Asking your university or a sympathetic professor to invest in a start-up has paid off handsomely for several PhD students-turned-tech moguls – most famously, Google’s billionaire founders.
But a British investment company is hoping its new “venture science doctorate”, in which PhD students set up spin-outs based on their research while completing their studies, will drastically improve the fortunes of graduate researchers, who can often struggle to gain funding for their big ideas.
Launched in 2016 by technology translation experts from Imperial College London, DSV has helped to create more than 40 science start-ups with a combined valuation of more than £300 million. It has now moved into the doctoral education sphere, with its new start-up doctorate attracting more than 400 applications when it was launched last year. UK Research and Innovation, Germany’s Helmholtz Association and Schmidt Futures, the foundation set up by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy, are among its early backers.
“Each candidate first conducts an interdisciplinary, immersive, industrial bottleneck analysis on a societal outcome, in order to identify high-impact experiments and join like-minded labs. We can share decision-making power this way, for more inclusive invention,” said Thane Campbell, dean of education at DSV.
