Meet David Walsh - New Entrepreneur in Residence (NMES)

Can you tell us a little bit more about your role as the incoming Entrepreneur in Residence in NMES?

My role as Entrepreneur in Residence (EiR) at NMES is about empowering academics to help connect their own innovations with the market and demonstrate their impact to the wider world, through potential onward partnerships or spinouts.

As a university, King’s is a hotbed of research innovation. New research and new ideas look to challenge old problems and open the door to products and skills that will help tackle them, providing commercial and social value.

My role is to help identify and work with the NMES community at any stage of the commercialisation process, working to connect the dots between staff and the private sector. Through events, workshops and mentoring, I’ll help smooth out some of the barriers that exist when getting Intellectual Property (IP) to market. This includes everything from researching the cost-benefit of an IP in a particular market and it’s need, to helping pull in the experts needed to make a minimum viable product.

My role isn’t to make everybody entrepreneurs; it’s not for everyone. Neither will everyone own their own company. But being a confidential and independent expert with a long history of helping academics realise their commercial ambitions, I can work with staff to help make their work more visible to the commercial world and capitalise on all the benefits that has.

Can you tell us a little bit about the value you bring to NMES in terms of your experience and interests?

I have always been interested in improving business performance and in providing solutions that have a societal and global impact. After graduating from King’s (Human Environmental Studies) my career took off with IBM where I was initially an expert in computer-aided-design and manufacturing before moving into international sales. I then became a software generalist, building a software product business which became a leading player in digital transformation, and which continues today in KPMG.

So, while I might say my natural home is somewhere like the Department of Informatics, science and businesses across the spectrum are united by a common theme – they all identify a problem and then try to solve it. In my experience, whether it be solving a software issue or commercialising IP, you have to think big to bring in the teams, capital and partnerships that will get you over the line.

That has been one of my repeated messages in the last five years as I have provided support to the King’s Entrepreneurship Institute as EiR in King’s Business School, mentoring and coaching about 20 to 30 start-ups a year. I am also involved in my own start-ups and have chaired AI businesses and lecture externally on innovation and entrepreneurship. Having a foot in the world of science, I’m a long-standing subscriber to the New Scientist and have a keen interest in the wonder of the subject as well. 

What is the value of research in NMES to the private sector and why should academics engage in this way?  

University partnerships between industry and the private sector are rich and wide ranging. Many top ranked start-ups are created from university research that has sustained investment over long periods – using this partnership to push back the frontiers of our collective knowledge. This hard-earned know-how is extremely valuable, and the potential impact of this research cannot be underestimated.

Enabling and creating impactful IP is a key measure of the health and vibrancy of King’s in its contribution to society and as a measure of its success as an institution, both from a Research Excellence Framework position and as a social enterprise. It is essential that we can surface and deploy this knowledge and apply it to the outside world.

Modern academia also means that researchers are under pressure to demonstrate their individual impact – and the private sector is a key mechanism to show that. Venture capitalists are now waking up to the types of work being done at institutions like King’s with universities being vital to the development of new products in areas like material science and biotech. Industries need academia to guide them to new solutions, and in the process, researchers can get their work off the blackboard and into the world.

If you could give one piece of advice to researchers interested in this work, what would it be and why?

As a researcher you hold an incredible advantage – you are at the forefront of creating new knowledge that can lead to innovative solutions, products and services.  Most entrepreneurs are not actually innovators, but you are. 

As EiR my mission is not to turn you into entrepreneurs, but to use my experience to support you in helping your innovations reach the market. So, my advice is to engage with the journey and to keep an open mind as to where it might lead. People out there want to help these kinds of endeavours, and you can a lot with not a lot of start-up capital if you know who to talk to – you could even have a lot of fun!

Get in touch with David at david.walsh@kcl.ac.uk and book an appointment to meet him here.