Episode 14 - The Accidental EIR with Peter Winton - EIR Live

Episode Transcript
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Peter Winton (00:00):
The breath gave me the confidence to say, I think I

(00:03):
know what's on the other side ofthis, so I'm happy to run
towards it and give it a go. Maycome onto this a bit more later,
but one of the things that allthat taught me was that the most
powerful three words in theEnglish language were I don't
know. Right? And I think I wasthe idiot who had the had the

(00:28):
courage to actually, whensomebody said, what about this?
I had the courage to say, Idon't know.
But I could then go offsomewhere and find out. And
that's one of the joys ofworking at the university.
They're not afraid to say, Idon't know, Because within
short, they'll come back andsay, because of this, this is
the answer. This is how it'sdone.

Ilya Tabakh (00:49):
Welcome to EIR Live, where we dive into the
lives and lessons ofentrepreneurs and residents. I'm
Ilya Tabak, together with mycohost, Terrance Orr, ready to
bring you closer to theheartbeat of the innovation and
entrepreneurial spirit. Everyepisode, we explore the real
stories behind the ideas,successes, setbacks, and
everything in between. Foreveryone from aspiring EIRs to

(01:11):
seasoned pros, EIR Live is yourgateway to the depth of the
entrepreneurial journey andbringing innovative insights
into the broader world. Checkout the full details in the
episode description.
Subscribe to stay updated, andjoin us as we uncover what it
takes to transform visions intoventures. Welcome aboard. Let's
grow together. We are here todaymostly because Peter got a

(01:36):
little curious when a smallmessage popped up in his
LinkedIn inbox saying that, Hey,you're an EIR in The UK. I
haven't talked to a lot of EIRsin The UK.
Also, I've been hearing aboutthis Royal Society scheme for
EIRs and would like to learnabout that. And I'm glad that
Peter's curiosity got the betterof him. This is probably two and

(01:58):
a half years ago. We've had thepleasure of having a few
conversations since then, butit's sort of my pleasure. And
I'm excited to have Peter on thepodcast with us because he's got
just like a crazy background andmultiple careers worth of
experience.
I'm excited to tap into that.Peter, maybe to get started, we

(02:21):
always like to kind of go backto the early days. And so maybe
I'll ask you to introduceyourself and talk a little bit
about, you know, kind of whereyour professional life started,
and maybe we'll even pull itback beyond that a little bit.

Sure. Yes. Well, thank you for having me on,
guys. This is an experience, soanother experience to chalk up.
So, yeah, my name is PeterWinton.
I am basically a mechanicalengineer who has spent most of
their time in businesses in themanufacturing side of things and

(02:54):
laterally in manufacturingtechnology development. I
started in 1971. I did anapprenticeship with Ford Motor
Company, and I went on then tobecome a buyer and I bought
large amounts of machinery andequipment. So there's a factory
down in Valencia in Spain, whichmakes or used to make the Ford

(03:16):
Fiesta, And I bought loads ofkit that went inside there. And
then the other interesting buythat I had was process control
computers.
So I bought the first finiteelement analysis computer that
went into Ford in The UK and thefirst automated drafting machine

(03:37):
that they had, which today, Imean, it was about the size of a
small bungalow, this thing. Itwas phenomenal. It could draw
the side view of a Ford Granadaestate, which was about 20 feet
long, full size. I mean, washuge. It was great fun going
down and seeing the technology,going into the guys who were

(03:58):
using the CAD and they were intheir little dark rooms because
the screen was just some littlefaint green lines, nothing like
what we have today.
Was great fun. And a friend ofmine who I met when I was a
buyer went across to a companycalled Desousa who were in North
London and they were looking forsomebody, the old man called a

(04:25):
production coordinator. What itturned out to be was let's go
and upset all the people in thefactory because the factory in
Hedgeware was not, well,probably still in the
nineteenth, let alone thetwentieth century. The problem
was they had a lot of ways ofmaking things which were really,
they were on top of and theywere very, very good at, but

(04:47):
they were never going tosurvive. Manual lays, manual
milling machines, things likethat.
But we had a factory down inAnmering on the South Coast in
Sussex and they had a lot ofautomated machinery. What the
old man was looking for wassomebody who would help him
transfer the volume work downonto the automated machine tools
and equipment.

You know, before we dive into that, it's
interesting. So a mechanicalengineer trained to sort of
design, do statics and dynamicload and things like that, and
then you're buying stuff, andthen you're plugging into how to
run a production facility. Ijust want to pick at that a
little bit because that'sprobably not the role you

(05:28):
thought you were training for.

Yeah. Probably misled you slightly in that my
my training was never aboutdesigning things or doing
equations or, you know, Greekyou know, putting Greek letters
in the right order. That wasnever what I did. So that was
the start of my self teaching,if you like, Ilya. But yes,
sorry, go on with your question,please.

No, no, that's great. Think that, you know, one
of the things that we found withEIRs generally is that even
before they started their formaleducation, they're taking things
apart. They're curious. Theykind of take leaps. I'm sure
there's a little bit of that inyour background, but we'll dig
into that here in a little bit.
And then the, you know, sort offormal education, they tend to

(06:08):
either do things outside of theformal curriculum, get good at
sort of understanding what theydon't know, and helping build
that up. And so it seems like,you know, you just mentioned
kind of your self education. Itsounds like you're following
maybe a similar pattern. That'skind of my question is kind of
from the formal education toyour first role, you know, what

(06:30):
was that transition like?

So the formal education was what was called a
Higher National Certificate inProduction Engineering. But
because it was the Fordapprenticeship scheme and I was
not a craft apprentice, so Ididn't go down and work in the
tool rooms and all the otherhighly skilled areas, It was a
technician apprenticeship andtherefore you were expected to

(06:53):
go out using your technicalbackground to help the company.
In cases of buying machine toolsand equipment, you had to have
some sort of technical knowledgeof what you were buying. I mean,
you know, just hanging up theblue oval and saying I'm from
Ford was great, but then oncethe order was placed and there
was an amendment to the order,then they would try and take you
to pieces and you had to knowwhat you were doing. So that

(07:16):
was, if you like, was my earlyformal training.
Think the ten years I was atFord, I think what I got out of
it was I had a very good mentor,guy named John Barton, and he
taught me to think. You know, wedownstairs would for lunch and
he would pose questions to usyoung technician apprentices at

(07:36):
the table and we had to try andanswer them and you had to learn
to think. And so that was veryuseful. As I say, a friend of
mine went to a company calledDesuta. The old man was looking
for somebody.
I went and joined it. I didreasonably well and I ended up
running one of the smalldivisions that made press tool
die sets and plastic mold sets.And that started to teach me

(08:00):
about business. That started toteach me about, well, hang on a
minute. This isn't all as simpleas it looks, is it really?
You know, it's not just aquestion of going down on the
shop and saying to the guys, weneed to make 20 of these. The
customer wants them next week.You know, somewhere, where am I
gonna get the money from to buythe material? You know, how am I
gonna market this stuff? How amI gonna sell it?

