“I’m able to identify pitfalls and bottlenecks.” with Christopher Leburn

Christopher Leburn is the Technology Exploitation Director for the Photonics & Quantum Accelerator (PQA) programme based at the University of Strathclyde, but working across Scotland’s central belt. He focuses on supporting and mentoring academics to boost research commercialisation.

Christopher shares his vision for filling the spin-out pipeline with exciting opportunities including:

• Why Scotland’s central belt is perfectly placed to translate more photonics research into innovation
• Getting academics to think more like entrepreneurs
• How he champions great ideas and helps to smooth the path to commercialisation
• Joining the dots from research to real jobs through place-based partnerships 

 Connect with Christopher on LinkedIn or X

Visit the Photonics & Quantum Accelerator website and follow the programme on LinkedIn or X @PhotonicsQA

 Follow the Academic Adventures podcast on LinkedIn

This podcast was a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky, working in partnership with Ross Tuffee and The Connect-Ed Network. The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black and Sarah McLusky. This season of Academic Adventures is supported by the Scottish Funding Council.

Transcript

Christopher Leburn  00:01

I'm able to identify pitfalls and bottlenecks that I can help support others through.

Christopher Leburn  00:09

We're filling the pipeline of opportunities and increasing the probability of creating more business opportunities in the future.

Sarah McLusky  00:18

Welcome to The Academic Adventures Podcast. This podcast is all about the journey from teaching, research and innovation to real world solutions. For season two, we are joined by experienced founders and other experts who work alongside university staff and students to help create and support culture of enterprise on campus.

Sarah McLusky  00:37

Hello and welcome back to season two of The Academic Adventures Podcast. I'm your host Sarah McLusky. In this season, we're meeting some of the experienced business founders and other experts who are working alongside university staff and students to help boost their entrepreneurial efforts. Our guest today, Christopher Leburn fits squarely into that category. Christopher is technology exploitation director for the photonics and quantum accelerator program based at the University of Strathclyde. What this means is that he works with universities and other partners across the central belt of Scotland to try and boost the commercialization of photonics research and make sure there is infrastructure in place to support it. Christopher brings a wealth of personal experience to the role having founded the ultra fast laser spin out company Chromacity in 2013 and he has also helped support academic entrepreneurs as a judge on the Converge Kickstarter Challenge. In our conversation, we talk about why photonics is potentially a huge opportunity for Scotland, how to get academics to think more like entrepreneurs, and how the accelerator program helps to smooth the path to commercialization.

Sarah McLusky  01:48

Welcome along to the podcast, Christopher, it's fantastic to have you here. I wonder if we could begin by hearing a bit about who you are and what it is that you do. 

Christopher Leburn  01:58

Yes, absolutely. Thank you very much for the opportunity to have me on this this podcast. My name is Christopher Leburn. I am currently a professor of practice at Strathclyde University, within their Institute of Photonics, as their Technology Exploitation Director, managing a program called the Photonics and Quantum Accelerator. 

Sarah McLusky  02:22

Fantastic. Thank you. I think before we go too much further, I'm going to just probe you, for those listening who are not experts in photonics or quantum accelerators, if you could tell us a bit about what that actually is and why it's useful. 

Christopher Leburn  02:40

Yes, absolutely. So photonics in particular, is embedded in many, many more things than we realize. Some people might ask, Well, what is photonics? It's really the generation, manipulation and detection of light, and it has become an ever increasingly important aspect of our daily lives, whether you switch on your television screen or look at your mobile phone, where light is generated so you can see all the pretty pictures on the screen, to the way light can be manipulated to communicate global scale, or, you know, monitor, detect and shoot nasty cancerous cells. There's a whole range of different things that photonics does for us in society that's really helpful. 

Sarah McLusky  03:29

Thank you very much. Helpful for me as much as anybody else. So yes, thank you. So tell us about your journey. How did you how did you get into this role you've got at Strathclyde now? What? What were you doing before? 

