Supporting European Researchers to Create Innovation-Driven Enterprises using Disciplined Entrepreneurship

I’ve been a huge fan of Bill Aulet’s Disciplined Entrepreneurship since I was first introduced to his process by Cathy Pucher, Executive Director of the Zahn Innovation Center at San Diego State University nearly five years ago now. I subsequently adopted it as the base framework for our postgraduate entrepreneurship education programs in TechInnovation and AgInnovation at the National University of Ireland Galway, in a small but fast-growing city called Galway on the Wild Atlantic Way of Western Ireland. I was also very interested in seeing how the process could be used to teach existing researchers and innovators, either in academia or industry, how to create startups, and hence the STARTED Project was born. You see, I had had my own fair share of failed research commercialization attempts…

When I was finishing my Ph.D. studies, I tried to commercialize my research as software that implemented my electronic component design algorithms. I didn’t really know where to start to be honest, as I’d only taken one mandatory business module in university that had introduced management, finance, and industrial relations. So I decided to make a flyer that could be used to help sell the software (maybe!), given that I liked working on how things looked visually. I added some screenshots, with some details about the platform, the functionality, and the component design steps involved. When I had developed the software further, I thought “that flyer doesn’t look good enough, let me try again…”, and so I decided to make a second flyer. This time I included a logo and a bulleted list of features. But as far as commercialization went, ultimately, I failed! What was I doing wrong?

As I later learned from Bill Aulet’s excellent adventure (the Entrepreneurship Development Program at MIT), I should have talked about the benefits for people using the software, not the features of the software. Nowhere on my flyer did I say who the software was for, or why it was better than what was out there already.

It was too technical, but worse than that, I didn’t even get to show the flyer to [m]any customers to find out what they thought. The idea of leaving my desk in the lab and going out (or even picking up the phone!) to talk to human customers was much too daunting a prospect for me at that time.

And that’s just my own personal story… Let’s scale this up!

There are nearly 2 million researchers in the EU, according to Eurostat. Almost half of the researchers in the EU work in business enterprises (much higher than I would have expected), with under 40% in higher education and over 10% in government. How many of those have absolutely no idea about how to create a startup or new product line?

As John Power, CEO of successful Irish Medtech company Aerogen once told me about some postgraduate biomedical student pitches he had attended, “It was interesting that the projects presented were technically and clinically excellent, however, the business / financial models were unfortunately all over the place. This reconfirmed my view that all the science and engineering disciplines need a module on entrepreneurship and business modeling.”

It seemed obvious to me that we needed a structured process of intra-/entrepreneurship for researchers and innovators: to get more research innovations off the shelf and into spinouts, subsidiaries, and startups. (I’d also seen many examples of commercializable inventions sitting on the shelf during my time as a university academic.)

We created a consortium to run an ERASMUS+ Knowledge Alliance project called “STARTED” (STArtup skills for Researchers and innovaTors in Entrepreneurship Development), funded with support from the European Commission, that seeks to address this question at a European scale. We began with the targeted regional development of entrepreneurial researchers through local workshops, and the project is culminating in the creation of an online European Research-to-Startup Center (ERSC) for teaching entrepreneurship to researchers all over Europe. In choosing the regions, we looked into levels of R&D (as a percentage of GDP) and levels of employment (for ages 15-64) in all of the (then) EU-28 NUTS 2 regions. We found six areas with relatively high unemployment (< 60% employment in the 15-64 age range), but also relatively high levels of R&D (> 1.5% of GDP), and chose those as our initial target regions: The “Border, Midland and Western” region of Ireland, Brussels and Liège in Belgium, Lazio in Italy, Languedoc-Roussillon in France, and Cataluña.

The Disciplined Entrepreneurship (DE) methodology has formed the backbone of the entrepreneurial mindset development activity as the consortium has developed and refined educational components for the ERSC. It is an accessible framework that offers clarity and structure to new venture creation, an activity that often lies outside of a researcher’s core skill set, empowering them to validate their research for the real world.

As part of the STARTED Project, Roma Tre University launched ‘Dock3 Startup Lab’ – an entrepreneurship program open to hundreds of researchers from 16 doctoral schools and 5 Ph.D. programs, as well as to students from the regions’ HEIs (Higher Education Institutions) and wider research ecosystem. The Startup Lab utilizes DE as a core methodology for participants for the creation of new ventures and the development of an entrepreneurial mindset.

In addition to providing a core methodology to workshops, DE has been adapted into an e-learning resource by the consortium, specifically designed with researchers in mind, called  ‘Validate Your Idea’. This resource has been presented and shared at workshops so that the participants can learn how to validate the commercial potential of their research projects in their own time.

Additional public-facing resources include a database created in partnership with Crunchbase to help researchers discover potential market leaders, collaborators, or competition in their new venture journey, and a technology transfer report for research centers to help them connect their research and commercialization activities.

As the STARTED Project nears completion at the end of 2020, the consortium reflects on the experience; what went well and what didn’t go as expected. The project has enabled the consortium to analyze, define, and test the components of a European-scale entrepreneurship resource for the research community. The core competencies of the ERSC have been defined by the consortium to ensure it will be a high performing and self-sustaining entity that can execute on the mission – to support researchers in creating innovation-driven enterprises. The next step is to secure funding to realize the vision of the ERSC that meets the needs of the European research community.

Some learnings from the STARTED Project are as follows:

• The role of mentors in the development of entrepreneurial researchers is as important as with any other innovator in creating a new technology venture. Aligning the mentors to entrepreneurial researchers is a challenging but critical piece of the puzzle.
• New venture creation is still viewed as a risky endeavor by a great deal of researchers when compared to building a career in academia or industry. The Disciplined Entrepreneurship methodology goes a long way to demystifying entrepreneurship for the research community.
• Lack of customer centricity at an organizational level in research centers hinders the traction of commercialization efforts. Adopting DE and human-centered design methodologies can help research centers understand more about who their customers are, what are their customers’ needs, and how they can meet them.
• Online and blended learning isn’t just a matter of publishing content to an online platform. It requires the skills of learning technologists and pedagogy experts as well as considering aspects such as gamification metrics and user experience (UX). The large surge in online learning in recent times emphasizes the importance of these considerations in order to maintain meaningful engagement.

With sincere thanks to Gabriel Mullarkey, STARTED Project leader, for all of his input to this article.