(08:20):
And that was an early teachingand the fact that you can't do
it all yourself. You have tobuild good teams and you have to
surround yourself with goodpeople. So I enjoyed that. And
that came to an end when the,DeSouter family sold the
company. The company didn't wantthe diamould set division and it

(08:43):
was sold to a couple of guys,the Danley brothers.
And I've got to confess I didn'tlike working for them. It really
wasn't. Nah, it's not for me.This is not the way that I
wanted to do things. And so Ihad my second major lesson,
which is if it's not goingright, give it up.

(09:04):
You know, people think it's afailure to give things up, but
it was a making of me, you know,and I gave it up. I left. I had
a small amount of money thatthey gave me, due to my contract
conditions. And I left. I wentbasically got bumped around the

(09:26):
early recession sorry, therecession of the early nineties.
And I ended up running a smallsubcontract company for a guy
who was you might have to cutthis out, didn't really know the
difference between being a shitand being a bastard. Again, it

(09:48):
lasted six months or I lastedsix months, let's put it that
way. But I then ended up atRolls Royce and that was great.
And I started in one of thesmall subsidiaries they had, a
company called Allen Gears. Wemade power transmission
gearboxes, parallel shaft andepicyclics.
And that taught me a hell of alot about how you design things,

(10:14):
how you take account of forces,how you simple things. I mean,
it never occurred to me. Poweris torque times revs. Never
crossed my mind. And it's areally simple thing that a lot
of people don't know.
But when you look at things,then you can see how that works.
From that, I went into doingsome lean manufacturing in Rolls

(10:38):
Royce, and that was really veryinteresting because again it
started to question all thethings I thought I knew about
how you schedule things, how youwork machinery and equipment,
how you assure quality andthings like that. It really

(10:58):
tested a lot of things I thoughtI knew, only to discover I
didn't really know. But again,that taught me a lot.

And just to point out before we kind of dive in, I
think there's a lot of meat inthe Rolls Royce part of your
story here. But I love the factthat you had some experiences
that you didn't love so much, tosay it in a different way.
Because I think that, you know,there's a lot of folks that have
spent their kind of life in, youknow, kind of one career, one

(11:26):
field. They sort of haven't hada variety of experiences. And I
found that, you know, being andswitching and sort of seeing
that things could be drasticallydifferent and they don't
necessarily have to be terribleor great, as in some cases a
superpower, because both thatyou can, you know, the dogma of

(11:47):
how it's supposed to be is justthat, right?
And so you kind of get someperspective. And I love that
that's in your background. I'mcurious how you would react to
that, you know, whether, youknow, kind of reflecting on
that, what that gave you furtherin your career.

I would agree with what you're saying completely. I
think what it gave me was twothings. One was I learned that
my career was never going to beabout height. And the only
alternative to height or, youknow, as the saying goes, the
only difference between a rutand a grave is the depth. If you

(12:24):
don't wanna be in a rut and youand you you've you've that, you
know, height's not your thing,then the only dimension left is
breadth.
And so I was very keen to go anddo things that I hadn't done
before. I had the confidencethat I would be able to do them
because they were either inareas that understood or they

(12:44):
were in areas that interestedme. And by the time I got to
Rolls Royce, I had certainlyconcluded that I do my best work
in things that I enjoy doing,which doesn't mean I wouldn't
take a challenge. I mean, when Iretired, my little eulogy my
boss gave me was started offwith. I never knew Peter to

(13:06):
refuse any challenge I gave Youknow?
And I think, you know, my answerto that at this distance is I
chose my bosses well in that Ididn't choose a boss who would,
you know, just tell me thingsthat I couldn't do. He was very
appreciative of what my skillswere, and and so we got on

(13:27):
really well. My point being thatif you enjoy doing something,
you will always do it well. Ifit's a chore, you won't, and
quitting is not a problem. Youknow, you have to set it in the
context of your own position.
I had family, you know, Icouldn't just quit and do
nothing. You know, I had family.You know, bread had to come onto

(13:52):
the table and all of that sortof thing. But my point is that
if you always aim for height,then you must accept that it's
an inverted well, it's atriangle, and there's only one
person at the top, and there'stens of millions, hundreds of
millions lower down. So wherewhere do you wanna live?

(14:15):
And you can't live somewhere ifyou feel you're just turning a
handle.

Yeah. The the analogy I love is if if you keep
digging, eventually, you're inthe bottom of a well, and your
perspective, you know, when youlook up, you see a very, very
small part of the world. And AndI actually think this sort of
horizontal nature of your careerand the fact that you got hands
on experience ordering things,seeing how these things work,

(14:42):
ultimately really contributes tounderstanding where to put
leverage, right? Think we'llprobably dig into that a little
bit on how you're able to applythat perspective in the role as
an EIR. But I just want to kindof highlight that because if you
don't know parts of the terrainfrom a close view, it's sort of

(15:04):
hard to know, Hey, we shouldreally do something over there
because it's going to have thisdownstream impact somewhere
else.

That's right. I think the other thing I would
add to that, Ilya, is because Iwas able to see across, I got
involved in a lot of differentbusinesses and a lot of
different issues, a lot ofdifferent projects. It gave me a
really good understanding ofwhere things are used and how
things are used and how thingswork. Right? So, you know, cars

(15:34):
that I worked on in Ford in theseventies were literally drawn
with a, you know, a ruler and apencil.
You know? When a car wasfinished and it went into
production, it it was drawnparts of the bodywork were drawn
on plastic film. It's calledMylar. Much much more durable

(15:54):
than paper. But when you've gota car with, you know, a 100, a
120 panels on it, and then theygo to the die manufacturer who
has to make them, in those days,there was nothing.
He would get a pair of calipers,a manual pair of calipers, he'd
measure between two points andhe'd say, I think that distance

(16:15):
is, you know, 2.4 inches orwhatever it was. And you would
have to go to the flat two ddrawing and work out whether
that was correct or not. But theproblem with mylar is it's
plastic, and over time, as youroll them out and roll them up
again, it stretches. So then youget the wrong answers. Right?

