"It is my hope that we can engage the Indian companies with London's academia and take some of these technologies into the commercial arena."

- Dr Jolyon White, technology consultant, London Technology Network

In July this year, Dr Jolyon White, technology consultant, London Technology Network, was in India to attend Bangalore Bio. In a freewheeling chat with N Suresh and Ch. Srinivas Rao, Dr White told BioSpectrum how LTN works and invites Indian companies to engage London Technology Network (LTN) to their advantage.

What are the services that you offer?
LTN is about helping any industry anywhere in the world, which has a technology-intensive component engage with the universities and academics in London. You have to tailor the service you offer according to the type of enquiry that the industry asks. The most easily understood type of problem is a company asking for carrying out a specific piece of work for a specific need. This is a relatively straightforward enquiry to handle as the academics are competing directly with CROs (Contract Research Organizations).

The deeper problem though is when companies are interested in learning about things that are outside their areas of expertise. This is an area where the academics can play an important role. It is because they work in this area of core understanding and wholly defined problems. They tend to have the abilities to foresee where the new technologies can go better than somebody who is within the company and who does not have the time to consider these things. When you bring the academic together with the commercial organization, he can see where the technology is going and the commercial threat and opportunity. These are the valuable things that get incorporated into the planned strategy.

Are these enquires handled differently?
These two types of queries are handled differently. They are slightly different in process and very different in terms of documentation. So for the project type of enquiry, which is "I know what I do not know", we handle this effectively as a preliminary project brief. It is made of phases. These are passed to the academic communities and they respond. The expertise enquires are normally not laid out in the same way. They are laid out as a knowledge area that a company wants to know more about.

In terms of process, when you feedback on a project enquiry, you feedback very precisely as to what each academic has said. The feedback on an expertise enquiry produces a technology landscape document. We lay out exactly what each of the groups in doing and it comes to the company as a single document as opposed to multiple responses.

Why is it important to have an organization like LTN?
London has somewhere between 40-60 academic institutions, all carrying out good technical research. They are split between London University (about 30 colleges), another 5-10 other universities and 5-10 other institutes, which are not part of any universities. All of them operate relatively autonomously and tend to have their own commercial offices for out-licensing. So the problem arises, when a company wants to find an academic in London. How does it identify him? It will be difficult even for a company, which is based in the UK, to find its way through that many colleges. For a company, which is overseas in mainland Europe or the US, it is difficult for them to spend the time to hunt around all the colleges. So an organization like LTN becomes very important because we help the companies find their academics of choice.

What is your structure?
We have put in place 110 people. They are called business fellows. Business fellows work for LTN half-a-day a week. The other four-and-half days a week, they do full time research. They are generally in the lecturer grade and above. They are fairly senior people and act as eyes and years of LTN. They help us understand what is happening in their circles (about colleagues) and collect information about the current, past, and future research.

What is the incentive offered to the business fellows?
We pay them. Besides they are keen to learn about industry. They are not necessarily entrepreneurs, but they have to be in business facing mode and have the desire to work with industry. They are carefully selected on the basis of interviews. We do this with the blessing of the institutions. Universities are both the stakeholders and resource providers.

Why does the industry want to work with London?
The largest chunk of the UK's research funding goes into London. On a global scale, London is probably the largest life science research community outside of the US. So it is a serious global player in life sciences research. I think this could be of great value to Indian companies too. The total funding to manage research is about $5 billion. In terms of employees, about half of the researchers would be in life sciences. The number of researchers in the top two grades in London alone would be 4,600. The other important thing to realize is that in London there are a lot of enabling technologies. I guess we set up the world's first stem cell bank.

What are the top areas of expertise?
Oncology, neurology and cardiovascular are the top areas. There has been some significant work in the infectious diseases area too. London is very strong on teaching hospitals. We have the two largest hospitals of Europe in London. There is a large population of 7 million people who volunteer for recruitment for clinical trial of drugs. Also as the hospital network is good, the translation of research and medicine into hospitals is another clear area of focus. And it is my hope that we can engage the Indian companies with this expertise and take some of these technologies into the commercial arena.

I understand there is genuine willingness in London's colleges to find good ways to engage with companies. Companies compete on knowledge, structure and process. And they are changing the structure and processes all the time in the light of new ideas coming from the business schools. The universities have to accept the fact that companies are going to engage in different ways and different structures. What we are seeing happen in London is a number of institutions or centers being set up which run across colleges and universities. For instance the London Center for Nanotechnology spans University College London and Imperial College London. So it sits across both. That brings together a lot of skills from the two colleges. Not just main stream nanotechnology, but also people who are oncologists, neurologists, etc and thus making it an attractive center of excellence for the industry to engage with. Again, LTN can help companies, which are distant from London, engage with the London Nanotechnology Center.

Are there any success stories on account of such engagements?
In general terms, in the project type of enquiry, we completed a project in the drug formulation; in the medical imaging area, we completed a project for a company, which wanted some beta-site testing. There has been interest in the monoclonal antibodies, vaccinology and target identification of the drugs, including vaccines.

We had about 150 enquires (till July). Of those a little over half are in research areas, and the rest are sitting in other areas like licensing, beta testing, consultancy and recruitment. At this stage we do not have hard data on the conversion rate. But I believe it is better than the rule "tenth", which most B2B operations run through. I am confident that it is greater than 10 percent.

What is the modus operandi of your work?
We operate a market pull model. What we want from the company is an enquiry. Think of it as a structural problem solving process. The first thing would be a need identification process and then we define and generate it. We get that down to a brief. If you like it, then we request for a proposal. We then search our database and find out which academics are likely to be interested in this enquiry. We feed the enquiry out through the relevant business fellow, who takes it to that academics and asks them to respond. The responses are generally in 100-200 words, which are then sent back to the company and then we set up the meeting for the company with the academic. At that point we leave the situation. We take no financial or intellectual property stake. It is for the academics to decide. If it is an expertise type of enquiry, in a similar front end we try and identify the need as best as we can.

We do other activities as well. One, we don't just feed the business enquiry through the business fellow. We also have a password protected website that is accessible to all the 110 business fellows and technology transfer offices. This helps in capturing more responses and more success rates.

Two, we run networking events. Once a month, we host an event, usually in the evening, around a theme. At these events there are about 100 people. Half of them are academics and half of them are companies. The academics are senior people and the company people are the managers. One part of the evening is dedicated to presentations and the other half is networking. At the networking, industry is asked to interact with the academia and industry-to-industry or academia-to-academia interactions are discouraged. A number of relations start that way.

What's next in store from LTN?
The next big activity is to establish the London Innovation Relay Centre (IRC) Network. This is an EU-funded initiative to assist in the successful exploitation of European R&D. The main objective of the network is to enhance European business competitiveness by strengthening technology and the innovation base of Europe's SMEs.

There are currently 70 IRCs in 31 countries including new and existing EU member states, Iceland, Israel, Norway and Switzerland. These centers have been created to facilitate the transfer of innovative technologies to and from European companies or research departments.

LTN was awarded the contract to run a London-based IRC in April 2004. This is a £3.5 million project across four years. The new London Innovation Relay Centre will increase technology transfer between Greater London and Europe by building on LTN's existing strengths. LTN will be a valuable node of the IRC Network.