Christopher Leburn  03:41

What was I doing before? So I started many, many moons ago as an undergraduate at St Andrews University, where I did a general physics degree. I then went on to a one year master's program, which at the time was called Optoelectronics and Laser Devices. And it was during that one year master's program that I really got a love for photonics and light and understanding the physics that lies at the heart of that. And so I then applied for a PhD at St Andrews, where I spent three and a half very happy years developing laser sources, predominantly for a consortium that was looking to develop new ways of developing really exciting ways for telecoms, data, comms technologies. So I spent a lot of time there with collaborating with the likes of Cambridge University, Essex University and others by developing laser sources that could feed into a whole range of different experiments. And after my PhD, I was then a postdoctoral researcher at St Andrews. I wanted to grow my academic career. Yeah, so I then transitioned across to Heriot Watt University where I took up a senior postdoc position within a research group there, again, developing laser sources, but less on the telecoms side. And it was during that time I applied for a number of research fellowships, which are notoriously difficult to secure. I applied for a number of them and was unsuccessful. And then one day, my then Principal Investigator knocked on the door of the lab and came in and said, I've got some intellectual property that we have patented. I'm interested in taking this forward. Would you be interested in seeing if we could create a company out of the back of of this? This, this intellectual property? Yeah. And I said, Yeah, why not? Let's see where this goes. So my then supervisor, Professor Derryck Reid, who's still out at Heriot Watt, and I submitted a proposal to the Converge Challenge, which is a business competition specifically designed for academics. And Derryck and I put a proposal together. We'd never put a business plan together. We didn't know how to do it. We sort of made it up

Sarah McLusky  03:52

I think everybody does a bit 

Christopher Leburn  06:14

Yes, exactly with with support from advisors that were provided through the competition. So we were given a bit of direction, and out of the 50 teams that took part, we came third. So we then felt, oh well, we must genuinely be onto something here. So I then applied for an enterprise fellowship through the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and was successfully awarded that. And that gave me a year's worth of time while still attached to the university, but it gave me a year's worth of time to go and look into the feasibility of developing a company out of the back of that. I worked with the Heriot Watt Technology Transfer Office, yeah, to look at securing access to that intellectual property and spinning out, spinning out a company, which we did in 2013 which was fantastic, and the RSE enterprise fellowship taught me how to stop thinking like an academic and start thinking a bit more commercially minded. And that was fantastic. So I then led the company for five years as CEO, and then beyond that, I transitioned across to commercial director, and this was a company that made ultra fast lasers for a range of different applications, but originally it was designed to deliver laser products that would be bolted onto the side of microscopes to allow academics to interrogate and characterize a whole range of different tissue types and diseases and drugs, etc, etc. 

Sarah McLusky  08:03

Yeah, excellent. I was really interested that you said there that one of the main things you got out of this program was how to stop thinking like an academic and start thinking more like a business person. What did what did that mean? What were the main shifts that you noticed 

Christopher Leburn  08:20

I was introduced to the ideas that as a PhD student and as a postdoc, you gain a lot of experience in presenting to a range of different audiences. You're able to manipulate and manage data very, very accurately. If you put pound signs in front of that data, then you can see how you could start to understand how the finances in a business would work and and keep track of those finances, etc, etc. You have a very deep understanding of technology, and you're able to research very, very effectively. Rather than researching a scientific endeavor, why can't you go and research a particular customer base and understand how they operate and why they would be interested in a particular technology? So you can turn your hand, I was, I was taught that you can turn your hand to the skills that you've got and turn them towards managing and running a business or playing some part in a business, whether that's as a CTO Chief Technology Officer, which a lot of academics like to do, or whether you're prepared to take up the mantle of CEO, Chief Executive Officer, where you you manage the whole the whole shebang

Sarah McLusky  09:42

Yeah, it sounds like a really worthwhile program, then to help you see the skills that you have differently, because that's something I talk to a lot of people, PhD students, postdocs and people like that, who, yeah, they they can't quite understand how they could do anything else, because they don't see the ways that those skills are transferable. 

Christopher Leburn  10:03

Unfortunately, that program no longer runs in Scotland. There is an equivalent down south, the Royal Academy of Engineering, enterprise fellowship type program, but my new role within the Photonics and Quantum Accelerator program, hopefully we'll be able to provide some of that education. So I, after I completed the fellowship, I was invited back to to share my experiences and and feedback to future cohorts, and I think I've been brought on board as the Technology Exploitation Director into the PQA program specifically because I've been at that academic commercial interface for a number of years, and I think there's a thinking that I am able to identify pitfalls and bottlenecks that I can help support others through, through the the funding that we can provide from the Photonics and Quantum Accelerator

Sarah McLusky  11:07

Yeah, so you're leading us very nicely there, into this role that you're involved in at the moment. So tell us a bit more about that, and about you know why it exists, what the aims are?