(16:35):
So every one of those had to beetched onto a sheet of
aluminium, which was screwed toa wooden table, which was in the
middle of the drawing office,and there it stayed for the life
of the car. You know? Now today,somebody just picks up his mouse
and goes click click between twopoints on the screen and says
that's 1.7648 millimeters. Boom.So it was a very different world

(16:58):
and you had to know how thesethings worked And that's a
massive advantage to me anyway.

Terrance Orr (17:05):
I'm gonna jump in here, Peter, because, it's
fascinating. I was letting youand Ilya like spar a little bit,
in in the conversation becauseI'm I'm taking a lot of a lot of
notes here and, I'm alreadystarting to see similar sort of
things that most EIRs don'trecognize as they're going
through it before they taketheir first opportunity as the

(17:26):
for this methodical role thatthey never heard of before in in
the ether. And it's a few thingsthat you've mentioned that I
just wanna, you know, sort ofbring together for our audience.
One, you've done a lot ofdifferent things. Most of the
EIRs that we talked to, they'vetouched and done a lot of
different things throughouttheir lives and careers.
And some of them have gone deepin things and some of them have
had the breath like like you inin in your career. So and and

(17:49):
what you guys are hearing is thedetails. Right? You listening to
Peter talk, you can tell he'sbeen into the details. He's
actually been executing anddesigning in in the trenches.
Right? Because only people whohave been in the trenches can go
to this level of detail. Right?And I think it's important to be
able to share those stories andto know that most EIR's at

(18:10):
careers look like quilts. It'snot a straight line.
You've done a lot of differentthings, right, along the way.
And I think that's superimportant. But I think more
importantly, you know, he nevernever ran from a challenge.
Right? So even if it was hard,even if he didn't know how to do
it, he ran towards it.
And I think that's a really goodkudos from your former boss to

(18:31):
saying, I've never known Peterto run away from a challenge.
Right? And I think that's acommon theme that we see in
people who eventually become,you know, entrepreneurs and
entrepreneurs in residence isthat they raise their hands,
they accept the challenge andthey run towards the things that
they are afraid of. And I thinkthat's important. How would you
react to that?

Yeah, I think I completely agree with you. Think
it's, you only need to runtowards things if you've got
some idea in your head whatyou're gonna do and what is what
is on the the other side ofwhatever it is you're running
towards. You know? It's no goodrunning towards a fire if you

(19:11):
don't know there's an exit onthe other side of the flames, is
it? That's the point.
And so the breath gave me theconfidence to say, I think I
know what's on the other side ofthis. So I'm happy to run
towards it and give it a go. Wemay come onto this more a bit

(19:31):
more later, but one of thethings that all that taught me
was that the most powerful threewords in the English language
were I don't know. Right? And Ithink I was the idiot who had
the courage to actually, whensomebody said, what about this?
I had the courage to say, don'tknow. But I could then go off

(19:51):
somewhere and find out. Andthat's one of the joys of
working at the university.They're not afraid to say, I
don't know. Because withinshort, they'll come back and
say, because of this, this isthe answer.
This is how it's done.

You may not find this so fascinating, but I spent
a little bit of time when I wasin university working on my PhD
in a fellowship to figure outhow to communicate STEM. And so
part of that was really thinkingabout how to teach kids about
stuff. It turns out, I'll saveyou a lot of the work product,
but the result was thatmetacognition essentially a

(20:29):
kid's ability to reason aboutwhat they know and what they
don't know, was one of thebetter indications of how well
they were going to do in kind ofan educational setting, whether
supervised or unsupervised. Andso it's not so surprising, you
know, kind of from thatexperience that a strong I think
both saying I don't know, butultimately, maybe more broadly,

(20:50):
having a good capability tounderstand where are you
comfortable, where are you not,and maybe even a little bit of
anticipation of where are areasthat you're not even aware of
that could be an issue, youknow, and how would you kind of
gain a little bit of groundingand foundation there. So, you
know, I've thought I guess itwasn't that surprising of a
takeaway, but it was aninteresting, you know, top tier

(21:12):
indicator that I didn't expectto be such a strong signal.
So I just wanted to kind ofbring that in there. That
metacognition thing's prettystrong.

And I'm gonna double down on this a little
bit, Peter, because youmentioned the word university
just now. And I wanna ask you aquestion about, you know, can
you tell us a little bit more,you know, in our sort of prep
call, we talked a little bitabout your role sort of managing
the university technologycenter, right, at Nottingham

(21:41):
while you were at Rolls Royce.And that sort of gave you
exposure to sort of likepotentially moving in towards
that world. Can you tell us alittle bit more about that
experience and how thatpotentially led to what you're
doing?

Yeah. So to put it into context of the previous
story, I did deletemanufacturing a bit, but I
worked for a really nice guy andI went to him one day and said,
look, I think I've had a bit toomuch of this and I seem to be
the guy who's sitting in thecorner here when somebody
suggests something saying, No,we've done that. Is there
something else I could do? Andhe gave me a little project to

(22:16):
do, which went very well. And Iended up in a part of Rolls
Royce called ManufacturingTechnology.
And we were the people who didall the research and development
on manufacturing processes. Soyou have R and D on product, but
you also have R and D on the wayyou make the product. And Rolls
Royce in many areas were leadersof that over the previous, well,

(22:40):
since the sort of middleeighties, they were leaders in
producing product that didthings that other people
couldn't do. And manufacturingtechnology was a central team,
but we had to influence otherbusinesses both to get them to

(23:02):
come to us and say, look, we'vegot these issues, can we work
them out? But also for us tosay, we develop these types of
processes and can we introducethem into your businesses.
In order to do that, and thisapplies equally to the product,
companies like Rolls Royce, andwe're talking gas turbines Rolls
Royce now, we're not talkingabout motor cars, BMW make them

(23:26):
now and we don't talk aboutthat. But the gas turbines, they
are the huge engines that yousee hanging off the wings of
aircraft. Rolls Royce specializein what's called twin aisle. So
in other words, as the namesuggests, it's got two aisles
that you walk down when you getinside the fuselage. So, you
know, your seven four sevens,seven eight sevens, three

