The role of ERC Funds schemes and their effects in the technology transfer process: a case study on team dynamics and collaborations between startups and industries

Evaluation, planning and feasibility study of an innovative productTechnology transfer is the process that disseminate technology between universities, governments and industries. It has been utilized for a long time now, but in the last years the volume of researches has increased while the number of projects successfully exploited in the market haven’t, leading to the need to rethink the process itself. In this work we present the technology transfer process from universities to the market, the actors that can help or operate it and the main variables that can lead to success or failure when a research based invention (RBI) needs to become an innovation. In particular, we are going to focus on the biomedical and the pharmaceutical industries, a field in which innovation has three specific conditions: an high level of uncertainties that lead to an high technological risk, enormous costs associated to the development of a new drug or treatment and long time - often over 10 years - before eventually getting a payback. For these reasons, research funds are often provided by governments. In this work we are going to analyze the different funding schemes of the European Research Council (ERC), comparing the entity and the duration of the grants but also the education of the Principal Investigators (PI), their industrial experiences and the number of publications, awards and patents they got during their career. We will focus in particular on the utility and results of Proof of Concept (PoC), a smaller but very specific grant that was recently made in order to study the feasibility and potential of a specific technology and bring it on the market on a limited amount of time. We argue that the success of a project is not only determined by the financial help that it gets, but mostly from the qualities of the PI, her/his teams and their ability to learn and adapt their knowledge to an industrial environment, with rules and logics that are totally different from the academic context. Finally, we are going to do a case study to present a practical example of the concepts described above. We will present the work of Valentina Cauda’s team, researchers and entrepreneurs of Politecnico di Torino who won either an ERC Starting Grant and an ERC Proof of Concept. We will see how the whole team evolved and improved through three different projects and how approaches can and should be different based on the technology peculiarities and market opportunities. In the end we are going to see the cooperation dynamics with an industry and we will explore the strategies that can be adopted in order to better exploit the growth opportunities.