“How do we, as a nation, commercialise the innovation that happens in our universities.” with Polly Purvis

Polly is Chair of Converge and the Digital Xtra Fund as well as being a board member of Edinburgh Science. This follows a long career in banking, economic development and digital technology. Polly has an honorary doctorate from the University of Abertay and an OBE for services to industry.

Polly and Sarah discuss:

• Why she has always enjoyed working at the leading edge of innovation
• The challenges universities and academics face when commercialising research
• How Converge supports academic entrepreneurs across all of Scotland’s universities
• What Scotland might learn from looking to other countries

 Connect with Polly on LinkedIn or BlueSky

Visit the Converge website 

See the comparison of European universities DeepTech spinout value that Polly mentions.

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

Polly Purvis  00:01

This question around, how do we as a nation successfully commercialize the innovation that happens in our universities has been a continuing thread. Most universities have got tech transfer teams, but in some cases, that might be one person. I think there's huge amounts of opportunity. I mean to me, it's all very exciting. 

Sarah McLusky  00:21

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 a culture of enterprise on campus. 

Sarah McLusky  00:41

Hello there. I'm your host, Sarah McLusky, and you are listening to season two, episode five of the Academic Adventures podcast. Today my guest is Polly Purvis. Polly is currently chair of Converge and the Digital Xtra fund, as well as being a board member of Edinburgh Science despite describing herself as an 'increasingly retired'. This follows a long career in banking, economic development and digital technology, and along the way, she has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Abertay and an OBE for services to industry. It's Polly's relationship with Converge that we are particularly interested in today. Depending on how you've discovered us, you might not know that Converge is one of the organizations behind this podcast series. Converge works across all of Scotland's universities to support academic entrepreneurs and research commercialisation. In our conversation, Polly and I discuss the support that Converge offers and the difference that it makes, and why she wanted to be involved with them. And we also talk about her career and why, despite a love of history, she has always enjoyed working at the leading edge of innovation. 

Sarah McLusky  01:49

Welcome along to the Academic Adventures Podcast Polly. It is a real pleasure to have you join us here today for our conversation. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about who you are and what it is that you do for anybody who doesn't already know your name. 

Polly Purvis  02:04

Thank you Sarah, that's very kind. I'm chair of cConverge. I have a couple of other non-exec engagements at the moment, but I'm increasingly retired, but Converge keeps me, continues to get me excited with all that happens in academia and that whole piece they do around commercializing and helping people to commercialize the innovation that comes out of our academic institutions. My background is that I started my career in banking in what's now part of the Royal Bank Group, working in the City of London for about seven years, not as a city banker as we tend to see them nowadays, but actually very standard retail banking about working in the branches in the city. But it was an interesting time in the for those of us who are old enough to remember in the run up to Big Bang, as the markets were deregulated and great fun. And then I moved back to Scotland and worked with the Scottish Development Agency, which is now Scottish Enterprise, very much working on small business policy, and with some investment work in small businesses, and then helping to develop small businesses and give them the skills and support they needed to grow. And then somebody came along to me one day and said, Oh, there's this organization that needs some part time project management support. And I was literally off on maternity leave with my second child. And so part time suited me ideally. And that was the Scottish Software Federation, which today is Scotland IS, which is the trade body for software and digital technologies in Scotland, and so I started with them as a part time project manager, and a bit like the adverts, I liked it so much I stayed, and I worked my way up to the point where I was, latterly chief executive. So yeah, that was great fun, and also a great time to be working in the tech sector as we saw technology companies in Scotland, you know, be born, grow, develop and spin out. That was great. Yeah. So that's me.

Sarah McLusky  04:08

Yeah so technology really does seem to be, or this interest in new things, technology, emerging ideas really does seem to be a thread that's that's run through everything that you do. Why is that area so exciting to you?