Christopher Leburn  11:19

Yeah, absolutely. So there are funding programs across many, many academic institutes called Impact Accelerator Accounts. And these are small pots of money that that you can apply for as an academic to try and generate some sort of impact from your work some sort of societal impact, rather than a scientific endeavor. And typically, those types of programs are spread across every subject, across the university and the Engineering and Physical Sciences EPSRC, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council have tried to start a new fund where they provide a bit more focus. And this focus is in is coming in the form of something called a PB IAA, or a place based impact accelerator program and Glasgow University, Strathclyde University, Heriot Watt and St Andrews University were gifted a large sum of money to run this place based impact accelerator program with the specific task of generating impact across a known a specific region, and that region is the central belt of Scotland and in a specific subject area, which is photonics and quantum technologies. So I have a pot of money that I can put towards impactful projects where there's a hope that we can generate some sort of socio economic impact. What's really nice about this program is that we also have the buy in from the civic partners across that central belt. So we've got Glasgow City Council, Edinburgh City Council, West Lothian and Fife Council, all involved in helping support the activities, along with the National Physics Laboratory, the Fraunhofer Institute in Glasgow, the Glasgow Science Center. There are three main pillars to this program. One is technology transfer and looking at ways of commercializing different outputs. The other part is skills based so upskilling people in Scotland, whether through internships, through apprenticeships, through entrepreneurial training programs. And then there's a third arm, which is public outreach. We recognize it's extremely important for the public to better understand what photonics is, how important it is, and how, actually, Scotland has been historically very good at it for a number of years. There's a lot of exceptionally good work that's come from Scotland on an international scale over many, many decades, and how that has translated across into the Scottish photonics industry. We need to raise awareness of that. 

Sarah McLusky  14:22

Yeah, so well, here's an opportunity to raise awareness. What are some of those things that have come out from Scotland that people might not be aware of? 

Christopher Leburn  14:31

So you've got the likes of there's a lot of laser manufacturers have been started, not just the company that I was involved in. But there are other organizations. Coherent would be the largest in Scotland, and it originally started out of a company called Micro-Lase, I think, which was a Strathclyde spin out. Coherent is a multi billion dollar organization that operates globally. And elements of that started in Scotland. A lot of the research that was done historically in St Andrews fed into that as well. So you've got a lot of exciting opportunities there. That's just one example. You've got a lot of things like Ferranti back in the sort of, oh when did Ferranti start, many, many decades ago that is now Leonardo in Edinburgh, a big security and defense organization. But not only are other large organizations, there are many, many we call them SMEs, small to medium enterprises across Scotland, generating millions of pounds worth of revenue. Optos would be a good example of that. So they do optical retinal scanning, and they if you go for an eye test these days, you'll get a scan of the back of your retina using a technology that came out of Optos. They're based in Dunfermline, yeah. So there's lots of really, 

Sarah McLusky  16:04

Yeah those are fantastic examples, yeah, and yeah, things that I had no idea came out of Scotland. So that's excellent. And so you've said that this impact acceleration account was a subject that the this particular, you know, the photonics side of things, was something that EPSRC really specifically wanted to invest in. Why was that such a priority area?

Christopher Leburn  16:33

It's a priority area for a number of reasons. One is that Scotland generates a lot of revenue in this area, photonics for Scotland is about 1.3-1.4 billion pounds 

Sarah McLusky  16:45

Wow 

Christopher Leburn  16:47

per year. There are about, well, somewhere between 100 and there's somewhere between 60 to 120-ish companies, either directly involved in or on the sideline of photonics and quantum technologies, the people that exist within this sector are highly educated and therefore have a large it's called a GVA - Growth Value Add - to the economy. And typically, those of us who work in the photonics industry have a growth value value add that's double the national average. 

Sarah McLusky  17:23

Wow. 

Christopher Leburn  17:24

So we're, we're contributing a lot to the economy, yeah. Now, what's important to the PQA is that, because of the excellent research that goes on in Scotland, academics are very, very good at acquiring a large proportion of the funding that comes from the main funding bodies in the UK. What it's not good at is translating that research into spin out companies or licensing opportunities or other impact opportunities. And so that's why the PQA was created to try and identify bottlenecks and either remove them or smooth them so that there's an increased probability of seeing more spin out activity, more inward investment into the country as a whole. So that's why the PQA was, was, was created. 

