In this episode, I had the opportunity to talk with Megan Steele, from CGIAR Accelerate for Impact Platform. Perhaps more accurately, she spoke with me as I offered my thoughts on Scouting and Mobilising Intellectual Property.
We frame the conversation around a series of questions ‘What problem are you solving?’, ‘How can you solve this problem and create value for stakeholders?’ through to ‘What does your solution / contribution look like?’ I reflect on the phenomenon of technologies looking for problems to solve rather than starting with the problem in mind. A concept we often discuss with guests and indeed, with our partners at Spiegare, is the Value Pool and the importance of considering the breadth of partnerships needed to bring technologies into utilisation and the distribution of benefits among those Value Pool participants.
While the webinar involved some slides, I hope that the conversation and subsequent questions catalyse some thoughts around the early considerations in mobilising Intellectual Property. The webinar is also accessible as are the other related webinars from Maurice Moloney and Anne Roulin.
Transcript
CB: Hello. My name is Cameron Begley and welcome to Tech Transfer Talk. Today we have an unusual podcast in the sense that it was someone else interviewing me. Recently, Megan Steele from CGIAR (for those who want full acronyms, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research), interviewed me about tech transfer. And some of the early steps that are taken on the journey of innovation, and specifically about getting agricultural innovation out into the hands of farmers, producers who are in emerging economies and in places such as sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and South Asia. I had a great conversation with Megan. Many people were on the webinar, joining myself and Megan, as we spent 30 minutes talking about these issues. I hope you enjoy this podcast, which is the recording of the webinar, and look forward to any feedback we receive.
MS: Hello everyone, and welcome to Venture Out Events brought to you by CGIAR’s Accelerate for Impact Platform (A4IP). I’m Megan Steele, your moderator for today’s webinar. Today’s focus is Scouting and Mobilising Intellectual Property: Unlocking Innovation Horizons. As part of CGIAR’s commitment to championing innovation impact, the Accelerate for Impact Platform is thrilled to present this miniseries of Venture Out Events exploring complementary approaches to agri-technology transfer. Our guest speaker today is Cameron Begley, Director of Spiegare, who will guide us through strategies to identify, harness and mobilise intellectual property for maximum impact in agritech and food systems. Venture Out Events are organised by CGIAR’s accelerator platform Adventure Space, powered by the Alliance of Biodiversity International & CIAT.
A4IP aims to co-design, accelerate and de-risk investments in technologies for sustainable agriculture and climate action, fostering creative engagement with the private sector and other non-traditional partners. This webinar is part of a new miniseries for Venture Out Events dedicated to expanding the horizons of technology transfer in agrifood systems. Across three 30-minute events this month, we will showcase different approaches to deriving impact from science. In doing so, innovators can equip themselves to better understand the potential of technology transfer to bridge their research ideas from the lab to the market. Venture Out aims to encourage learning, connection and inspire the entrepreneurial mindset across CGIAR scientists and collaborators. Together with the success stories of our guests and your participation, we can spark a larger conversation around agricultural technology transfer. With that being said, we encourage your active input into the event, so please submit your questions and feedback in the Zoom Q&A function for us to draw on in the discussion coming up. But first, we will welcome Cameron Begley, Director at Spiegare, who will kick things off with a presentation on unlocking innovation horizons through scouting and mobilising intellectual property. Thanks for joining us, Cameron. The floor is yours.
CB: Thank you very much, Megan and I will share my screen. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today, wherever you may be around the world. My name is Cameron Begley, and I run a tech transfer advisory firm which has deep expertise in where science and research and technology meet markets. What I hope to share with you today is a little bit about scouting, and some of the questions we ask ourselves as intellectual property comes to us from the research community. And also, some of the questions we ask ourselves as industry approaches us, looking to assemble solutions to the problems that they face in serving the markets that they offer their products to.