Polly Purvis  04:21

I don't know. So my academic background is in anything but technology. I grew up in a family with two history graduates, and so actually, history probably is my favorite subject, because they had done history I absolutely wouldn't do it. I did economics, but so I'm very much sort of arts, sort of an humanities person, but I have found, I find the technology sector just fascinating and, you know, we have seen in the last 30 years, or the last, certainly, in the last 50 years, I mean, just in huge changes in technology and how we can use it and how we can, use it, hopefully for good, but also, I mean the damaging things it can do as well. But the appliance of technology in so many industries now is making such a difference, and that sort of led me from technology into the wider science community. And one of the benefits of working at Scotland is was we had always had all the universities as members of the organization, right? Yeah. And so we work very closely with the universities across Scotland, clearly, mainly in the computing science space, but that's sort of I built up a number of relationships through that. I got involved with setting up the data lab, which is one of our innovation centers. And this, this question around, how do we as a nation successfully commercialize the innovation that happens in our universities has been a continuing thread. You look at how other countries, such as America, but the Chinese also increasingly have successfully, or appear to have done that more successfully than we have perhaps in the UK. The UK had a bit of a reputation for developing the innovation then selling it out to another country to develop. And so yes, that's been something that I've been interested in for quite a long time, and that ties really nicely into Converge.

Sarah McLusky  06:15

It does, yeah, and you've very nicely taken us into towards that work with Converge. So possibly people listening to this podcast might either not realize that that one of the organizations behind this podcast is Converge, and also, even if they recognize the name, they might not actually know a lot about what Converge does, why it exists. So maybe you could tell us a bit about that, about the organization.

Polly Purvis  06:41

Converge was set up and has from the very beginning, been hosted at Heriot Watt. But it isn't a Heriot Watt organization, it's it's a pan-Scotland organization, and originally it was supported by all the research intensive universities in Scotland, and then gradually has gone on to to cover all universities in Scotland. So we work in partnership with all the universities in Scotland to help them to spin out and and with startups to help people spin out that innovation into commercial companies. Now we're not the only people in town. Many of the universities have their own in-house teams. We complement what they do. We try and make sure we're bringing best practice from across the world to what we do and to what they do, and that we can help and are working in partnership, we can help to increase the impact of the work that is being done, to help universities commercialize their their innovation. So it's fundamentally two streams. There are people who have worked on research within a university, and then, with the support of the University, we'll see that there's an, say, there's an opportunity here which you can build something, for example, in life sciences, new drugs or new discovery methods, etc. And we can turn this into a business. And it goes beyond being a research project, we can turn into business, and that will be for the benefit of Scotland as a whole, the world as a whole, etc. And so very often, the people who are brilliant at research don't necessarily know how to set up a business. Converge is about, is about helping them set up those businesses, but also working with the the teams within the universities, who also been most universities, have their own in house technology transfer teams, and we work with them to help the people setting up the business to do that successfully. But in addition, we have startups, and that's people, that's and it's very often students, but it can be researchers. It can be more senior academics who come up with a bright idea and go, I want to start up a company. And they can either, they can either come up in the startup route, whereby they almost do it themselves, independently, but but Converge is there for them, and also, actually, the technology transfer teams are there for them as well, or they can do it as a spin out where they're taking, they're doing a partnership with the University to spin out some intellectual property into a new business. Does that make sense?

Sarah McLusky  09:11

It does make sense. And yes, so yeah, perhaps just to kind of reiterate for anybody not quite clear in the terminology, and correct me if I've got this wrong, spin-outs are a piece of university research that has then got the potential to become, you know, a product service, something out in the real world. So the company is built in collaboration with the University, whereas a startup is something that's done completely independently and might actually have nothing, it might just be somebody's got an idea, but it's nothing to do with what they were doing whilst they were at university. Is that right? Could be.

Polly Purvis  09:45

In general, and I suspect the Converge team would tell you, and there are nuances, okay? I mean, I think, I think you might find that there's, there are one or two areas where there are startups, where they've seen some research going on in universities. The university doesn't see it as being particularly interesting, or whatever. They're not concerned about that being then used to set up a new business idea. So there's, you know, there's a bit of a mixture in places.

Sarah McLusky  10:10

Yeah yes, yeah. And so, as you said, most universities have their own tech transfer, knowledge exchange, people. What does Converge bring that that perhaps can't be done in house, or that enhances what can be done in house in the universities.