(23:49):
fifties, and so on.
And those products are very,very sophisticated. They're
complex and their performancerequires you to constantly
looking at new materials, newmethods, new aerodynamics inside
the engine and so on. And thatrequires you to have a very good

(24:14):
network of fundamentalscientists. Now Rolls Royce's
competitors either didn't do itor did it on their own dime. And
Rolls Royce wasn't big enough todo it on its own dime.
So a very clever guy came upwith the idea of having what he
called university technologycentres. And the object of the
exercise was that the universityand the company got together,

(24:38):
the company made contributionsannually for the number one
purpose of paying for PhDstudents to study new science in
areas that were of interest tothe company. So that was a
university technology centre. Soif you take for example the

(25:00):
transmissions UTC which is alsoat Nottingham and they did work
into transmitting power fromdifferent parts of the engine to
other parts of the engine. Sowithout giving you a boring gas
turbine lecture, basically thebit at the back drives the bit
at the front and the two bits inthe middle drive each other.
But there's a lot of power to betransmitted. So on takeoff, it's

(25:21):
something like 60,000 to 80,000horsepower coming out of parts
of the engine. A lot of power.The second UTC at Nottingham was
the manufacturing UTC. And forreasons I won't bore you with,
it had dwindled, had withered onthe vine.

(25:42):
And my boss said to me, Peter,would you like to go over there,
take a look at it and see if youcan repurpose it for something
that would help you? And I wasone of 32 global specialists and
my global specialist in which Iwas responsible across the whole
of Rolls Royce was tooling andfixturing, which is a massive

(26:04):
subject which I'm not going toget into. So I went across
there. That was 2010, I think.Let me just work that out.
Was it no. It was earlier thanthat. 2007, 2008, something like
that. I went across there. Theyhad a new, UTC director, and I

(26:25):
met him and the UTC consisted ofhim, a very clever researcher
who ended up working for RollsRoyce and one PhD student and
that was it.
And when I asked them what theywere working on, the answer was
not a lot. So I went round andtalked to a number of people

(26:45):
including the guy who wasresponsible for all the UTCs for
the company and said, well, howdo I do this? What do I do? What
can be done? And the upshot ofthat was, together with
Professor Dravos Segazinte,highly motivated guy, really

(27:07):
keen to make a success of this,which I'll come back to.
And he said, well, we ought tobe doing this sort of thing. I
said, and I'm trying to do thissort of thing. So can we put
these two together and come upwith a package of work that we
could justify our annualcontribution on? And he said,
yeah, so we did it. And wepresented it to my boss and he

(27:28):
was very keen on it and veryreceptive.
And afterwards when he wastalking to me, I just said,
look, I think we can make a goof this. If you'd like to give
me a couple of years, let's try.And he said, Okay, let's try.

Before we dive into that, I'm just curious, what was
your first impression? And maybewhat sort of surprised you about
the academic folk what didn't?Because it's like that's the the
the meeting between industrialand academic worlds. And I have
a lot of background on this inThe US, I I'll add some color
commentary later. But I'm alwaysI'm always fascinated by first

(28:01):
contact.
Right? Like, when you actuallygo from the Royals Royce
contacts to the academic, I'mjust curious what your
experience was like.

I think initially, I just wondered what they were
supposed to be doing. I wonderedhow they did it. But because it
was so I mean, in a way, it wasso closely allied to what we
were doing in ManTech that Ididn't wonder much more than
that. But it was only as timewent by I think the best way I

(28:35):
can sum this up is as time wentby, I began to realize this. In
Rolls Royce, our principalcompetitor in gas turbines was
General Electric.
So everything we did, we lookedat General Electric. What was
the impact on General Electric?Were we getting orders? You
know, all you know, was ourtechnology better? Was our
engines better?

(28:55):
All of that sort of thing. Andin business, in industry,
competitor is somebody elsewho's doing something that
you're doing. Right? What I cameto realize was in academia, the
professor's competitor was theguy in the office next door. It

(29:16):
wasn't another university.
He had to raise more money. Hehad to have more PhD students.
He had to publish more papers.Yada yada yada. Right?
He was worried about the guysitting in the office next door.
He wasn't worried about Oxfordor Cambridge or Manchester or
Lees or Sheffield or anywhereelse, you know, because what he

(29:37):
was selling was teaching, but hewasn't selling it. He was trying
to attract students to come andtake it. Yeah? So, you know, the
competition was completelydifferent, but from his career
advancement, from theadvancement of his institution,
if they all competed with eachother, the whole institution was
raised up.

(29:58):
You know, everything got better.Once I got that in my head, then
it was easy.

Super important. Just to draw that out in The US
context, it really sort ofdepends what career stage the
academic is in. But in manycases, folks go to academia
because they want to maintainsome academic freedom, right?
And then if they're early,obviously, publication until you
get tenure. So in The US,there's the concept of a tenured

(30:24):
professor.
And then there's sort of maybeyou are competing against the
other top institutions becausethere's a limited amount of
funding. And then also, it's anindividual sport. Even in team
performance, first author stillmeans something. But that's the
It's interesting because I sortof spent a long time training to

(30:45):
be a professor and then escapedthe other way. And so really,
the understanding of incentivesfor sort of the diverse team
that you were encouraging tobuild is really important if
you're sort of doing thiscontact between academic and non
academic.
So it's interesting thatincentives is the place that you

(31:07):
called out because I completelyagree and have to explain to
people all the time that peopleare in academia or choose to be
at least partially in academiafor different reasons than they
would be in industry, Right? Andthat's surprising for a lot of
people, but I think it's areally important point to sort
of call out. I just wanted to Ilove that that's what you came
up with, I'm, you know, a hugeplus one for me.

Yeah. And, I mean, shamelessly, I leverage that.
You know, if I get more moneyfor more PhDs, if I could get
more kudos because we'didentified a novel piece of IP
that Rolls Royce could patentand use, any of those things,
you know, he helped me and thatwas my way of helping him. But I
had to realize that helping himmeant helping him

(31:53):
do better than the guy in theoffice next door.

Yep. Everybody's got to win. How you get stable
cooperation is when everybodybenefits.

