VIDEO SERIES
Founders with Purpose
It takes passion, resilience and adaptability to build a business.
Spinouts allow academic researchers to take their innovation from the university environment to the outside world, in the form of new products, services and technologies.
But what motivates an academic founder to create a business? What impact do they expect it to have beyond the university setting?
In our series Founders with Purpose we hear from four outstanding academic founders about their motivations in building a spinout business from the North of England, and what advice they would give others thinking of making that same journey.
Not all academic researchers choose to become CEO, yet Ben White did just this in founding the infrared sensor technology business Phlux, a spinout from the University of Sheffield.
Hear more about Ben’s story and his belief in Sheffield’s growing technology innovation ecosystem.
Professor Helen Gleeson, OBE is an experimental physicist working in soft matter. She is Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Leeds.
Helen and her team discovered the world’s first synthetic material that is auxetic at the molecular level, leading to the creation of Auxetec a spinout from the University of Leeds.
Hear more about Helen’s story and partnership with Auxetec CEO Rob Gunn.
Professor Alex Frangi and Dr Zeike Taylor are two international academic researchers who came to the University of Leeds and decided to revolutionise the medical devices industry.
Hear more about their path to co-founding the deeptech company adsilico.
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Why we created Founders with Purpose
Northern Gritstone CEO Duncan Johnson on his passion for supporting academic founders from the Northern Triangle universities on their path to success and his belief in profit with purpose and a Silicon Valley of the North.