Unlocking tech potential won’t be painless — but it must be public
The government’s acceptance of a university spinout support reform is a significant step, but it’s just the first of many
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Narrated by Nathan Benaich
Before I joined the venture capital industry in 2013, I’d planned to train as a physician-scientist, with a focus on translational medicine. During the undergraduate summers that I spent at MIT, I saw the power of the Boston biotech ecosystem. This engine translated research breakthroughs from the lab into spinouts that commercialized transformational products at a dizzying pace.
When I moved to the UK in 2010 to pursue my PhD at Cambridge, I saw the same world-class science produced by highly gifted and motivated researchers. But almost no one I met had commercialized their research. Few even tried, despite the growing tech ecosystem an hour down the road in London.
Potential breakthroughs in materials science, drug discovery, and artificial intelligence remained locked in the vaults