Yeah. And the company benefited. There's
absolutely no question. Theycame up with some fantastic
things and they still are. Youknow, even today they are still
coming up with stuff that youjust wouldn't believe, You know?
Like, little little snake arms,right, which you can send in
through a borescope hole in anengine. Right? And it will

(32:23):
follow. It will tip follow andgo around the engine to the
place you wanna have a look at.Alright?
And can you imagine that it'slike a cat's tail, right, but
it's like a meter and a halflong. It goes through a nine
millimeter borescope hole. Ninemill it's not even half an inch.

That's incredible.

It is. You're absolutely right, Terence. It is
incredible. But the whole basicscience of that they came up
with. And without I mean, no oneelse in the world came up with
it.
They came up with it. You know?So that's, mean, that's the sort
of thing that just amazes me.But if they're gonna put that
level of hard work in, then boy,I need to put some hard work in

(33:05):
to help them out.

Peter, you mentioned earlier that, you
know, you were trying to figureout like, what is the role
really and how do you actuallydo it? And what was it at this
point did at this point, did youhave exposure to the role of an
entrepreneur in residence or hadyou ever heard of this role yet

(33:26):
at this point?

At this point, I had never heard of the role. I'd
never seen I mean, I knew whatan entrepreneur was and the
university had a pretty goodtrack record of exploiting their
technology. I mean, major thingwas the CAT scanner. So the CAT

(33:48):
scanner was invented atNottingham. The technology was
invented at Nottingham.
It was licensed to others andthey made a huge amount of money
out of it over twenty years ofthe patent. So they had a great
track record but it never reallyimpinged on me and the reason
for that is because as anindustrial sponsor, our contract

(34:08):
was that the intellectualproperty that was generated out
of the PhD research or thespecific research projects if
there was one using theresearchers in the UTC, The
intellectual property that wasgenerated belonged to Rolls
Royce, not to the university. Soif you like, Terence, I could

(34:31):
see this stuff being generated,it was going into Rolls Royce
and we were exploiting it. ButI've never heard the term at
that point and obviously therewas no opportunity for the
University of Nottingham to useany of that in spin outs. So in
other words, because of thearrangements of the contract, I
never got to see that side ofwhat was going on.

(34:54):
So no, I'd never heard of theterm.

That's incredible. Now I'm gonna ask you the money
question, which is, know, afterall of that exposure of working
with the UTCs, right, you've hada very storied career, right,
this very weird three letter jobtitle, you know, opportunity
role pops up called theentrepreneur in residence. How

(35:20):
did you hear about it? Had youever heard about it at that
point in your journey? And walkus through how you landed your
first EIR role.

So had I ever heard about it? No. I think I've
said no. I'd never heard aboutit and didn't really know what
it was. About, I don't know, sixmonths, but I decided the year
that I retired, I decided at thebeginning of the year I was
going to retire at the end ofthe year.
And over a period of months,when everything was worked out

(35:53):
and I started to tell people.And about, I don't know, it must
have been about three or fourmonths before my retirement
date, my very good friend KateBarnard, who was also involved
in the running of the UTCs cameto me and said, I've got the
very thing for you to do whenyou're retired. And I said, Oh

(36:15):
yeah, what's that? And she said,You're going be an entrepreneur
in residence. So I said, Ohyeah, what's that?
She said, I don't know, butyou're going to be one. So,
okay, fine. So obviously we do abit of homework at this point
and we start to find out. And itwas by applying for a grant to
the Royal Society, which is oneof the original scientific

(36:37):
societies, one of the first inthe world founded by such people
as Isaac Newton and others. Andso I thought, okay, fair enough.
Read through the grantapplication what you needed and
I needed the support of somebodyat the university. So I went to

(36:59):
see the dean of engineering andI said to Sam, you know, this is
available. I'd like to give it ago, but there's no point in
giving it a go if you're goingto look at it and say, not
interested. So we went throughit together and he said, you
know what, I am reallyinterested, and this is what I'd
like you to do. So I wrote thatup as a project.

(37:21):
He wrote a letter of support andI submitted it and thought,
well, here you go. Kate, I didwhat you asked me to do. I had
no expectation that anythingwould happen. About a month
after I retired, I got a letterfrom them saying, you're
accepted. We'll pay you, and youcan go and work for one day a

(37:43):
week in the university.

So effectively, Peter, you did a favor for a
friend, you know, for applyingfor the EIR role, a role that
you had never heard of before inall of your years of working and
took the leap, right, to justtake a look at it. And, and I
think that's a testament to whoyou are, right, and from what

(38:05):
you've told us so far on thepodcast, because I think it's
important that most people havenever heard of the role, so
you're not alone there, right?Number two, most of the time the
EIR role will find you. Youdon't find it, you know? And in
this case, your friend found youto be a good fit for this
mysterious role.
Yeah. And you just happened tosay, this is a good enough

(38:25):
person. I'll take a look at it.Right? So And when and when

I read it, it it it really was, Terrance. I would
say 50 no. That's too much. 20%of the job I was doing with the
UTC, identifying theintellectual property, trying to
decide whether it was worthprotecting or not. I mean, the
option was if we didn't want toprotect it, we could give it
back to the university andtalking it through.

(38:53):
And one of my other roles inManTech was I was the liaison
between manufacturing themanufacturing function as a
whole, not just ManTech, and ourPatent's Office at Rolls Royce.
So our guys would come up withclever ideas and they would put
in business review forms andthey would come back and say
this has got this novelty, da dada, And I was the one who

(39:16):
liaised with them and said okayfine, well you know we should
pursue this one because you knowthis area would be helpful if we
could get a lead over thecompetition or you know we could
license this out to one of oursuppliers and improve the cost
or quality of our products orblah blah blah. So I had that
sort of experience. Never I'venever crossed my somebody said,

(39:36):
what are you doing here? I justsay my job.
Never crossed my

By the way, just jumping in real quickly. I think
for physical products, beingable and being sort of at the
heart of the patent noveltyfootprint is like a crazy
interesting role. I spent alittle bit of time. I think I
spent like three months at theIP group within Cisco Systems,

(40:02):
so the networking company. Andso they had done a bunch of M
and A work, but they also hadlike 10,000 patents on, you
know, from like networktelephony to whatever.
And it's just interestingbecause they're sort of folks
that invented, you know, thingsthat we rely on on the Internet
every day, you know, and werevery good at You know, Cisco

(40:25):
also got sued for lots of moneyevery week or month as companies
would sell, transact, patentportfolios would go. And so the
other thing that was reallyinteresting to me was the, in
those lawsuits, the quickability to say, No, this was in
the market three years beforethis thing was issued. Let's not

