Conception X Industry Challenges

Great companies start with great customers.

Building new relationships between UK companies with deep channels to market and academic researchers at leading UK universities can greatly increase those company’s R&D firepower with minimal changes to commercial departments and budgets. The UK government and universities already fund some of the best research in the world. 

Conception X helps academic talent and founders partner with leading companies early in the product development cycle. Beginning a virtuous circle that accelerates development of start-up companies, and greatly expands the breadth, depth, and ROI of existing corporate R&D investments.

? Conception X Industry Challenges virtually convene global corporate R&D teams with leading UK academic researchers building new technology products.

? Partner companies and academic researchers share user stories and collectively workshop problems and opportunities.

? Better leveraging existing UK university research can effectively extend corporate R&D budgets by at least 30%.

Welcome to Conception X 2030

I’ve often discussed the Conception X offer to PhD academics at leading UK research universities. Test commercial applications of research as new technology products and companies alongside academic work. All new companies share one key inflection point. Early adopters and first customers.

Conception X partnered with two leading UK corporates to work with academic researchers on delivering research products to market. Barclays Eagle Labs and Deloitte Legal. These partnerships connect those organisations to leading UK academic talent and research. These partnerships connect PhD students to multinational corporates with extensive reach into markets and customers segments around the world.

Together, corporate partners and student teams start testing product-market fit before embarking on significant commercial projects.

Closing the gap between academic researchers and corporate customers

UK companies spend on average 2.9% of revenue on R&D. That is underweight compared to an average of 4.2% in the OECD. Leading technology companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft spend 10 – 20%.

The UK consistently ranks as a top global player by quality and quantity of academic research. UK companies spend ￡24B on R&D a year, and universities spend another ￡8B more. Therefore, better capitalising on research done at UK universities may effectively extend corporate R&D budgets by at least 30%.

Conception X Industry Challenges 

The Conception X programme is divided into three parts:

1.     Training

2.     Industry Challenges

3.     Demo Day showcase 

The programme begins with intensive training covering the basics of turning research into products, product development frameworks, and corporate finance. We end with a Demo Day showcase that hybridises an academic symposium with start-up pitches.

Between training and showcase, we run Industry Challenge packages. Practitioners from leading organisations work with teams to help guide the research-to-product journey.

These packages begin with pre-sessions. Partner company leads gather specific challenges and group them into themes. Challenges become narratives that describe specific opportunities and customer outcomes. On the other side, Conception X teams apply to work on the themes – each of which incorporates a number of narratives.

Conception X partners and teams come together in virtual Industry Challenges workshops. Over the course of a day, we connect opportunities to research and technologies. Some challenges involve moving machine learning processes from laboratory into production. Other challenges are open-ended questions around things like explaining AI decision-making, or developing new customer propositions in a world of evolving privacy expectations and regulations.

Some challenges are about customer-facing propositions. How to incorporate customer data into long-term asset management strategies. Other challenges involve making internal company operations more efficient or more engaging. One collaboration from this year has the potential to change the face of quantifying embodied carbon to both reduce global emission and create quite potent (read: extremely high margin) long-term revenue streams for both start-up and corporate partner.

Anatomy of an Industry Challenges workshop

Conception X convenes teams that have applied to themes alongside corporate partner teams. Participation is open to both current Conception X teams, as well as alumni teams from previous cohorts. As Conception X grows each year, the reach of Industry Challenges and value to partner organisation also grows. Effectively we take deep-tech deeper into time.

We begin by reviewing themes and move onto individual narratives and asks. Narratives and asks are often phrased similarly to Agile user stories. “I am an X who has Y, and I want to achieve Z. I think there are N of me out there.”

From User Stories to commercial partnerships 

We now hold these sessions completely virtually, removing geographic barriers and allowing for greater contribution by both partner teams and researchers. Corporate partners generally invite cross-disciplinary audiences. These contributors can now be anywhere, and there are no frictions involved in joining to observe and contribute.

Academic teams zoom in from their universities. The resulting forum is a formidable combination of voices. Workshops end by again reviewing themes and narratives, and now attaching next steps between specific partner practitioners and Conception X researchers. In some cases, the day refines problem statements, or validates and refutes current approaches. Often, new relationships begin between practitioners and researchers, the opportunity of which cannot be understated. 

Great companies start with great customers

Weak feedback loops between founders and customers result in weak products, weak commercial outcomes, and missed opportunities for each party.

By bringing customer voices into the process (much) sooner, we shift the concept of research commercialisation from trial and error, to collaborative design. We’re not prospecting for opportunities and solutions anymore, now we engineer outcomes. This alignment creates cleaner routes to market.

“We can build products and iterate them with better functionality. We can refine our design until we have a product that functions as efficiently as possible for the user. This self-directed learning is not only a great way of communicating with customers it is also an inherent characteristic of the best companies.”

Growing the impact of Conception X Industry Challenges

Industry Challenges are collaborations between corporate partners and researchers. Universities are vital to the development cycles, and corporate funding flows are vital to creating new companies. Product development, from discovery through launch, takes place in multiple ways. Universities collaborating with corporate partners. Corporations collaborating with academic partners. 

And now, corporate practitioners collaborating directly with academic researchers.

Third-party funding flows from commercial partners encourage academic founders to invent new business models, that can then be financed. Conception X now enables this to happen without university faculties having to dedicate any additional managerial time. Industry Challenges are costless ways for universities to expand the footprint of university research and commercialisation opportunities. 

Industry Challenges provide an easy “how to” experience for companies and researchers. This also puts researchers on the radar for companies. Companies follow those researchers through the development process, as collaborators or customers.

Companies enable university research to go beyond basic knowledge and become real solutions. As deep-tech capabilities are increasingly required to effectively compete in commercial markets, the use of academic research in commercial products will grow.

Conception X Industry Challenges unlock economic contributions academic talent and research can generate, even in the earliest manifestations.

N.B. 20% of this post was written by an AI that launched from academic research.