So, market research and engagement. It’s a series of questions that follow in this short slide. And the first question we ask ourselves is, what problem are you solving? It’s important to define that problem as best as you can as you set out on a particular endeavour, body of research, market investigation. It’s important that you talk to people. It’s very all good and well to read the literature. All good and well, to speak with not only your colleagues internally, but reaching out externally is a really important part of articulating the problem that you’re solving. And then how does your technology help? The technology that you are working on, the particular perspective you bring, the technological solution, how does that actually solve the problem? Reflect on what you’re hearing and whether, indeed, your technology does solve the problem. Or perhaps it only solves part of a problem, or it could solve the problem if other technologies were brought to bear around the component that you have. Critically, why can you solve this problem instead of someone else? So, is there something about your particular approach that creates a unique position, a unique sales proposition, in fact, it’s called in marketing terms, that makes your solution distinguished from better than someone else’s. It might be quicker to market, it might be more ready, it might do things more efficiently. But identifying what is unique, helps understand or helps you understand why you can solve this problem more than anyone else. And indeed, a subset of that conversation is with somebody else. So again, coming back to this notion of having part of the solution. So, how can you solve this problem and create value for stakeholders? Very important to think about the value that you create as well as solving the problem. A solution will not be taken up if it solves a problem, but it is more expensive than the incumbent solution. There’s no place for that. There has to be something that creates a value, and value cannot only be monetary; it could be a time value, it could be risk, and that you make something less risky for someone. But it must do both solving and creating value. And what does your solution or contribution look like? You may only actually have part of the answer, as I touched on earlier, and integration of the complete solution may be the key to delivering your part of the puzzle.
Philosophically, it is important to be a solution to a problem. Not a solution seeking a problem. So, in embarking upon research, there is absolutely a place for mission-based research, the curiosity-driven research and finding new ways of solving problems. But that in and of itself may not be a solution to a current problem. It may be work that enables the solution to future problems, bringing something forward in the sense of tech transfer or commercialisation. It needs to be a solution to a problem. Hence the question we asked ourselves: what problem are you trying to solve?
In bringing a solution to market, there’s more to this than the person you’re immediately dealing with. So, we may have a technology and we license that technology to a company that breeds seed. Fantastic. But that particular company, that organisation, has other people that it sells to. And we have to consider all of the people that will derive value from the solution that we bring to market. And that not only includes producers or intermediaries or the people we license to, but the licensee might have other partners it has to bring in. For example, if it’s grain, they need people to move that grain around. They might need to isolate that grain and keep its identity preserved. There are consumers that will want these products. The consumers want these solutions that are and are prepared to pay for the solutions being implemented. Government may play a part through regulation. Other research partners may play a part in terms of bringing other parts of the solution forward. Community and social license plays a part. If the community doesn’t accept the general premise or general approach, resistance will emerge through through the notion of social license. And what is really important to recognise is that value must be created for all the participants in the value pool. If there are points where negative value is created or no value is created, they’ll be points of resistance that will limit the ability or limit the uptake of a particular technology or particular solution to a particular problem. So, we must be thinking about value for everyone that’s involved in the system. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be monetary value. As I mentioned earlier, it could be a time value, it could be de-risking value, it could be convenience- another form of time. But some sort of value must be created to de-bottleneck the uptake of the technology.
Technology transfer is complex. So, any organisation that’s involved in technology transfer needs to think about the resources it needs to drive this. It requires a concerted effort to move technology from the bench to the field. And it takes time, and it takes certain capabilities, and it takes certain processes. They may be governance processes, they may be processes in proving it out with partners. But there are all these steps that need to take place. And the decision to do tech transfer has to align with the ambitions of an organisation’s research and tech transfer business growth efforts. Irrespective of the tech transfer strategy, there has to be a culture that drives relationships from which transaction’s form. The business of tech transfer, the business of commercialisation, the business of taking science to market to solve problems, is predicated in relationships. If you think about it transactionally, it’s unlikely to progress very far because relationships are needed to drive trust and underpin the patience that’s required to bring these things through, what is typically a very non-linear and lumpy process as new things and discovered obstacles arise, etc., etc. And examples of culture, there are a couple of references there. People are worried about loss and some people do things because of fear of missing out. Sometimes, we find organisations are just unable to say ‘no’. And if you don’t say ‘no’, it limits the resources you have to say ‘yes’, or to pick the things that you should focus on. So, there are lots of ways that culture impedes tech transfer, but the culture must align to the ambition in order to drive this process and drive these relationships and these successes, removing technology into the market to solve problems.