(40:47):
waste any legal money. Or, Hey,we're actually going have to
fight this. This is important.
But it's just like, unlessyou've been in that role, that's
like a really weird Becausethere's a little bit of the,
What's the commercial potential?Where does it sit from the
protective standpoint of theportfolio? And the reason I say
physical things is in software,patent and copyright are, at

(41:09):
least in the Western setting, ona whole different level than in
hardware. Because if you have ahardware kind of patentable
device, you can keep people outof the market. It's pretty
effective.
And so I just wanted to sort ofcall that out. That's a pretty
unique experience. Even in yourbody of unique experiences,
that's the one I sort ofstumbled onto because I was very

(41:32):
curious on how intellectualproperty allowed technology
companies to sort of enter themarket. But, you know, I got a
whole life's worth of lessons ina very short period of time. So
I just wanted to sort ofidentify kind of the unique
nature of that, especially for atechnical person.

Yeah, is unique and it's one of those areas
where people just in mostpeople's head, the answer is a
patent. What's the question?That's not always the way. The
recipe for Coca Cola isn'tpatented.

Trade secret.

It's a trade secret. The trade secret is
indefinite. And the other thinginteresting that you say earlier
about patent versus copyright orboth in software. And we did a
lot of work in Rolls Royce verysuccessfully of patenting
processes which involved thesoftware. That was something I

(42:29):
actually introduced into the UTCwas, Guys, you've written this
little subroutine to go withyour ANSYS FEA work.
It's very clever. It allows usto do this. So you go identify
that to somebody because I'm notsure that Rolls Royce own it.
It's just a side issue. It's notan output of what we've

(42:50):
commissioned, but it's gotvalue.
And the university now has areally good arrangement with a
company and a lot of theselittle, what would you call
them, they're not algorithms,they're a bit beyond algorithms
but these add ons that go on tothings like FEA analysis or CFD
or stress or whatever, they areactually bundling up as an add

(43:14):
on software and this company arelicensing to sell it. So, you
know, there is a lot of stufflike that. But I'll be honest,
from a personal perspective, Istay well clear of I've got an
app for this or an app for that.Because it's not a market I
understand at all. You'll haveguessed by now that I don't even

(43:35):
dabble in life sciences anyway.
Don't understand that either. Soin that respect, you know,
because of the IP side of it andbecause I understood it earlier,
I've always stuck to themechanical engineering bit that
I've been working around all mylife.

I love hearing you guys talk about IP as somebody
who has some legal training froma law school and understanding
that you guys actually know thedifference between different
types of IP, which is great tohear. And and so, you know, I I
can geek out on this topic ofdesign patents and copyrights,
trademark, all sorts of forms ofof IP that you can really get

(44:11):
into frankly. And and and Ithink that's a value lever,
right, that that a lot ofcompanies leverage when you're
building hardware or physicalthings, Ilya, as you would call
them versus you're trying to dosomething in software. Right?
Like, I would feel this a lotwhen when I used to build data
storage systems at, ITinfrastructure company called
EMC Corporation at at the time,you know, that was acquired

(44:34):
later by Dell for a lot ofmoney, that that you can go
check it out.
I think it was 65,000,000,000plus, and still the largest I
think second largest acquisitionin technology history and I
learned a ton around like the IPof like physical things, right,
during during that time. But Ihad no clue the value of that
because at the time I hadn'tgone to law school yet. Right?

(44:55):
So you guys got a chance tolearn it in the trenches. Right?
At the time, I learned it in thetrenches building data storage
systems and then went to lawschool. So I think the fact that
you got a chance to cut yourteeth doing that in real time,
Peter, no legal training, right,just the technical knowledge and
know how and applying that, Ithink is incredible.

Yeah. And I think, again, I agree with you, but I
think I regarded having afundamental understanding of the
legal situation around differenttypes of IP protection as
something I had to do because Ihad to understand it otherwise I
couldn't properly support theUTC, You know, so have to say

(45:36):
the Royal Society decided theywanted me. So I I totalled back
into the university and said toSam Wright, well, what are we
going to do? And he said, well,let's start by doing this. And I
spent two wonderful years goingaround getting to know people,
picking up on a couple of goodideas and was asked at one point
to support a group going througha process we call iCure Explore,

(46:01):
think it is.
Just used to call it iCure. Butit's is it? Industrialisation
and Commercialisation ofUniversity Research And it's run
by Innovate UK, which is agovernment funding organisation.
And it gives an entrepreneuriallead three months to actually go
round the world and find out ifthere's a market for their idea.

(46:25):
And then at the end of it, theycome back and say, this is what
I found and this is what I wantto do with it.
So they can say, yeah, I foundit, but I need to do more
research. I found it and I'mgoing to license it. I found it,
I'd like to have a startup. Andthere's another couple I don't I
mean, the other one is, well, Ididn't find it. It's around the
world and nobody's interested.

(46:47):
But, okay, you know, 40% of allstartup failures cite no market
need' as one of the reasons theyfolded. Know? So it's a
wonderful way and University ofNottingham have now got, I think
it's 38 spin out companies onthe go And since 2005, I think

(47:08):
it is when they started, they'veonly had three failures and they
go through this IQR thing. Sothis was how it all started. I
think my the thing I found mostinteresting was, I would say 90%
or more than 90% of all theacademics I spoke to, their

(47:30):
priority was an academic career.
They wanted someone to use theirwork, but this wasn't about
founding a spinout. It was aboutfinding ways for their research
to be used and give benefit andimpact outside the university.
And that was the mostinteresting thing and that makes
the whole entrepreneur inresidence thing very different

(47:54):
because now you're not worriedabout whether it's going to get
exploited or not. What you'reworried about is how can you get
the resources into that academicthat allow them to convince
somebody that they should beusing it. You know, how do you
assure that if it's I mean oneof the things that I think

(48:16):
what's it called?
I think it's Terra Nova, is spinout company. And they monitor
movement in the earth, you know,huge movements in the earth for
all sorts of things. Butensuring that the university
maintains the capability to keepall that up to date is

(48:38):
important. You almost have to goand find the support mechanism
before you find the customer, ifyou see what I mean. If the
academic is saying, Oh yeah,yeah, if there's a professorship
at Imperial, I'm off.
Well, that's no good to theuniversity he can't maintain the
IP that he's developed. So Ithink it's quite different to a

(48:59):
lot of other ways of doing it.