Speaker 1  18:17

And

Sarah McLusky  18:17

And yeah, so your role within the PQA, then is that you've, you've said, there you're, you're one of those people trying to help find out where those bottlenecks are and help to unplug them. 

Christopher Leburn  18:28

Yeah, so I'm going around, I'm going around the the four institutes that are part of this consortium. I'm digging into the research labs to understand the technologies that that that lie at the heart of this research and and having a view and a look and working with the tech transfer offices in each university to identify which ones have the greatest chance of being commercialized. And there's a whole different number of characteristics you need to consider. Have you got the right team? Is the intellectual property protectable or protected already? Is there a market for this technology? There's a whole range of of different things. Is it investable? A whole range of things that we need to answer. And I'm now in conversation with Scottish Enterprise, who's the regional funding body across the central belt of Scotland, working with them to see whether we can create some sort of journey for an entrepreneur to take through, starting with a PQA that then gets fed into something called the high growth startup program that's funded by Scottish Enterprise, and that's the path that that my business took many, many years ago. We secured, you know, grants and tried to de-risk the business opportunity before incorporating the business, at which point you're then responsible for managing the funds and the people and the sales and everything else that goes with running a business which shouldn't be as terrifying as I think a lot of people think it is. I thoroughly enjoyed my journey, in fact I loved it. Brilliant, great fun. 

Sarah McLusky  20:11

Yeah, well, that's I was just going to ask you then about how you're finding your experience of that spin up, start up process, and how you're bringing that to the work that you're doing now. 

Christopher Leburn  20:24

Yeah, so we, when I started the business, and there were three of us as co-founders, we sat down and agreed the type of philosophy and ethos that we wanted to have lie at the heart of our business. We wanted to develop laser sources that would be easier to use a more sort of a plug and play product. And now, there was nothing really like that on the market at the time. So we wanted to make a bit of a leap in terms of the technology. We wanted to make this technology more accessible. And historically, we were talking about products that sold for, you know, upwards of £100-120,000 per product. We wanted to completely transform that and deliver products that were £40, 30, 25,000 each. So they were much easier to acquire for academic research groups, certainly. So we wanted to create that kind of change. And I thoroughly enjoyed, certainly for the first five years as CEO, bringing all those bits of the jigsaw puzzle together and and putting a business together, and securing an investment, and bringing people on board who had that same kind of want and ethos. And we had, we built a team of what was between 10 and 14 people. It fluctuated, yeah, as business needs moved on, and then as time progressed, we recognized, well, I recognized that as a CEO who had never done this before, I was reaching the limit of my capabilities, there were only so many plates that I could spin. And so we brought on board someone to sort of replace me in the role of CEO. I recognized that actually my value was better put towards the sales arm of the business, because I was very good at drumming up sales. Therefore we should carve out more time for me to do that, and so I transitioned into that commercial director role where I could add more value, and we brought in a female CEO on board with a very similar ethos, and really started to drive the business forward. And that was great. That transition worked very well, actually, and I recognize that that company is now her responsibility. I play an important part in that jigsaw puzzle and and grow the business from there. 

Speaker 1  22:53

Yeah,

Sarah McLusky  22:53

Yeah, that's fantastic, and you talk with such enthusiasm about it. So I'm sure that is just that story is really helpful to some of the people that you're working with now. But how, how do you find your experience, your journey, helps the people that you're working with? 

Christopher Leburn  23:14

I, I can now go into our lab, and I did this so we've, we've, we've had a funding round already, and we funded a number of projects. And this funding was put in place before I came on board in the program. So I took, I took it upon myself to actually go and visit every one of these academics, to go and understand more about them and their technology. And it was clear to me, having having gone around their research labs, that easily a half, if not two thirds, of the technology could easily be exploitable. But I recognize that you need the teams and you need the buy in from the tech transfer offices to secure the IP, which is, you know, that doesn't come free of charge. Universities have to put their hands in their pockets to do that, and you have to, I'm here to help champion, help those academics champion their opportunity, in front of the tech transfer offices and say, Look, this is really exciting. We want to take this forward, please. And I can go, yes, I've had some experience at this, and I also have a network of people who I've got to know and build relationships with in the commercial world, from with a with a photonics perspective to also help justify the need for these technologies to escape out of the universities and into society in whatever shape or form that will be. 