There are just a handful of reflections that I’d like to leave you with today, just as we skip through the very high level of technology transfer. Relationships, as I’ve just said, upon which transactions can be built. Trust and the philosophy of no surprises. In my experience, it is perfectly okay to tell a collaborator that things have gone wrong. It’s better to tell them and manage that than not tell them, and everyone gets a rather nasty shock sometime in the future. It’s important to be fair. Not only allocating the rewards of success, but also the risks with getting to success. And time. Time and timeliness. Time is the only truly non-renewable resource. You actually can renew fossil fuels. It just takes 60 million years, but you can’t renew time, so value it. And value the time that your collaborators are putting in, and value the time it takes to get things done. And what I refer to as veracity, which is simply doing what you say, setting the expectations on what can be done, and understanding the limits of what can be done. And that last point, typically refers to the limits of what can be done, not only thermodynamically or scientifically, but within the laws of biology and chemistry and physics, but also understanding the limits of an organisation that not only you might work in, but knowing the limits of the organisation you’re partnering with and through relationships, you’ll understand those limitations, and that will actually allow for a good equilibrium and a good trust to be built to make these things come about.
In my experience in agriculture, from the first experiment to getting serious uptake in the market, 15 years is not uncommon; 20 years is pretty normal. And I know that’s a rather frightening prospect, but that’s about what it looks like. At least based on my observations from this part of the world, from 10 or 12 years of CSIRO and ten years doing this advisory work to a lot of agribusiness, to a lot of food, to a lot of bio-based economy organisations. So, patience is important. The last thing I’d like to leave you with is that we run a podcast series called Tech Transfer Talk, and we explore a lot of these issues with guests from around the world, talking about case studies, of which a few are listed there. But we talk about the importance of relationships, of due diligence, of how startups work, on how innovation policy works. And I invite you to have a listen to some of these. There’s 30 or so out there now, and there are a couple of QR codes for those that are enthusiastically using their phones to either find our website on the right or jump onto the podcast on the left. And with that, Megan, thank you and thank you all for joining me today and Megan today, and I look forward to your questions.
MS: Thank you so much, Cameron. That was a really enlightening first look into the world of tech transfer. And as you were showing us at the end, you know, there’s so many topics to go from here. It’s really just the tip of the iceberg. So, as a reminder to our live participants, please submit your questions, reflections, feedback, input, any type of comment you want to make now into the Zoom Q&A function because this is your chance to steer the conversation. So, what unique challenges do you face as an innovator that involve technology transfer? Please share them with us and we will tackle them together now as we get into the discussion. So, meanwhile, while you’re coming up with those great questions, I’ll start with one of my own.
CB: Please.
MS: What do you think really sets CGIAR apart from other academic or development institutions that engage in this kind of technology transfer? You know, what might be our challenges or assets associated with the positioning that we have?
CB: No, that’s a great question. So, I would put it to you that the breadth of the applied work that you do, and the intimacy and the connection that you have in the different jurisdictions gives you a unique set of perspectives. One of the things that I think brought us into our conversations with CGIAR, was just the depth and breadth around tropical agriculture. And I think this is an underappreciated part of the agricultural production systems around the world. If I reflect, perhaps very much from a, developed economy, Caucasian perspective, we see all these start-ups and innovators and venture capital firms, and they’re all pursuing large, broad acre temperate crops. That’s what they do. They do maize and soy and cotton. And we don’t really feel that there’s enough, real focus and real effort that’s put into seizing innovation opportunities to drive productivity improvements and indeed, social outcomes for tropical agriculture. This is an enormous opportunity and, in my view, absolutely critical when we look at the effects of climate change, and the way that that changing climate is going to impact those jurisdictions, I think it’s an extraordinary opportunity.
MS: I think so as well. And I think this sort of, you know, reflects what you were talking about in one of the last slides, the five principles relationships, especially CGIAR is really rich with relationships with local partners. And this will be critical in transferring technologies.
