Accelerating innovation with the Emerging Technologies Competition
The Emerging Technologies Competition is back for a fourth year and it’s bigger than ever before.
We first launched our innovation initiative in 2013, as a way to accelerate the commercialisation of the cutting-edge research taking place in small companies and universities. Although the essentials of the competition have remained the same – with winners receiving support from leading multinational companies, PR opportunities and a cash prize – we’ve been developing it every year, to maximise its impact. So far, the 2013-2014 winners have raised a combined £16 million and still counting.
Back in the competition’s first year, three winners were selected from the UK. Four years on, we are expecting applications from across Europe and will have 12 winning technologies out of 40 shortlisted entrants. The winners will be given the chance to work with our eleven partners: AkzoNobel, AstraZeneca, Croda, GE Healthcare, GlaxoSmithKline, Procter & Gamble, Schlumberger, Pfizer, Unilever, Aramco and Johnson Matthey.
New category
To make the competition accessible to all branches of chemistry, we’ve introduced a brand new competition category this year, food & water. This will be in addition to our existing categories of health & wellbeing, energy & environment and materials.
We want the Emerging Technologies Competition to support as many entrepreneurs as possible and now offer all 40 shortlisted entrants an entire day of specialised business training. We’ve also merged the competition final with our flagship industry event – Chemistry Means Business 2016 – allowing each shortlisted entrant a chance to showcase their technology at an exhibition and make crucial connections across the chemistry-using industry and beyond.
Previous winners
We keep in touch with our past winners and have been delighted by the success they’ve experienced as a result of the competition. This has included securing new commercial contracts, winning major funding bids, including Innovate UK and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and increasing the number of employees.
In 2013, University of Oxford’s Professor Kylie Vincent was one of the winners of the competition. Kylie’s research group had developed HydRegen – an enzyme-based technology which showed potential in overcoming major cost barriers to using energy-efficient enzyme catalysts in synthesis. When Kylie’s group entered the competition, HydRegen had been proven to work on a laboratory scale, but they were looking for expertise to take the technology forward. Two years later, in collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline, Kylie successfully secured over £2.9m of translation funding to demonstrate HydRegen.
Kylie says: “Without the support from GlaxoSmithKline, we may not have been successful in the funding bid…being able to cite the Emerging Technologies Competition prize was also hugely important in proving our credentials.”
Biogelx Ltd was also a 2013 winner, who developed self-assembled peptide hydrogels for cell studies. They entered the Emerging Technologies Competition knowing that a major market opportunity was to sell their products to big-pharma companies. Winning the competition gave Biogelx the opportunity to be mentored by GlaxoSmithKline, who helped the start-up company establish the areas their technology could be used in and, most importantly, how they could develop it for use more broadly.
Speaking about how GlaxoSmithKline supported them, Biogelx’s business development manager, Dr Eleanor Irvine, says, “as a result [of the competition] we now have a working relationship with GlaxoSmithKline that’s allowed us to develop our product for the high value customer opportunity that our company is looking for.”
With this clearer understanding of their market, Biogelx have recently opened an office in the New York, allowing them to expand into the US market and continue their focus on sales to big-pharma companies.
It is not all about the business... in addition to these outstanding achievements, we have often heard how important winning the competition has been in raising the profile of the individuals developing the technology, as well as that of their business.
We hope to hear of successes like these for years to come.
Applications open until 14 March 2016.