Working Lunch
Despite the economic storm blowing across Britain, academics from Imperial College in London are moving to cash in on their Eureka moments by backing them with hard cash.
Professor Andrew de Mello, Imperial's Professor of Chemical Nanosciences, shows me an iPod-sized device designed to test blood, urine or saliva. They will cost less than £1 each to make.
"This could be huge," he boasts, "It's a very simple way of taking a lot of treatment out of hospitals and allowing people to take charge of monitoring their own diseases." So it must be fitting that he has called his company Molecular Vision.
A few doors down in a futuristic complex in the heart of Imperial College, I find Danny Green of BioCeramic Therapeutics.
He extols the powers of a glass-like ceramic substance, fresh out of the furnace, to fill the gaps between broken bones and help them heal.
"We are starting with bone, then cartilage," Danny says, "Then with our second generation materials, it'll be heart tissue, bladder tissue. We're trying to regenerate the tissues so that they are more like those of a younger person."
Andrew and Danny's companies are being mollycoddled in Imperial's incubator, along with 16 ventures covering healthcare, engineering and recycling.
Convincing
The incubator is run by Imperial Innovations, which is itself a spin-off from the university. Its job is to bring on new ideas and invest in them using money raised on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), the London Stock Exchange's junior market.
"We still have a problem in the UK in that there is a very big early stage funding gap," says Susan Searle, who runs Imperial Innovations. "If I look at investors in the sector we work in, I can count them on one hand."
Life in the incubator is not as cosy as it sounds. There is a frantic effort to develop a convincing prototype or product demonstration, a search for customers and a lot of trying to work out business plans to impress investors.
The ideas have to be convincing, because Imperial Innovations will only commit its money alongside outside investors, including venture capital funds and wealthy individuals.
"I've learned that technology is not everything. It's technology plus the package that goes round it," reflects Michael Lamperth, a Swiss specialist on electric motors, "Also, knowing that money is not expensive but time is expensive. We really need to hit the deadlines."
He founded Evo Electric to sell a new motor which is much lighter than other designs on the market, but produces more power. He is working on versions for trolley buses and London cabs.
"Connect"
Michael raised £1.5m while inside the incubator. But as Evo Electric grew he found he needed more space, more employees and he needed to be able to make more noise.
He has just moved to an industrial unit in Woking and hopes to raise a further £6m to keep going. Evo Electric is chewing up £80,000 a week.
So far, five companies have graduated from the incubator. Another is Quantasol, set up to develop solar cells to generate electricity.
The technology was invented by Professor Keith Barnham who uses gallium arsenide to create much more productive cells.
"It's been used to power satellites up in space, but it's expensive," explains Prof Barnham, "The reason we can use it on earth as that people are developing simple mirrors and plastic lenses to concentrate the light."
Quantasol's chief executive, Kevin Arthur, has a track record building up companies. It's standard practice for Imperial Innovations to install a commercial brain, like his, to galvanise the academics.
"The key lesson is to connect with customers as soon as you possibly can," warns Kevin, "There is a catalogue of errors in technology start-ups, where you produce something because you can, then you find that there's no market for it."
Rewards
The lure of profit and business success is a big motivator for the Imperial scientists. But there is also an urge to "make a difference" by commercialising ideas which might remain unexploited in a university lab.
That is how newcomer Nikolaos Vlasopoulos feels. His research is into replacements for Portland cement, which he says is responsible for 5% of all man-made carbon emissions.
"We want to make a difference to the environment, to at least help to stop global warming," Nikolaos enthuses.
He has come up with magnesium oxide as a viable substitute for traditional cement, claiming that his manufacturing and construction process will actually reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
It's a key concern for Michael Lamperth as well: "I've got four kids. They ask me what I'm doing to stop global warming.
"Now, I can give a much better answer than saying I'm going off to teach. I can say I'm going off to build machines to help reduce CO2."
Imperial Innovations has invested £18m in spin-offs in the incubator, hoping to reap the rewards later. Some of the start-ups could take a while to flourish but Evo Electric says it aims to be in profit within two years.
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