Polly Purvis  10:28

Okay so I think actually we should just clarify that it is true that most universities have got tech transfer teams, okay, but in some cases that might be one person. So one or two of the universities are really, really well established as far as this is concerned, okay, but very many of them are somewhere along the journey from having nothing to having a fully blown, you know, fully fledged tech transfer team. And so we therefore work with them in different ways. So for those who are at the beginning of the journey, or just don't have the resources, we might be almost their in-house, maybe sorry, that we might almost be replacing an in-house team. Okay? And then for those who are really well established, we are not bringing quite so much to the table, but the things that we do provide are, firstly, a cohort across the whole of Scotland. So we do a program every year. We run several programs every year, helping people who've got ideas to spin out and start up their businesses. And for them, there's an opportunity to meet up with other people across Scotland doing similar things from a similar background, because one of the challenges very often with academic spin outs and startups is they're really good at academia. They understand how that works. They understand the research environment. They don't necessarily understand the commercial environment. So actually, it's probably very nice for them to, you know, and very useful for them to meet other people in a similar situation. They can exchange ideas and thoughts and, you know, create a sort of supportive community around it so the cohort thing is important. We're beginning to see an increasing appetite for bringing people together at regional level, because there are regional specialities. And you know, you know, take an example, the north and northeast of Scotland. You know, have got particular interest in areas around renewables that areconnected to wind and wave power. 

Polly Purvis  12:22

Yes, yeah, definitely. And I can see why that would be really valuable. Really valuable. And so all the universities in Scotland, they're sort of members of Converge. Is that, right? Is that how you think of it? Yes, they very much make that happen. 

Sarah McLusky  12:22

Yeah, 

Polly Purvis  12:22

It isn't that places like Strathclyde and Heriot Watt don't do that as well. But actually, there are some sort of common threads there. So we're bringing people together at a regional level as well. And we run a number of, we run the programs, but at the end of each year we run a we have a set of competitions that feed through to an award ceremony. And actually, as part of that, we are handing out quite a lot of money to various companies coming through the program. You know, we run the competition. If you're first, second or third, you're getting a prize. Most of that cash, most of it is cash, and most of it is unencumbered, so there's no ties to it. It's not like, you know, an investor coming along and saying, we want to share the business. We're not doing that. The prize pot this year, I think, just little bit over 400,000 pounds altogether. So not enormous. But actually, if you're starting a business 30, 40, 50,000 pounds it makes, can make a huge difference.

Polly Purvis  13:31

Yeah we're very much their organization, and we're there to serve them. And so it is slightly different for each university out of what they want out of us. I think the other thing we do is we help to disseminate good practice, whether it's from one university in Scotland to another or from coming from other parts of the world. We're trying to share that best practice knowledge across the universities as well.

Sarah McLusky  13:55

Yeah, you say that as well there, sharing best practice and connecting with places elsewhere, is this sort of model having an organization like Converge? Is that unique to Scotland, or do other places have similar models? I mean, I'm based in the north of England, and I'm not aware of there being a similar sort of thing in the north of England.

Polly Purvis  14:15

I think you might find there are other countries where there are similar models, but I think you most definitely will find is there are other regions, there are parts of Europe where they have similar groupings, but at a regional level. And I know we've talked to the universities in the North of England about possibly doing something in collaboration with them, if we just haven't got there yet.

Sarah McLusky  14:36

Yes well, I can see why, exactly why that kind of support and help would be really valuable for anybody who is coming through the university system and and has got an idea that that they think they might want to pursue, whether it's just getting that support in terms of the the practical help, or whether it's the financial support, and both of those things, I can see they'd be really, really valuable. And so you've said a bit about some of the things that Converge is currently working on. Are there any particular areas of interest or particular things that Converge is doing that you're really interested in, that you think are real areas for development?

