Commercialisation of Research

Interview with Assoc. Professor Geoff Willmott By Alex Chapple

Photo by Michael Longmire on Unsplash

For many young students, commercialisation of research, and industrial research is not something we come across very often. And yet, this field of research is incredibly important

and brings about a huge amount of innovation and entrepreneurship. If you haven’t been exposed to industrial research much, it can be difficult to see how it works, who funds it, and how to get involved. The following is a conversation I had with Associate Professor Geoff Willmott from the University of Auckland. Geoff is a Principle Investigator, as well as the Deputy Director (Commercialization and Industry Engagement) at the MacDiarmid Institute, and has a joint appointment with the Department of Physics and the School of Chemical Sciences. We talked about how industrial research works, and how you can get involved as well.

How does industry research work? And how's it different to research that is funded, for example, through the Marsden fund?

The industry refers to companies that are making things, selling things, producing items, or selling services. In the course of doing that, they come across challenges or opportunities in their business that require research to figure out how to address them.

So Apple wants to create an iPhone, everyone wants to buy an iPhone, that's going to make them and the shareholders a lot of money. But in order to do that, they need to get some research done to figure out how to make a good phone. So that's kind of how industry research works, it creates value in companies. In a very important way, it's not different from any other research. So if you're a scientist working on an industrial project, you will quite often have a very similar process to what you would have if it were a more fundamental project. You have a research question that you're trying to find something out about. History is littered with these discoveries, where fundamental advances come as a result of industrial problems.

A really good example would be one of the recent Nobel Prizes awarded for the blue LED. It was a fundamental material science problem of how do you get a blue LED material? In doing so it meant you could have a white light LED, so it's an extremely valuable problem. So in general there can be a bit of an arbitrary line between industrial research and fundamental research.

Now, having said that, there's obviously some kind of difference because otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it. So in terms of funding, a company can directly fund research themselves. So they might pay say, myself or the university, to carry out research that's of interest to them. But there's also quite a large amount of government funding and quite a large number of schemes that support industrial research. So the companies are not really paying for it. Callaghan innovation is one of the agencies in New Zealand and they can fund PhD projects. So the money will come from the government and it's seen as a public good that supports the company, but it's also a public good in the sense that it supports the broader economy as well.

Whereas when you apply for the Marsden fund, people will not judge you on how applicable your science is, it's all about is this a world leading, game changing, academic idea? In industrial funding applications, it's about what is it gonna do, who are you working with, and who's interested? I should also mention that lots of, and some of the best innovative companies employ their own R&D (research and development) staff. So many people with undergraduate/postgraduate science degrees can go on to become researchers at companies that conduct internal research.

So if a business has a problem, and it requires research to solve the problem, are the research problems more physics/chemistry based problems rather than an engineering problem?

Often these lines we draw between departments are pretty arbitrary. Engineering schools, and the profession of engineering may be more set up to do directly applicable things.

Perhaps the chemists and physicists are more set up to think outside the box, and do things that are entirely new but that's a generalisation. But perhaps that's how it can be classified. There are plenty of commercial projects that go through physics and chemistry departments as well as engineering.

The figure shows the gross domestic spending on research and development as a percentage of the countries GDP in 2017. Gross domestic spending on R&D is defined as the total expenditure on R&D carried out by all resident companies, research institutes, university and government laboratories, etc. New Zealand's R&D expenditure falls short of the OECD average. Source: data.oecd.org/rd

So I think you had a project that you were looking to commercialise. So how does that work? It sounds like it's the opposite direction of what you said before.

So commercialisation is where you take the research that you're doing within the university and say, hey, we think this could be useful outside the university. It's a very interesting area, because it's where the two different worlds meet. So people who are researchers who have done research, all of a sudden, come in contact with the idea of a market. You need people to want to buy your product before you've got the products. There's a lot of stuff that happens at the interface there, and that's kind of interesting. So one thing is to educate our scientists and engineers about how the commercial world works. We have an organisation called Uniservices. They're attached to the University of Auckland in what's called a technology transfer office.

So if you are trying to commercialise your research as a University of Auckland researcher, then typically you go to Uniservices and talk with some of their specialists. They may say this isn't really for commercialisation come back in a year when you figured out this or that, or they might say, this is great, lets go patent it. Or they might say, this is great, this company we know could really use that technology so you should go talk to them.

The idea of protecting intellectual property, and to be able to capture some of the knowledge for your own private benefit is really important in societies. Otherwise, if you couldn't protect your intellectual property, then somebody can steal your idea and so there's no point in doing the research in the first place.

In terms of dealing with intellectual property, there are different ways to go about it. People are most familiar with patents. So that's kind of like a paper except you write down what your idea is, and it goes to a patent office and gets judged whether it's a good patent. Once you've got your patent, then competing companies overseas that come up with the same idea cannot commercialise it in the same domain that you've got your patent in. The other thing you can do with your patent is licensing. You can go to another company and say, we've got this cool idea and you can use it for X dollars a month or something along those lines.

That's quite a good model in many cases because it means you don't have to go and set up a business yourself which can often be hard and costly. This way you can still make money from your inventions.

So the other way is to set up your own company and that's what startups or spin off companies are. More and more are emerging from universities in New Zealand. A lot of young physics, engineering, chemistry graduates get involved in startups.

I went to the bio engineering building over the summer and there were tons of spin off companies that were based in that building.

Yeah, and that's a healthy ecosystem of companies. So in order to grow your company, you need capital investment, which are people who want to give you their money for a stake in the company.

Then when the company grows, they can sell that stake and make money. So you need to find those people that believe in you to grow the company, and it's easier to find those people if you're all based in the same place/building. A good example is Silicon Valley, where a lot of the IT and electronic companies sprang out of one particular geographical location in California. And the idea was that because all these companies were rubbing shoulders with one another, and because they shared people (people moving from one company to one another and cross pollinating ways of doing things) the investors would go to Silicon Valley to find cool things to invest in.

What do you find most exciting about industry research?

I think it's exciting because you can see some kind of tangible effect of what you're doing. You can see a product go from A to B. I worked on one product, where the research we did provided the sales material. So when the company was going to customers, they would show the research and the customers would say, wow that's cool, let's buy it. So you can see that type of impact. It's also a little more dynamic. There'll be kind of harder deadlines that are out of your control. In the academic environment you might set yourself a deadline and then halfway to getting there realise there's some other thing that's more interesting and change plans and so on. In industrial research it can be a little bit more prescribed in terms of what you're doing but it's also more energetic sometimes, and that makes it exciting.

How can you get involved in industry research?

One thing is go look for jobs in these startup companies because they might be employing people. There are also a number of R&D heavy large companies in New Zealand that will recruit scientists. If you're looking at research projects within the university, then they might have an industrial partner too. Taking advantage of skills development is the other thing. Uniservices put on workshops, and they're things like the Velocity challenge, which is a challenge where people can take their ideas and pitch them for investment as young students. Lots of science undergraduate students will go into fourth year honours and do a research project as part of that. So talk to your supervisor about whether there is intellectual property associated with it and whether you should be publishing it or keeping it a secret. The supervisor should have a bit of an idea about that. So it's not too early to ask around and get involved in commercial projects.