I do want to say, though, I think that once you
know what problem you'resolving, back to this incentive
for the academic, I think it's alot easier to get there. And so
I want to sort of commend you onfiguring that you probably ended
up solving a problem that youdidn't initially come in for.

(49:22):
That's sort of a testament tolooking at and saying, What have
we got going on here? What arewe trying to do? In our
discussions, I think youmentioned that you've done like
six spinouts ish in your time sofar.
Yeah. And so I'm sure there'sstories of great success, maybe

(49:44):
less success. Can you talk aboutkind of maybe the first
successful one and kind of thatportfolio and maybe what was
surprising and not surprisingabout those experiences?

So the first one I did was it's actually quite a
nice little story. You don'toften get to see the things you
do come to fruition. I'll tryand not drone on about this. One
of the difficulties that youhave when you're servicing
products that undergo corrosiveor high temperature atmospheres

(50:17):
is that the fastenings that holdthem together corrode and
getting them apart becomes amechanical problem. So you've,
you know, just take a simple nutand bolt, if you're going to get
those apart, you've either gotto cut the bolt off or split the
nut.
And that's fine except that ifit doesn't go quite right, you

(50:39):
can cause a lot of damage to theparts that are being held
together and those parts can bevery expensive. You've also got
to consider that if you'retrying to take a wind turbine
apart, having a large boltsplitter with a lot of
mechanical forces in it, 150meters in the air isn't
something that people readilyvolunteer to do. Okay, so we

(51:04):
have the same problem with a gasturbine. Parts get corroded
together and if you can't takethem apart, the two bits they're
holding together can often bevery expensive to replace and
time consuming. So Icommissioned a piece of work to
use electro discharge machiningor spark eroding as people might
know it, to take apart nuts andbolts.

(51:29):
And that was fine and we did thework and it got some traction
but not a lot. So the universitydecided that they would have a
look at this, see what patentswere around because a lot were
held by another company and notby Rolls Royce and whether they

(51:49):
could do anything. And what theydecided, it was before I got
involved, was that yes, theycould and they could do it
actually quite successfully. SoI was roped in because the guys
at the university knew what mybackground and my history was
with this. And I took this guythrough the iCure, so two months

(52:11):
before prepping it up andapplying.
Three months talking to himevery week, helping him, keeping
him enthusiastic. And it was inthe middle of COVID so I had do
it all from his bedroom, was,you know, a slight challenge.
And we came to the conclusionthat yes, there was a market out
there. We had several peopleinterested. So I helped the

(52:35):
university put the companytogether to sort out where the
IP was and where it wasn't andwhat I thought we needed from
Rolls Royce or didn't need fromRolls Royce and how we might get
it.
They started the company. Theysecured a grant for a year to
start the company and theystarted developing the product.

(52:57):
And what are we now? We're nowthree years in. They have sold a
couple of machines.
They've got a couple of peopleinterested in machines. They're
in their own unit in Nottinghamand they are now starting to
develop in different ways.Initially, we were just gonna
sell portable machines so peoplecould take the machine to the

(53:20):
product, extract whatever itwas, and separate the assembly.
But we discovered that peopleactually want fixed machines. So
they've got a fixed thing theywant to do, plenty of turnover
on one type of product and theyjust want to take, in this case,
nuts and bolts off it.
So you wouldn't say it wasaccelerating away, but it is

(53:43):
certainly moving very well atthe moment. It's just another
injection from an investor andit's been really great fun just
watching it grow. And I go inprobably once every two or three
months and see them, or one ofthem gets hold of me and says,
Can you come and talk aboutthis? And it's been great fun to

(54:05):
watch. I think my learning pointfrom it was that these things
never move quickly.
Don't you know, this is notRolls Royce. You have not got to
get this to a certification day.It'll do what it does at the
speed that it does it. But, youknow, what I try to do is coach
them, help them, support them,and, you know, wave a flag to
the technology transfer office.I think there's something that

(54:28):
we need to do.

And to that point, Peter, you you mentioned during
our prep that you stronglybelieve that two years is too
short Yeah. For an entrepreneurin residence role.

That's right.

And nothing less than three years. Tell us more
about that.

So when I got to the end of the, well, no, before
the end of the two years, theguy who runs the scheme at the
Royal Society sent everybody anemail saying, right, we're
opening up for a third year. Soif you'd like to do a third
year, please apply. So again, Iwent back to saying, blah, blah,
blah. But when I came tosummarise for that, what I'd

(55:02):
achieved in the first two years,it seemed to me to be not a lot,
really just not a lot. I mean,had some impact on the things we
were trying to effect.
We certainly got a lot ofacademics interested in the fact
that they could exploit their IPand they could personally
benefit from that as well as itbeing a promotional enhancement.

(55:28):
But I just thought I've notreally done much, you know,
apart from Sam and the Syntamthing, you know, that I've just
described. And so I did thethird year and at the end of the
third year I thought, actuallyI've done quite a bit more, but
not in that year. I finished offthings that I started right back

(55:49):
at the beginning in some cases.So at the end of the third year
the university said please stayon our dime and so I have and
there are now a lot more thingsthat are reaching a conclusion
and with the speed thatuniversity works there's a lot
more things they've now managedto understand and academics come

(56:09):
and knock on my door now andthings like that.
So I'm not sure what you canachieve in two years. Mean one
thing I know is if you go inthere and say right I'm going to
establish these workshops andI'm going to get an
entrepreneurial spirit into theuniversity and you know get the
students interested forget it.Forget it. That's not what

(56:30):
you're going to you're nevergoing to achieve that and even
if you get it rolling whenyou've left it'll just stop
rolling. That doesn't work.

What do you think those blockers are, Peter,
inside the university as well?

I don't think there are any Well, okay. I
don't think the university and Idon't just mean Nottingham
because obviously there arequite a few, I think there's
about 40 of us EIRs now in theRoyal Society Industrial
Fellowship. And I don't thinkany of us would say that the

(57:11):
universe it's not a blocker. Ithink the problem is that the
people are not very good atpicking ideas and focusing on
them. Okay.
Today, the world is full ofprocess. Everything has a
process. Nobody trusts anybody.Right? So you don't trust your
doctor, your policeman, yourlawyers, your dentist.

