A former panellist on television’s Dragons’ Den is to re-educate academics to think more commercially, in the latest government-backed attempt to make UK universities more entrepreneurial.
Doug Richard, a serial entrepreneur, is running a series of one-day workshops to challenge professors and researchers to open their minds to the ways of making money from their ideas.
The idea is not just to push university spin-outs but to open academics to the possibilities of licensing their discoveries to large companies, collaborating with the business community, or framing research so that it has a practical use.
“What I’d like to see is a substantial change in these academics’ behaviour,” he said. “In the long term, I hope it would produce an uptick in start-ups but also increase the amount of funding to universities from new sources.”
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