Legendary deals at KCA

Knowledge Commercialisation Australasia (KCA) brings together commercialisation professionals from both sides of the ditch, and the annual Conference and Awards this year was conveniently held in Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast. With the theme of “Innovation to adoption – delivering real impact”, the conference showcased a diverse range of presenters and panel speakers.

It's interesting to see the scale of funding and investment in research commercialisation in Australia. Initiatives such as the $2.2B University Research Commercialisation Package place university innovation and industry collaboration front and centre. This includes the?Economic Accelerator, a $1.6B initiative designed to support translation and commercialisation activities aligned with national research priorities. This provides targeted support for researchers to ensure the R&D pipeline has the knowledge and skills to translate research to commercialisation outcomes.?

KCA Awards

The annual KCA Research Commercialisation Awards highlight the profound impact of research commercialisation on society, and the critical role of tech transfer professionals in translating publicly funded research into real-world solutions. It's an opportunity to celebrate?deep tech spinouts, startups, licensing deals and legendary exits, and the commercialisation professionals who help make it all happen.

A big congratulations to the team at Massey Ventures for their award for ‘Best Licensing Deal: Strawberry Birthmarks’, alongside?AFT Pharmaceuticals. This topical treatment is a gamechanger for the estimated 10% of children who are born with these sometimes disfiguring strawberry birthmarks.

Awards keynote speaker Sean Simpson shared his 10 year overnight success journey with LanzaTech, providing highly entertaining commentary on the benefits of tenacity and self belief. To all those cynics who suggested that feeding carbon emissions to trillions of carbon-hungry microbes (turning pollution into valuable raw material commodities) was "impossible", well, Sean has proved you wrong and is not shy about telling you not to crush people's dreams and aspirations.

Commercialisation pathways

Natasha Rawlings, Quasar Satellite Technologies?gave a masterclass on getting technology out of?CSIRO with the help of legendary scientist and Wifi inventor David Skellen. “You need that translator, that listener, that driver of the product. We have a great moat, with complexity including bringing a range of different technologies together. We have the support of CSIRO – you need people within the institution that have a founder mindset."? ?

Alezeia Brown, Main Sequence Ventures shared how portfolio company Samsara was built around an idea in a published paper, raising $54m (at a $160m pre-money valuation) Series A last year. ?“Universities should be willing to find those ideas and push them out. What do you need to be successful? Give me the next 900 ideas after the top 100. There’s a fear of ‘what if you find something that we didn’t see?’ about sharing information”.

Relationships with academics who can bridge the knowledge gap are important. “There’s so much stuff within your organisation that has tremendous value outside your organisation. The purpose is to set up a pipeline, not to just do one deal. It should be a flow of things coming out before we worry about optimising.”? ? ?

Innovation ecosystems?

MedTech and BioPharma are big business. I enjoyed the pre-Conference tour of the GC Health and Knowledge Precinct (GCHKP), an extraordinary innovation hub providing a range of research and industry collaboration facilities. These include the Institute for Glycomics and the Advanced Design Prototyping facilities (ADaPT) for end-to-end?research translation opportunities - it was also inspiring to meet the passionate people driving these initiatives.

The benefit of an ecosystem approach is that you end up with a diverse group of talented people who want to work together, often with a regional advantage. This creates collisions between researchers, industry and business.?

Paul Hodgson also showcased the innovative approach to workforce capability building with the Scaling Green Hydrogen Co-operative Research Centre initiative, designed to empower skills uptake in this sector.

Aotearoa, New Zealand context?

The indigenous knowledge panel session with Australian Patricia Adjei, and University of Auckland's Tori McNoe, Tui Kaumoana and Michael Steedman canvassed challenges and opportunities for indigenous engagement.

Wai 262 is about to be ratified, examining the Crown’s policies and laws that impact indigenous knowledge (mātauranga Māori) and taonga, including indigenous flora and fauna, the environment and Māori culture. Reciprocity, engagement and benefit sharing empower us all. ?

MBIE’s David Hutchinson delivered a very concise overview of the Te Ara Paerangi future pathways reform of the research, science and innovation ecosystem. The reform’s vision and objectives are to embed the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, creating an aspirational future based on national research priorities to accelerate innovation. ? ?

Legendary Deals

Uniservice's Stephen Flint (University of Auckland) shared the commercialisation success of their wireless technologies IP portfolio, including PowerbyProxi's exit to (well, a company that has a logo with a bite out of an Apple) and HaloIPT's wireless EV charging exit to Qualcomm.

All in all, plenty to celebrate! The latest?SCOPR benchmarking data was also released, with an increasing number of NZ Universities and research organisations sharing their data on commercialisation outcomes. ?

The 2024 KCA Conference will be held in Queenstown and it's a real opportunity to showcase the commercialisation profession and research impact right here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. See you there!

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