Venture science doctorate reorientates PhDs towards start-ups

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, Deep Science Ventures 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.

Those selected will work with supervisors from 30 leading universities on PhD projects related to four key global challenges – healthcare, climate, environmental restoration and computation – while also linking with experts in industries where their research might be applied and with members of DSV’s investment team.

“There is a huge unmet need for this kind of doctoral support,” explained Dr Campbell. “Few professors will be experts on fundamental science, the mechanisms for translating science into practice, including funding, and have the required contacts in industry, but our model can change supervisory structures for PhD students to access of all these things.”

In the first year of their venture science doctorates, students will be trained in 10 areas related to starting a company, including leadership, storytelling and the economics of relevant industries, continued Dr Campbell, who said that, “without an emphasis on these skills, less than 0.5 per cent of PhDs spin out [into a company]”.

“Every one of our doctoral students will have a DSV mentor who will help them systematically explore their sector, with our North Star being improving global outcomes, rather than academia’s traditional focus on publication,” said Dr Campbell, whose second round of PhD recruitment runs until March.

With the number of new PhD graduates far outstripping the number of available posts in academia, the venture science doctorate was a valuable addition to the doctoral education landscape, he continued.

“A recent Royal Society report found that 80 per cent of PhD graduates do not get a job in science in any form, so this is strategically positioning individuals to create dream jobs in science and for those around them,” said Dr Campbell, who said DSV aimed to train about 1,000 students by 2033 – of which at least half will be women and half from diverse backgrounds – with the aim of having at least 80 per cent of them create a start-up, vastly higher than the 4 per cent to 8 per cent of PhD graduates, depending on sector, who currently do so.

“The science entrepreneurship movement is producing a human-centric field where diversity of thought is celebrated and one founder can launch multiple moonshot ventures to tackle urgent challenges, such as climate change. The UK has a pretty unique opportunity to lead on venture science,” said Dr Campbell.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com