As we near the end of the year, I’d like to offer my sincere thanks for your interest in Imperial’s enterprising ecosystem. Whether you’re a longstanding partner to Imperial, or your involvement extends only to reading this newsletter, I appreciate your membership of our community.
We have had a productive year in Imperial Enterprise. As ever, we've connected Imperial staff and students with external organisations in a range of fields to unlock the power of science. And we've made several moves to further develop the infrastructure we use to support innovation and entrepreneurship. You can see some highlights from the past year below.
We hope to maintain this pace in the year ahead. To help you understand how your organisation can make use of Imperial's resources and expertise, we’ve produced a new guide:How Imperial Enterprise can power your business. I look forward to further conversations on this topic in 2023.
Until then, I wish you a peaceful Christmas, and a very happy new year.
In a report delivered through Imperial Consultants for MCS Charitable Foundation – and widely reported in the media – Imperial energy experts shared insights into sustainable domestic heating, saying that heat pumps should be a priority in the next decade as hydrogen won’t be ready for gas grids until the 2030s.
We offered businesses insights into the ways that academic experts are helping businesses like theirs transition to net zero carbon and other forms of pollution in a campaign by Imperial Enterprise in collaboration with the College's Transition to Zero Pollution initiative.
Curiosity met credibility as Imperial experts shared scientifically informed visions of the world in 2041, having worked with dedicated foresight practice Imperial Tech Foresight to uncover the future of computation and energy.
We’re familiar with the sustainability benefits of business models like car clubs in which we pay to access products instead of owning them. But what if manufacturers merely borrowed the materials needed to build their products? Dr Marco Aurisicchio presented the business concept in an Agenda blog for the World Economic Forum.
In a collaboration with fashion house Fendi and its parent company LVMH, SynBio researchers began to develop a lab-grown fur alternative made sustainably from genetically modified yeast and replicating the qualities of the original material.
To help our extended community of business partners, entrepreneurs, investors, staff and students more easily navigate Imperial’s enterprising ecosystem, we launched our two new ecosystem portals.
We offered student and alumni founders an opportunity to ‘pay it forward’ once they exit by pledging to support future entrepreneurs and innovators through a philanthropic gift. The Entrepreneurs’ Pledge is to designed to help create a self-reinforcing entrepreneurial ecosystem.
We shared news of a new technology, available for commercialisation by industrial partners, that could help accelerate the development of advanced cancer treatments that harness naturally occurring immune cells by rapidly identifying the most effective t-cells.
Profiling Imperial, the Guardian said that “Imperial’s rep as a place for go-getters and entrepreneurs continues to flourish”, describing our entrepreneurship hub the Enterprise Lab as the “crown jewel in an institution that prides itself on blending business with the sciences.”
Three papers jointly authored by researchers from Imperial and BASF, the world’s largest chemical producer, were accepted by prestigious machine learning conference NeurIPS. The techniques for optimising experimental design were the latest outputs from a major partnership with BASF covering chemistry, chemical engineering and computing.
Medicine researchers shared news of a new partnership with EnteroBiotix, a company that produces capsules containing gut bacteria that provide an alternative to intestinal matter transplants. The researchers aim to gain new insights into the gut microbiome and to test the potential of the capsules to reduce infections and improve outcomes of cancer treatment.
Notpla, a startup founded by Imperial students in 2014 to produce biodegradable packaging from seaweed, won £1 million in the Prince of Wales’ Earthshot Prize in the category ‘Build a Waste Free World’. The company has supplied its packaging to the London Marathon and takeaway company Just Eat.
Jawdrop is White City Innovation District's inaugural life sciences summit for academics, startups, scale-ups, enterprise and investors.
Photo at top shows Selly Shafira, MSc student in the Imperial College Business School and co-founder of startup Banoo, at the Imperial Enterprise Lab. The company won student entrepreneurship competition WE Innovate in 2022 for a technology designed to help fish farmers in Indonesia be more productive. Photo by James Tye.
