“Mature Your PhD”: a challenge for testing potential R&D tech transfer project
About this good practice
With only 25% of doctoral students finding work in academia, Conectus has created Mature your PhD to help PhD students turn their theses into professional opportunities and even create their own job in a spin-off. The advantage is twofold, since their theses often hold hidden potential for tech transfer development. Thus Mature Your PhD helps identifying both innovative research results and young researchers open to business applications. It also increases the volume of projects Conectus can transfer.
With the help of universities and doctoral associations, Conectus informs 2nd and 3rd year PhD students. They can then fill out a simple form, and if selected, present for 30mn to a jury of innovation experts such as the incubator and student entrepreneurship office.
Mature Your PhD is not a competition but an open call where all young researchers with innovative ideas and promising results are offered support for tech transfer. If selected, they win a specific support by Conectus and its innovation partners:
- market analyses linked to the thesis project
- personalized intellectual property advice
- 2 days of training on entrepreneurship to map out their tech project and career and business plan.
Finally, if the criteria of technological development, market, intellectual property and personal career choice are met, Conectus can offer to invest in a maturation project. The PhD graduate can obtain funding for post-doctorate and proof of concept to follow on from this.
Resources needed
Com agency: approx. 40 000€ to create the design and run the first campaign
2 months of work each year by com manager
Multiple contacts with PhD students by Conectus and PUI-A staff
Contacts by doctoral schools and associations
Partnership with a university or an incubator for the training
Evidence of success
After five editions, Conectus considers Mature Your PhD to be a valuable success:
- It maintains contact between Conectus and young researchers, and opens the doors of new labs, facilitating detection of innovative research results.
- A few spin-offs were created by laureates.
- The local ecosystem participates widely and create strong collaborations.
- Mature Your PhD confirmed to be a precursor initiative, as similar ones now exist in most French regions and at national level.
Potential for learning or transfer
The “Mature Your PhD” challenge was novel and original when launched back in 2018. Because it improves valorisation education of the new generation of researchers, it has inspired similar practices in France. It aims at tapping into the tech transfer potential of theses, while most detection actions target established researchers. It is linked with a support and training system for the students, and thus doubles as a professional opportunity action. The PhD students are a very interesting target population, especially since few will remain in academia, as they can bring much to the regions in which they will work. Each year, the challenge attracts 12-15 candidates out of 1500 doctorates.
The programme is easily replicable in any region with higher education establishments and a technology transfer office.
The difficulties faced by this action, namely the challenge of reaching and interesting enough students, is worth sharing as it can be improved upon.
Further information
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Good practice owner
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