if universities are pushed to make their students more employable, then they are also creating students that will not be employers.
PraxisUnico’s Impact Awards
Award winners included a solution to the problem of vision-limiting smoke in operating theatres during laparoscopic surgery, an international collaboration between the University of Wolverhampton and the University of Maiduguri in Northern Nigeria working together to increase the numbers of high growth companies, and a digital analytics technology company.
Sue O’Hare, chairman of PraxisUnico, said: “We have had a diverse range of strong entries to the PraxisUnico Impact awards in 2014.  Since establishing the awards in 2009 we have received over 500 entries – these are excellent examples of how Universities are demonstrating the impact of their research for the wider benefit of UK PLC.
Dominic Griffiths, managing director of Asalus Medical Instruments, which won the top Business Impact Aspiring Award for its Ultravision product after spinning out from Cardiff University, said: “Our story has been an excellent example of best practice collaborative IP [intellectual property] commercialisation.
“The university instantly recognised the potential value of Ultravision, filed IP and provided translational funding to create prototypes.
“The commercialisation team then secured funding from Fusion IP to create a spinout company. Four years later we have a launched product and are attracting distribution partners worldwide.”
Ultravision beat other finallists Ketso from UMI³/UMIP, University of Manchester, STAR from The University of Edinburgh and Seralite from University of Birmingham.
For the Collaborative Impact Award, the University of Wolverhampton’s knowledge transfer partnership in Nigeria won, with a collaborative research training partnership with drugs company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and University of Strathclyde and a local business support delivering regional business impact from University of Wolverhampton as finalists.
Queen Mary University London won the Business Impact Achieved Award for its Actual Experience spin-out.
Adam Daykin, head of technology transfer at Queen Mary Innovation (QMI), said: “Since 2009, [Actual Experience] has managed a period of sustained growth, picking up a number of large global clients. Having recently listed, we see an excellent future and QMI is very proud to have helped the company to where it is today.”
Actual Experience fought off other finallists Oxford Photovoltaics from Isis Innovation at the University of Oxford and Smarter Grid Solutions from University of Strathclyde.