CB: Absolutely. Cannot understate the importance of strong and deep relationships.
MS: That’s great. That’s great. I’ll move on to another question here. So, how can our organisation really effectively balance, like you were saying, technology push versus market pull? So, it’s very clear that we want to, you know, solve the right problem. But a bit of times, in curiosity-driven research, it’s a bit different. So, where’s the balance there?
CB: That’s it’s a super question, actually. And the word I’d like to use instead of balance is equilibrium. It’s an equilibrium. We need discovery research. It’s, you know, we can’t be completely applied in the way we think about these problems. We must always be thinking a little bit about mission directed, which is a little bit more, you know, tech push oriented. The challenge in that equilibrium, I find, is in very simplistic terms, is the ability to say ‘no’. What’s really important is to recognise that some science which is fantastic in terms of its quality and the depth of thought and the way that the work is being done, is not destined for direct commercialisation or tech transfer. It’s enabling. The ability or the notion of tech transfer is not a reflection necessarily on the quality of the science. That’s not the conversation I believe we’re having. The conversation we’re having is ‘does the science solve a problem?’ And if it doesn’t, publish it; and allow that to then amplify through other channels, and you will find others will find it is the partial solution to another problem that they’re solving, or look at it as an enabler to other solutions. So, this is an equilibrium. And it is quite a skill to be able to cycle through that equilibrium. Some research groups just tend to be more mission-directed, curiosity-driven. Some are more mission-directed but applied-driven. So, there is there is an art to doing that, but it’s that ability to say ‘no’ and to say, ‘listen, this isn’t destined for tech transfer. Let’s publish. Who can we work with that might be able to take this somewhere else?’ That’s the challenge. That’s the discipline, particularly with limited resources.
MS: Absolutely. And I think that makes me, you know, think of the strength of multidisciplinary, and the fact that, you know, even if it’s curiosity-driven research, if you want to work with someone else to really bring all the pieces of the puzzle together in organisations like CGIAR, where we have local partners, where you have different research institutions collaborating with. There’s a lot of value to be maximised there in that. We can work with people from different perspectives that might just come up with a solution that wouldn’t otherwise be discovered.
CB: Absolutely. I would consider it a very rare outcome that a single discipline can now solve a single problem in a single sweep of the pen. I think that’s pretty unlikely, particularly when one considers the dynamics of, social uptake, social license and the constant adaptation of products to suit different markets, different geographies, different social situations. It’s very unlikely that one solution will do all of that.
MS: Certainly. We’ve got a question here in the chat. It says, in terms of the relationships upon which transactions are built, what can scientists do to ensure that they are trustworthy and reliable, aside from upholding scientific rigour?
CB: Yeah.
MS: Any reflections on this?
CB: Yeah. So, that’s a very good question. I would bring that, simply put, because I would suggest that answer is simply doing what you say and setting the expectations around what it is that can be done. There is always a risk of overpromising, and we always must start with ambition. Right? We must start with ambition when we set out on these research projects. But it’s important that if things are changing, be up front about that, manage those expectations, communicate things are changing. Because I’ve not yet come across a project plan that actually is the same six months later, maybe three months later, because you learn things and it’s fantastic. And then as you learn things, you start to change the plan. And that’s the relationship piece and that’s the veracity piece, and that’s the trust piece. People can, in my experience, people are very comfortable with learning things and things changing. What they’re not comfortable with is not knowing about it and suddenly finding they’re in a place that they didn’t know they were in. That’s the key, I think. So, the rigour of your work, I would consider a given, given the organisations within the CGIAR umbrella. I don’t normally think about that question with certain institutions. But it’s that communication of where you’re at, and it’s okay if it goes off track and changes direction; it’s okay if it doesn’t work out. But there’s a little niggle in there, of course, of what if the funding stops? Yeah, but if we’re all honest with each other, there’s probably another question that needs answering that we can turn our mind to.
MS: Yeah. I think transparency is, is especially relevant, going into talking about specifically, tech transfer in the Global South. So, I’ll call in this other question from the chat as well. It’s asking, in your view, what are the key constraints to technology transfer from the perspective of the recipients and demanders in ACP countries? So, what do you recommend to sort of overcome those specific challenges in context?