Polly Purvis  15:14

So I have been associated with startups from about the mid 1990s when I came back, late 1980s when I came back to Scotland, that's the world I moved into. In Scottish Development Agency was we were predominantly dealing with startups and very small businesses. And there has always been in the Scottish ecosystem, people who help businesses to develop skills, understand the issues they may have to deal with when setting up business, and help them to have the right skills, the right people in place to grow I am hugely impressed by what I see the Converge team doing. They do understand that business in great detail. They understand what it is, how you build a business, what you need, the skills you need, the team you need to build. And they also understand what is the slightly different bit about the Converge community, which is that these are people coming out of academia. So they understand around they'll be issues around intellectual property, about dealing with universities to license that IP, they just and they do it, in my view, superbly. And I think that ensuring that we give startups and spin outs and anybody setting up in business the right advice, the right skills, the right support is something that's hugely important. And I think a lot of people over the years have tried to do that in a number of areas across Scotland, and I think we can always improve. But, you know, it is making sure that we're not just going through the motions and then Converge they're most definitely not going through the motions. And I'm not suggesting the universities are going through the motions either. I think I mean, I think there is real capability and skill being built in Scotland, across the academic institutions, but there's always more we can do. In terms of things I'd like to see us do, interestingly, there was a, there was a paper published recently about the success of commercialization of universities across Europe. And we tend to think we're good in the UK. But actually, you know what I mean, Oxford and Cambridge were up there in the top 10. Edinburgh, I think, was in the sort of between 20 and 30. But there are other countries, other small countries, like Switzerland, absolutely, you know, beating us to it time after time. So one of the things I'd like to see us do is look at what it is that's making the difference there. What can we learn from them? So that whole piece of our best practice transfer. And I also think, and, you know, it's, it's very easy to say this now we're a few years in, but in the very early days, we didn't know whether Converge was going to continue all right, so, I mean, it was a project. Is it going to work? Does it have any difference? What's the challenges here? But now it's been around for a while. One of the things we're now starting to see is we've got businesses who have come through the Converge program who are now actually a very high success rate in terms of those, the people who come through the Converge program and then succeed, you know, they're still in business three years on. That's always been a sort of a benchmark for startups, and the success rates around 80% which is actually very high. But so we know what these businesses have been through Converge and have had the experience of all the challenges of setting up business from academic background, and we try, and we'd now like to try and engage some of that expertise back into the Converge program, so setting up an alumni champions type program whereby we bring those people back in, but also bring people from other walks of life who have also set up businesses, and know what that's like. And being an entrepreneur can be quite a lonely business. Being a founder, definitely, and, you know, we do very much encourage people who are trying to set up these businesses to build the right team. And very often, you end up with a founding team, rather than just one founder. But it's still, it's a tough, tough business. And I've seen so many tech businesses going through that whole bit, where three or four of them started up, or one or two of them started up, and they get to sort of 10, and that's a sort of, oh, and then they get to 50, and that's a sort of all right we need different structures in place. And then, you know, and as you grow the business, you know, actually that sort of very cosy original team starts to get strained. And actually these these individuals need a lot of support, because they're the ones having made decisions. They have to be sometimes, have to be very tough. It can be quite a lonely place. And so wrapping around people who have been there, done that understand the challenges. And I think the other thing is the people who understand the challenges of these markets that our startups and spin outs are going out into because most industrial markets these days are very sophisticated. You need to understand how they work. Some of them have long lead times. So if you're setting up a bioscience company, you know, getting all the approvals in place, for example, to go into the American market. It's a long, it takes years, okay, so having people alongside you who understand that and who can guide you through that, and who have got connections and networks that they can tap into for you. So those are sorts of things that we are trying to do more of and I think will help to, you know, add value to everything we do.

Sarah McLusky  20:29

Yeah and that's such a strong message that's come through all the interviews I've done for this particular season, is the value of having these trusted advisors, people who've been through it before, understand the challenges and can help to mentor people through the process. So, yeah, so having, but that sort of thing needs to be coordinated and doesn't it? And that's where an organization like Converge can help make sure that people are getting the right support at the right time.

Polly Purvis  21:14

You know, across the business startup ecosystem in Scotland, there have been and there are a lot of business people providing that sort of advice and guidance. So very often, what tends to happen is you bring somebody in who, let's say life sciences, okay, you know is somebody very senior in a big life sciences company. Actually, sometimes the advice you need, when you're very new into all of this is the person who's just the next step or two up the line, because it's, you know, it's like, you know, I remember when I first started work, I intended to be the chief executive of the Royal Bank Group by the time I was 30, I very quickly I unlearned that. But, you know, if at age 25 I had been talking to the CEO of the Royal Bank Group, you know, actually, the gap between our experiences is so enormous. You know, you can get you can get ideas, but I think sometimes what you want is the person who's, you know, two or three steps up the ladder from you, who can say, well, actually, here's how I this is how this worked, and here's my tips and tricks for getting to that stage. And so in terms of our alumni and trying to provide sort of mentor and alumni support it is making sure we do all of that, all right, because, yeah, people need need help at different stages, and they need different sorts of advice at different stages.