Sarah McLusky  24:40

Yeah, and I think that combination of kind of support and encouragement and also that network of contacts just sounds incredibly valuable. Yes, yeah. And so where are you now with the project? Where do you hope it'll go in the future? What's you know? What are the challenges that lie ahead? How are things looking 

Christopher Leburn  24:58

Yeah, so I spent the first first six months, just managing the program as it had been laid out in the original proposal. And we have an advisory board that feeds into us. There are different tiers of management within the program. We have the delivery team, which is me and two others, a program manager and an impact development officer, and we are responsible for managing the day to day operation. There is then a steering committee and an executive that manages the decisions that we choose to make, and so they vet those decisions. And then we have an advisory board who takes a larger overview of the program and what impact it could have across Scotland. And we take advice from them, and they come from both a commercial and an academic world. So I've listened to them, and I've listened to industry as well. We have strong linkages with industry. We ran a co-creation workshop in January to understand where their problems lie and understand how the PQA may be able to help not solve all of them, but some of them. And following on from that advisory board meeting and these co-creation workshops, we're looking to revise our strategy at the end of what is the first year of four of this program, with a view to, as I've already mentioned, hopefully work more collaboratively with Scottish Enterprise create a smoother pathway to increase the probability of having technology that can be transferred out of the university. To give an example at the moment, typically, one to two photonics related businesses are being spun out of Scotland that that are seen by Scottish Enterprise. We'd like to double, if not triple, that number. We think there's, there's a we think that if we if the PQA can fund somewhere of the order of 50 projects to begin with, and they get refined down to a slightly smaller number that then secure further funding, then we're filling the pipeline of opportunities and increasing the probability of creating more business opportunities in the future. Alongside that, we also need to have the workforce and skills base to go into those companies, and skills shortage is a big problem in many countries, including Scotland and in the photonic sector. So we're looking at ways of funding, internships and apprenticeships to help alleviate those problems, help help release those bottlenecks. So there's a lot of activity going on, and what I would like to see is, I guess, by the end of the four year program, source some sort of kernel of a legacy that we could that we could see, and hopefully we can go back to the funding bodies and find a way of funding another four years, so that we could have over an eight year period, you could genuinely demonstrate over that time frame, a number of spin outs starting to become really successful. And for me, that would be fantastic, because it grows the strength of what is already a very strong ecosystem in Scotland, the PQA is here to, I guess, join the dots in certain places and make it more connected. 

Sarah McLusky  28:34

Yeah, it sounds like, oh, really valuable stuff. And definitely a case of, watch this space. You know, as you say, see where things are in another three years time, then potentially another seven years time. 

Christopher Leburn  28:44

Yeah, absolutely. And with, with, with all that's going on, on the political landscape, where there's where there's a much stronger need for sovereign capability, I think that's also going to become important in making sure that the the Scottish ecosystem is number one, well connected with itself, and then number two, well connected on a national scale, down south, and then hopefully on a European and global scale as well. 

Sarah McLusky  29:11

Yeah, yeah. First, Strathclyde, next, the world. Fantastic. I think we should think about wrapping up our conversation. But if anybody wants to know more about the program, more about you, where would you suggest that they go and look? 

Christopher Leburn  29:28

We have a website which you are welcome to go and look at. It's photonicaccelerator.ac.uk. You can get in touch with me directly. I'm sure you'll share my contact details on this podcast, so they're more more than welcome to get in touch with me directly and understand if the PQA could have the ability to support their ideas. I'm also open to helping support any and all outside of photonics as well. What's what I'm really excited about, is having sight of 50 different projects that I may want to get involved with in the future. Yeah, beyond the PQA. Who knows? 

Speaker 1  30:12

Yeah,

Sarah McLusky  30:12

Yeah, yeah, it is. It's like, I that you're sort of on the cusp of of who knows what? Yeah, exciting, exciting place to be, I would thank you so much for that. We'll put those links in the show notes, so if anybody wants to find out more, they can go there. And it just made to say thank you so much for taking the time to come along and tell us about the Photonics and Quantum Accelerator. Am I saying that right? 

Christopher Leburn  30:37

Yeah. Well, my pleasure. Thank you very much 

Sarah McLusky  30:41

If you've been inspired by this podcast, head over to our LinkedIn page and tell us about your biggest takeaways. You'll find a link in the show notes, or just search for the Academic Adventures Podcast. This podcast is a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky, working in partnership with Ross Tuffee and the Connect-Ed network. The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black and me, Sarah McLusky. This season of The Academic Adventures Podcast is supported by the Scottish Funding Council.