CB: Yeah, that’s a very interesting question. So, from the from the perspective of a recipient. The challenge, I think, is…So, imagine that we’ve transferred a black box, for want of a better word. Can I adapt that black box to serve the markets and the customers that I serve? And the challenge will be that it’s unlikely that where we’re at the moment of tech transfer is ready to productise – which is the idea of turning it, bundling it, up into a complete product that a customer will pay for. So, the challenge will be firstly, okay, what do I now have to do? And then, the second part of that is, is keeping that communication open so that that adaptation and that, ongoing improvement can take place. There’re two examples I’d like to share. One is that we did a podcast with Bay State Milling, a couple of years back, and we talked about what happens after the deal. And it was really interesting because as someone who licenses technology, you just sort of sign the deal and walk off. It’s sort of not your problem anymore. But it really is because it’s a relationship that you’ve formed, that, that you now should nurture. But that technology that Ed talked about, it wasn’t completely ready, took them another two years to actually get the technology ready to go to market. Really interesting story. The other, and within that, is that notion of just throwing things over the fence and hoping they’ll be okay. And they’re not. Yeah. So, I think from a recipient’s perspective, it’s having that door open to come back and say ‘yeah, but it’s not quite right. We need we need to change this, or we need to change that. Or have you thought about this because our clients are saying that we all thought it was going to do X, but it’s not. It’s doing x minus four.’ It’s the relationship.
MS: It’s all coming back to relationships. And I mean, we’re rounding out the time a bit for this quick conversation, but I’d like to end on a note of talking about, why culture is so important and how we can sort of cultivate more of an entrepreneurial mindset, in scientists, how can we have that that ambition and incentive to transfer technologies and really move them from lab to market?
CB: For my part, I think I think drawing the distinction between the quality of the science and the tech transfer outcomes are important. We shouldn’t conflate these two things. We should recognise high quality science for what it is. And if it doesn’t make it, that’s okay. We should draw that distinction because it will encourage, I think it will encourage the research community to engage without feeling threatened that something doesn’t make it commercially. They should be encouraged to keep engaging. The other thing I’d say is, the chances of someone entering the tech transfer sphere, if you like, or wanting to do this and having their single best idea the first time they turn up, is really slim. So, we have to find a way to embrace when things go wrong. And there’s a phrase that everyone I suspect has heard called ‘fast fail’. I really don’t like that phrase. It’s the wrong mentality. It should be fast learning. If we learn fast, that will keep the door open and keep us coming back. So, I think that spirit is about learning from the experiences of what tech transfer works, but also distinguishing between really good quality science, which is enabling, and science, which may or may not be like, we may not have split the atom, but we might have actually solved the problem that unlocks a whole lot of value for a whole lot of people. And it may not be the thing that gets into Nature, but it might be the thing that creates a lot of value for a lot of people. And I think drawing those distinctions is important.
MS: Thanks, Cameron. What a fantastic note to end on and it’s clear that there is loads more to discuss, so that’s why I encourage everyone here to join us for the next instalments of the Technology Transfer miniseries that are coming up this month and keep the momentum going. So, next Wednesday, February 21st, we’ll tackle entrepreneurship in agribusiness with Maurice Moloney, founder at Agritech Knowledge. And in two weeks, Thursday, February 29th, Anne Roulin, President at Agripreneurship Alliance will showcase capacity sharing through the training of trainers. So, for more information on these events to share your feedback, reach out to Cameron, our speaker, reach out to the Accelerate for Impact Platform and Innovations at CGIAR.org. So, I’d like to extend a big thanks to Cameron from Spiegare for teaming up with us for this fantastic Venture Out event and highlighting such potential for CGIAR and other scientists to trailblaze these new pathways to impact. So, thanks again to everyone who joined us live and see you next time.
CB: That was me talking with Megan Steele from CGIAR, exploring some of the issues with innovation and technology transfer in agriculture and in emerging economies. I hope you can join us for our next podcast. Talk to you then.