Sarah McLusky  22:33

Yeah yeah, no. Definitely makes sense. And you mentioned there, and you did, you sent me before we came on air, and maybe we'll see if there's a way we can share the graphic with with listeners. But you shared with me that table that showed all the different countries and the success. And it really was remarkable how dominant Switzerland, in particular was

Polly Purvis  22:53

It may have been produced by the Swiss 

Sarah McLusky  22:55

Probably but, but yeah, do you have any inkling? You've said there that there's lots we could learn from other countries. Do you have any inklings about what sorts of things you think other countries are doing differently that we could be learning from?

Polly Purvis  23:10

I'd like to do some research on this whole area, actually, and find out more. I suspect we would find in Switzerland that in particular. I mean, I mean, I think, first of all, it may specialize in two or three sectors and life sciences and, you know, biotechnology is one of those medicine generally. I suspect that industry is better connected to their universities than at a local level than perhaps we have here in Scotland and and that may be that it's actually, I think some of our universities are very well connected to their businesses in the local area. Strathclyde would be a good example. You're very connected to the engineering sector in the in the West of Scotland. But the other challenge we've seen over the last 30 to 50 years is, you know that the loss of headquarters from Scotland, means that some of that is probably happening in, you know, at Imperial or University College London or Oxford or Cambridge, that that might once have been happening in Scotland. And I think looking at some of the universities I've worked with in the past around sort of computing science and software is, you know, the connections are with international companies like the Googles of this world, Microsoft, etc, but not, not down to local level, or less at the local level. And I think, I think we might find that plays well in Switzerland, and that's just just taking them as an example. But we actually need to go and find out what is it? What it is it is that makes a difference?

Sarah McLusky  24:43

Yeah, certainly it does make sense when you say it's it's often in places like Scotland, as I say, the north of England's the same. You might have the manufacturing centers, for example, in that area, but not the head office or the research and development teams and those sorts of things and that, as you say, that can be where it's really important to make those connections isn't it? 

Polly Purvis  25:03

Yeah,

Sarah McLusky  25:04

Fascinating. And are there any other particular, so you've mentioned technology generally, you've mentioned Life Sciences. Are there any particular areas where you think either Scotland's doing really well now or you think it's primed to move into.

Polly Purvis  25:22

Well I think, I mean, if you look at the sort of the majority of the businesses coming through Converge, they'll be in digital technologies and advanced manufacturing, life sciences, but actually there are, I mean, you know, we see businesses coming through, SRUC in food and drink, there's more and more in renewables, there's always been an energy element, because Scotland is really, you know, impressive on energy. I think that some of the sort of the green economy, actually the increasing focus on space, some of the sort of blue economy, that there are. One of the benefits of covering all the universities in Scotland is, you know, you get pockets of excellence in different places around different topics. And I think there's huge amounts of opportunity. I mean, to me, it's all very exciting. I know the universities themselves are all going, it's a very tough environment at the moment, and it is, but actually, I think that we're seeing so many new developments. I just, you just see science is in everything nowadays, and okay, we're not, Converge is not purely about science, but science and engineering and the application of digital technologies tends to permeate all that goes on. But actually, you know, we're seeing exciting things come through in, you know, so the Royal Conservatoire, Queen Margaret University, I mean, they'll come in with things which we might see as a little bit left field, but actually really interesting opportunities that don't necessarily have that same deep science background. But actually somebody just come along and going Here's a smart idea. And actually they very often are very smart ideas. So yes.

Sarah McLusky  27:07

Yeah oh, it's fantastic again, that Converge is there to provide that support for for all comers, regardless of what subject matter they're coming from, or which university, which specialism, yeah. Oh, I think for time, we should look at wrapping up our conversation. So if people want to find out more about Converge, or if they want to connect with you personally, where would be the best place for them to find out that information?

Polly Purvis  27:33

I think the Converge website is a good starting point for anything about Converge. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on BlueSky. I'm no longer on Twitter, and so you know, people can reach out, they can reach out through Converge to me, or they can reach out on LinkedIn.

Sarah McLusky  27:49

Yeah fantastic. I'll get those links and put them in the show notes. So thank you so much, Polly, for coming along and sharing your huge knowledge about this sector, and I'm sure that will make for really interesting listening. Thank you.

Polly Purvis  28:04

Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah McLusky  28:06

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.