competent students but there was also a feeling at that time that our students were not risk-takers, that they were good as managers but not as entrepreneurs. We wanted them to be more daring and be able to fail,” Professor Tan said. So the university began launching programmes to nurture these qualities. They established an overseas colleges programme where students intern in start-ups while attending entrepreneurship courses at partner universities. Students will spend their whole third year in a start-up to learn about entrepreneurship and venture creation. More than 300 students join the latter programme each year, which celebrated its 20 th anniversary in 2022. Graduates have formed more than 1,100 companies that have raised about S$3.5 billion (US$2.6 billion), including two unicorns. NUS has also sought to boost entrepreneurship among academic staff and graduate students. They brought the Lean LaunchPad programme to Singapore to help professors spin-off companies and added a Graduate Research Innovation Programme (GRIP) to accelerate innovation. The LaunchPad programme has generated about three to four spinoffs a year – “really a snail’s pace.
We know the success rate for these companies is probably one or two out of 100 so it will take a long time for even one of them to be listed. Our colleagues are very competent in terms of research, but not so much in business,” he said. The graduate programme therefore selects candidates (postdocs or senior PhD students) who are keen to take up a professor’s IP and spin it off, with the professor as advisor and seed funding from NUS. Over the past four years, about 100 start-ups have been created. The hope is that they will soon start to attract Series A funding. Professor Tan added NUS is also pursuing outlets for IP that do not evolve into start-ups. They are working with companies to let them use the IP for free if it generates income of less than S$1 million (US$0.75 million), and afterwards at a moderate rate of about 5-7 per cent. “The essence is not so much about gaining from the royalties or equity returns, it’s really about building an ecosystem,” he said. While the efforts presented have gone some way to generating innovation, audience members were curious about how to overcome resistance from staff and systems.
sluggish pace of change at universities is not always a bad thing. “Our culture, which I’m proud of, is deliberative. It’s shared governance. And for many parts of university operations, it’s the right model and works very well. But when you’re working with industry, it begins to break down. We have adopted a few countermeasures against this mismatch of cultures,” he said. He cited an encounter with a group of investors who told him one of the first things they did with faculty start- ups was to fire the faculty member, because academics usually do not comprehend the need to act quickly in the start-up world. UCLA, therefore, has sought to professionalise and rethink its infrastructure to support innovation. One measure has been to hand over the IP process to semi- independent, not-for-profit corporations to let experts with no attachments to faculties make hard decisions on which technologies to pursue. “We have found that IP can be loaded with university politics. Suddenly, you’re patenting things you shouldn’t be and spending a lot of time on not-very-helpful inventions,” he said. The change has worked well and allowed IP to be returned to faculty members if the university decides not to pursue it.
These measures have paid dividends. Over the last decade, UCLA made about US$750 million from IP. They also nurtured a thriving start-up ecosystem, with about 1,000 start-ups founded by students and faculty over the previous year. UCLA has been exploring new approaches that draw from the example of the Broad Institute — which has senior managers from both MIT and Harvard on its board but is independent and can act more quickly and flexibly than a university. UCLA is testing the model now with an immunology and immunotherapy institute. The university is also trying to change culture through Startup UCLA, which teaches undergraduates across all disciplines how to start companies and makerspaces that provide room for creative applications of new technologies. “Universities do wonderful work and some of the slowness has to do with the fact that we have very strong traditions of shared governance. But that doesn’t work well when working with corporations, so you need these extra measures,” he said. At NUS, efforts to create an innovation ecosystem started a couple of decades ago when the university realised that their students needed skills and thinking that went beyond academic achievement. “We are known for producing
Our culture, which I’m proud of, is deliberative. It’s shared governance. And for many parts of university operations, it’s the right model and works very well. But when you’re working with industry, it begins to break down. We have adopted a few countermeasures against this mismatch of cultures.
Professor Gene D Block Chancellor, University of California, Los Angeles
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