They underlined their point by exemplifying how innovation in science and engineering during the 20th century had immeasurable impact on social conditions – from the invention of the airplane to the sequencing of the humane genome. Just like then, the world is facing existential challenges, that we lack any solutions for. Whether it’s climate change, biodiversity crisis or threats to our democracies we need monumental breakthroughs at the intersection of science and technology. Much research already goes into that. There’s just one problem: The vast majority of scientific inventions never leave university labs. Europe leads the way in producing highly cited research publications in deep tech science. Yet very few scientific breakthroughs begin the journey to market and international scale.
It takes a village to turn scientific breakthroughs into real world solutions
We see a huge divide between the work in science and then reaching the actual impact. The article by Murray, Kearney and Nordan points out that this coincides with a gap between philanthropic funding for university research and venture capital funding for commercialisation. The potential to close this dual gap calls for strong ecosystems that can work together and create the right steppingstones for scientific entrepreneurs. As Jes Broeng, Director of DTU Entrepreneurship and Board Member at PSV Foundry explains: “Even though universities create knowledge, only a third of the ideas for companies and solutions are based on patents originating from the universities. The rest stems from collaboration with businesses and the surrounding society. We know this both from research and our experiences with Open Entrepreneurship”
Ecosystem orchestration
Exactly because of collaboration between stakeholders the innovation ecosystem at DTU – The Technical University of Denmark is showing positive results of turning inventions into impact. According to a new article in the Havard Business Review DTU commercialized 81 inventions, launched 74 new startups launched, and facilitated 1,173 research collaborations with outside companies alone in 2021. That puts DTU in a league with high-esteemed universities like New York University.
The Havard Business Review article calls out the orchestration of the DTU ecosystem as an example for others to model in order to become a prime innovator in society, because it gives the ecosystem the ability to intervene and offer support at each stage of the journey from lab to commercialisation.
As a venture house PSV has played a part in this ecosystem for two decades, since our evergreen pillar, PSV Foundry, were spun out of the university in the early 00s and continues to be an associated company of the university till this day. Being embedded directly into the innovation ecosystem at DTU, gives us unprecedented access to scientific inventions, and puts us in a position to actively invest in bridging the gap between lab and market.
Making a case for impact potential from lab to market
We believe the raging climate crisis is making it urgent to develop initiatives in climate tech, that can target the dual gap described by Murray, Kearney and Nordan. Across technical universities, scientific teams are daily inventing and refining technologies that could have a significant impact on climate transformation targets.
As investors rooted at DTU, we have the possibility to take a role in bridging the gap between philanthropic funding for research and venture funding for commercialisation. Thus, leveraging the orchestration and strong collaboration in the DTU innovation ecosystem, we launched DTU Earthbound together with DTU Skylab, DTU Entrepreneurship, and DTU Science Park. A climate tech catalyst, designed to nudge, screen, and nurture climate relevant deep tech science across the academic ecosystem and hatch early-stage startups. We believe this initiative is necessary to motivate more scientific talents to go for an entrepreneurial career and mature their startups for the venture journey, where our own fund PSV DeepTech and other VCs can support them. To this the Earthbound team has developed a three-pronged model to unleash the potential of climate tech:
1) Mobilise scientists, students and entrepreneurs for the planet
Earthbound seeks to make the sustainable transition of societies a higher priority in academic research and especially nudge scientists to take their inventions beyond the academic career path, where they often end up in research papers rather than as startups.
2) Mature deep tech science for the startup journey
Earthbound developed a framework to screen for both business and impact potential within climate inventions. Based on their assessment they select deep tech inventions with climate relevance and offer the scientists support for commercialisation, funding and tracking impact.
3) Engage proven entrepreneurs
To assemble a team fit for spinning out science, Earthbound offers fellowships for proven entrepreneurs and match them with a scientist to lead the business maturing of his/her deep tech invention. The fellowships are combined with grants covering costs for up to a year. We hope initiatives like Earthbound and the model the team have built can work as an inspiration for more initiatives to follow. Denmark, the Nordics and Europe for that matter need to step up the collaboration between research environments and investors if we want ‘our’ inventions to define the future. Just look at Stanford’s role in Silicon Valley and how the most iconic VCs are flocking around the university to catch the next big thing. At other universities with iconic innovation ecosystems like MIT or TUM in Europe, they have also created strong ties with investors and embedded them into the university, like The Engine Ventures and UVC Partners. In comparison to these top-tier innovation ecosystems we still have a long way to go Denmark. PSV hopes to nurture the development and contribute to the initiatives that will bring Denmark into a new league. We encourage anyone who has experiences with or ideas for bridging science and venture, we welcome you to reach out.
