Mixing academia with business
The view that academia and entrepreneurship don’t mix is fading away, but a lack of business knowhow is still holding back scientists from commercial success, says Sir Michael Brady.
As a professor of oncological imaging at Oxford University, Brady is a top academic. But he has also been involved in 20 businesses and helped launch 10 of them, including 30-person Wellington company Volpara Health Technologies.
Brady previously served as deputy chairman of Oxford Instruments and sold one medical imaging business he founded, Mirada Solutions, for $20 million.
Originally a mathematician and the first of his family to go to university, Brady developed an interest in cancer screening in the 1980s after his mother-in-law died of an initially undiagnosed breast cancer.
ASX-listed Volpara aims to improve the consistency of mammographic screening by applying a model developed at Oxford that calculates how X-ray photons are
"I regularly see PhD students with great ideas but they don't know anything about how to write business plans." Sir Michael Brady
scattered as they pass through different types of breast tissue.
Brady said he and fellow Oxford academic Ralph Highnam originally conducted their research ‘‘from the standpoint of pure science’’.
But they found their results could benefit the 10 per cent to 15 per cent of women whose breasts are sufficiently dense to make small tumours very hard to spot, and who could benefit from extra tests such as MRIs and ultrasounds.
After unsuccessfully trying to licence their technology to a market that wasn’t ready for it in the 1990s, Brady and Highnam later decided to go it alone after Highnam had moved to New Zealand.
Brady says that when he first arrived in Oxford in 1985, it was not common for academics to help launch businesses.
‘‘You were supposed to be an academic and to teach and do research and leave aside the rest of it.’’
Brady said that had changed beyond all recognition over the past 30 years. ‘‘On average there are something like eight to 10 companies spun out of Oxford University each year now, and it is now considered very favourably.
‘‘Five out of the eight last buildings at Oxford have been financed using the money which the university had as its share of companies.’’
There had been a realisation that academics starting businesses wouldn’t be the ones shirking research or teaching duties, he said.
‘‘So there has been a sea change in attitudes and that’s been throughout the UK, and you are beginning to see that in Europe. It has always seemed to me that to take science right the way through to being used in everyday practice is a fantastic way to succeed in science. I am proud that my science is now used in 6000 hospitals around the world.’’
Brady said he didn’t get much advice. ‘‘I screwed up in every single way imaginable, even to the point of screwing up [the] screwing up.
‘‘By some luck I imagined to get through and sell a company and I learnt a hell of a lot.’’
Now, Brady says, rarely two weeks go by without someone asking him about forming a business.
‘‘It used to be academics and then it became postdoctoral researchers. And by the time I retired as professor of engineering in 2010, I was getting undergraduates beating on my door, wanting to start companies. I regularly see PhD students with great ideas but they don’t know anything about how to write business plans or approach investors.’’
After raising A$20m (NZ$21m) over the past year through its Australian sharemarket float and a capital raising, Brady believes Volpara has enough funding to see it through to break-even point.
‘‘Volpara has made a very good start towards becoming a major presence in supporting breast imaging around the world,’’ Brady says, with ‘‘an enormous amount to play for.’’