Scientist to Founder: Physical Innovation Edition

Could your PhD be the best place to start a hardware company?

For physicists, chemists or engineers, access to lab space, scientific instrumentation, grants and years of foundational research can make university labs an unusually good place to develop new technologies. Yet scientists can start companies too early, and struggle to launch without strong data and a robust proof of concept. The PhD, as a structure, was designed to train future academics, not necessarily to produce CEOs.

Whether or not a project becomes a company also rarely comes down to the scientist alone. Supervisors are often key enablers of venture creation, but can also kill initiatives before they gain any momentum. Can group leaders be more intentional about establishing a culture of company creation within their labs?

Join Conception X and Positron for a conversation that puts both sides of that relationship on one stage: two founders who have taken physical innovation out of the lab and are now building, and two principal investigators whose labs have produced multiple spin-outs. Followed by drinks and open networking.

WE WILL DIG INTO

What a lab built to generate companies looks like, and what the PI’s role is when it works

What founders wish they had known before leaving the lab: proof of concept, first prototypes, regulatory hurdles, etc.

How you can turn your physical innovation discovery into a commercially viable technology that can scale

WHO THIS IS FOR

PhD students, postdocs and early-career scientists thinking about building a company, early-stage hardware founders, and PIs looking to enable more venture creation.

SPEAKERSTil Schlotter, Co-founder and CEO, UNOMRTil studied engineering at ETH Zurich and developed the core interface nanopore technology behind UNOMR during his PhD there. He co-founded the ETH spin-off to bring single-molecule protein analysis to healthcare, pharmaceutical development and food science.

Manuel Häußler, Co-founder and Scientific Lead, aevoloopManuel is a chemist who completed his PhD and did his postdoc at the University of Konstanz, where his work on fully recyclable plastics was published in Nature and won the German Thesis Award. He co-founded aevoloop to bring that chemistry to market: high-performance plastics with built-in breaking points that can be recycled back into their building blocks.

ORGANISERS

Conception X is the home for Europe’s venture scientists. Since launching in 2018, Conception X has supported more than 800 PhDs, postdocs and early-career researchers from 92 universities to launch over 220 science companies that have raised £270+ million in investment and grants. Their £1 billion portfolio includes Rahko, Solve Intelligence, Humanloop and Infinitopes.

Positron is an early-stage venture fund for scientists and technical founders who want to turn bold ideas into real companies. They work closely with teams grounded in deep scientific expertise and are drawn to ambitious solutions for some of the most important challenges facing human and planetary health.