You’re a STEM PhD student at a northern university. You’re female, from a working-class background and the first in your family to go to uni. None of your parents’ friends are entrepreneurs or venture capitalists. You realise your research is commercialisable and you want to turn it into a start-up. How do you make it happen?
It isn’t easy. “Talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not” may have started to feel like a cross-partisan platitude, but it’s true. If you were lucky enough to be in London, Oxford or Cambridge, your friend on the Polaris or Nucleate fellowship might encourage you to apply next year, or your friend in the well-connected, well-funded Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital societies might bring you along to an event, where you meet your co-founders. You and your co-founders might hear about the university’s start-up accelerator competition and sign-up. Your university might even help you access lab space. But if you aren’t lucky enough to be in these places, things are going to be much harder.
And that’s if you even bother to pursue commercialisation. Most STEM PhD students are aiming for careers in academia.1 Most will not make it. They know this, and are relentlessly focused on the journal publications that will slightly improve their chances of doing a postdoc at one of the best labs. For these budding professors, working day-and-night on their research whilst making ends meet on small stipends, finding time to explore other paths isn’t easy, especially for paths as unclear and illegible as becoming a founder. This sort of exploration is particularly difficult for female scientists, who must also juggle a disproportionate share of the caring responsibilities at home.2 Of course, industry research is always there as a back-up if academia doesn’t work out, and some do start their PhDs with other career paths in mind - policy, venture capital, management consulting - but they’re very much in the minority.
Britain’s deep tech ecosystem is growing stronger. There’s DeepMind, the crown in the jewel, and Oxford Nanopore, working on DNA sequencing, but there’s also Altos Labs, the best-funded life sciences start-up of all time,3 and BenevolentAI and Isomorphic Labs, working on AI drug discovery. But spend some time on Sifted’s StartUp Explorer, or O3 (an interactive map of Britain’s AI startups), and you’ll quickly realise that our deep tech success is concentrated in the South, leaving the rest of the country’s potential unfulfilled.
To get Britain moving again, rather than trying strategies designed for economies very different to ours, we need to double down and exploit our major comparative advantage - our science and tech expertise - and actually turn it into growth. The innovation wouldn’t just serve to satisfy the TBI and Onward wonks. Novo Nordisk is no start-up (founded in 1923), but its effect on the Danish economy - single-handedly preventing a recession and delivering 1.7% GDP growth - is mostly down to just two products (Wegovy and Ozempic).4 This tells us that a single, transformative deep tech product, from one start-up, could be all it takes to bring progress back to Britain. And that’s before we even consider the direct effects of frontier tech - witnessing Ozempic’s impact on a patient’s diabetes, right here in Yorkshire, is part of what inspired me to write this piece.
Nucleate, an American nonprofit talent programme which recently expanded to London, Oxford and Cambridge, offers a model to learn from. They help teams of students access the knowledge, skills and networks needed to turn their ideas, discoveries and inventions into biotechnology start-ups - one of which may produce the next Wegovy and the next Ozempic - and they don’t take equity. So far, Nucleate trainees have founded one hunded start-ups and raised $190 million in venture capital funding. But we know that most start-ups fail. An abundance of science and tech start-ups is needed, of which a select few will deliver the progress that Britain needs. This is where the state comes in.
We need to move beyond relying solely on the Golden Triangle. Where progress happens can matter just as much as whether progress happens. Having been to secondary school in Manchester, I know what the discovery of graphene at one of our universities means for our sense of pride in place. Cities like ours already have the scientific expertise to drive progress - they just need a little more support.
The solution is to learn from the Nucleate model and leverage state capacity to establish Start-Ups GB, a program operating at universities across the UK, including those in Northern England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Start-Ups GB would shift us away from a reliance on high-turnover, poorly-connected and poorly-funded student entrepreneurship societies. It would deliver free training for STEM students to turn their research into new businesses, without taking equity.
Crucially, Start-Ups GB would have strong connections with industry and venture capital, between universities and with alumni, offering students networks to find co-founders, advisors and pre-seed capital. Today, even the most self-motivated student in the wrong part of Britain can’t access this without outside help - a challenge I’ve experienced first-hand whilst studying in Leeds.
Through schemes like Deep Science Ventures’s “Venture Science Doctorate”, we’re already seeing a cultural shift where more PhD students are interested in commercialising their research. By making the founder route clearer and easier to explore, Start-Ups GB would accelerate this cultural shift. More scientists would move away from narrowly seeing the PhD as a stepping stone into academia, towards a broader view, where a PhD is also recognised as an opportunity to develop a commercialisable technology.
We already have cross-partisan consensus on reforms to university spin-outs, and the share of venture capital funding going towards deep tech has doubled over the last decade.5 There has never been a better time to capitalise on Britain’s comparative advantage in science. And while our policymakers face tight fiscal constraints, the low costs involved mean that Start-Ups GB could genuinely be set up today. With its national scale, it would maximise our chances of inventing the next Wegovy and the next Ozempic, of incubating the next DeepMind. It would draw foreign direct investment and turn universities in every part of Britain into engines of innovation-led growth, ending our economic malaise and raising living standards once again, for everyone.
This submission to the TxP progress prize draws on the few months I spent exploring an idea for an antimicrobial resistance startup while a student at the University of Leeds, amongst other experiences (like meeting the patient who was on Ozempic, and interning in a lab in Cambridge as it was spinning out into Altos Labs).
https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/HEPI-Policy-Note-25_PhD-students-careers_FINAL.pdf
https://wbg.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Early-Career-Researchers-Covid-19-report-.pdf
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stanfleming/2022/03/09/alta-labs-mega-startup-wretched-excess-or-the-future-of-biotechor-both/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-09-23/with-novo-nordisk-nvo-denmark-wants-to-avoid-the-nokia-trap
https://www.bcg.com/press/21november2023-deep-tech-claims-20-percent-venture-capital-surging-two-fold-in-past-decade