(57:33):
You don't trust anyone. Right?You go to the dentist, the
dentist says you need a filling.Right? You go home, on the
Internet.
No. No. I don't. And you go backand you say, no, I don't. I've
looked it up.
I don't need one. And soeverybody has a process and all
objectives that people have intheir careers are set by the
process, if you see what I mean.To turn this handle until you

(57:56):
achieve this result. So I don'tthink that the universities
actually understand that what weshould be doing now is looking
at the ideas that come up andpicking them. And I think one of
the reasons they don't do it isthe fear of failure.
So they pick an idea, run withit, they put money and resource

(58:19):
into it and it doesn't work. Towhich my answer is, well, how do
you think it works when peopleget startups going? 95% of them
fail. So what makes you thinkthat you can have a better track
record of that? And what makesyou afraid of actually matching
the existing track record of theworld?

(58:41):
So I think that's one thing. Ithink the other thing is they
don't move with speed. There arepoints at which, oh yes, Yeah,
this is a really good idea. Weshould do a proof of concept.
You should apply for thisfunding.
Okay, fine. I'll write the thingout today. No, no, no. It
doesn't open for three months.Excuse me?

(59:01):
You know?

You're ready to go today. You're ready to do it
right now.

Person who's got the idea, Terrance, is ready to
go today. They're enthusiastic.They want to get it done. You
found them a source of funding.They'll write the grant
application tomorrow.
And it doesn't open for threemonths. How do you think they're
feeling in three months time? SoI I I don't think the university
my experience has been thatuniversities don't block
anything. It's the way that theythink that blocks things. Well,

(59:29):
no.
It doesn't. It's the way thatthey think that doesn't get
things going at the speed thatyou would hope. It doesn't
capitalize on people'senthusiasm, etcetera, etcetera.

But but just to draw out this without being too
long winded, but it's a prettyimportant topic, I think. I
think most people read about howthis happens in the world,
right? And so there's sort ofthis folklore around how you
start ideas and build things andeverybody's young and in a

(01:00:00):
garage and, right? And whatyou're saying is actually not
just unique to universities. Inmost corporates, nobody has had
the or very few people has hadthe experience of starting a new
business line, right, orcommercializing a new concept
and having it become a materialpart of contributing to the P
and L, right?

(01:00:21):
And so in many cases, the thingsthat they imagine that it's
going to take to do these thingsare not the things that it's
actually going to take to dothese things. And so a lot of
the skill set and perspectivethat's necessary, I think that's
part of the reason why I reallylike this idea of entrepreneur
in residence. In order to be anentrepreneur in residence, you
actually have to have the, asTerence was saying earlier, in

(01:00:44):
the trenches experience ofcapturing and creating value.
And then you can take that andtranslate it into the residence.
But just to pull that apart, alot of the established
institutions, whether it'scorporates or universities or
others, this is just not a skillset that's, you know, kind of
trained for and reinforced.

(01:01:05):
Most folks do what we're talkingabout despite the structure, not
because of it.

Peter Winton (01:01:10):
Yeah. And

Ilya Tabakh (01:01:11):
so just to point that out.

That's that's right. And I think the other
thing is that all institutions,whether industrial or academic
these days, in my experience,have all sorts of hoops you've
gotta jump through. And it'slong past the time where some of
the people who create thesehoops need to sit back in their
chairs and say, when I ask themto come and present to me, what

(01:01:35):
value am I adding? Because ifthe university is going to
commit a 6 figure sum to one ofits startups, I understand that
the vice chancellor really oughtto know about that. Right?
But the vice chancellor does notneed a twenty five minute
presentation and a ten minute qand a. K? If the vice chancellor

(01:01:59):
doesn't trust the person who hasput this together and goes to
the vice chancellor and says, Ithink we ought to do this one.
What the hell are they doing?You know?
If you you know, why have a dogand bark yourself? If you see
what I mean. And I just thinkthat a lot of these review
boards and things like this inall walks of life, I don't blame

(01:02:21):
Nottingham or any university orany business, they really ought
to ask themselves the question,what value am I adding by having
this? You know? Well,

you know, just to kind of move forward a little
bit, you're six years in now.You know, you've done quite a
bit and you're accelerating thepace. What's actually keeping
you engaged and excited about,kind of your EIR role at this
stage? Can you talk about that alittle bit?

Yeah. I think what keeps me engaged is being
surrounded by some incrediblyclever people. I just love it.
You know, it's, I don't knowwhether I'm living my youth
vicariously through them becauseI never did it. I never did a
degree and, you know, exams.
I don't have letters after myname and things like that. But

(01:03:09):
they are such clever people.When you explain to them, mean
we spoke earlier about being atranslator, know, in fact, I
don't know if I've got it. IfI've got it, I'm gonna read this
to you. You can cut this out youdon't want it.
Where did I put this? Just aminute. Because this I think for

(01:03:32):
me, this typifies what goes on.Here we go. So this is,
something I got involved inthrough reviewing an application
for a grant for some money to doa proof of concept.
They were asked to summarise thework and this is what it said.

(01:03:55):
It said, the biological world iscurved from the subcellular to
the continental length scale.Cells sense the complex shapes
of their surroundings andrespond to these stimuli through
the transduction of physicalstimuli into biochemical
responses. In vitro, designedcell scale 2.5 d complex

(01:04:15):
curvatures have been shown todrive cell migration responses.
However, synthetic polymerbiomaterials with stoichiastic
microporosity, I.
E. Those fabricated by emulsiontemplating or particle leaching,
often showed limited cellinfiltration into the bulk of
the material without surfacechemistry modification. Little

(01:04:36):
has been done to translate thephysical influence of defined
cell scale curvatures intobiomaterial design as a strategy
to improve cellularisation rateof three d scaffolds, partly due
to manufacturing technologiespreviously being too slow to
make this a realisticproposition. So why don't you
tell me what that's about?

Yeah. Only because I spent a long time in academia,
really hard to make surfacesthat help cells move because
they transfer into the cells andthey're hard to manufacture. And
so if you can make materialsthat change the physical
properties, then they'll changethe way that tissues grow. And
there's a lot of knowledge gapsin that area, they're interested

(01:05:18):
in exploring that problem.

So this is how I got it translated in order to
attract somebody to think thatthis was a good idea. Okay?
There is a significant clinicalneed to develop new bone graft
treatments. Bone is the secondmost transplanted tissue after
blood, but the current best bonegraft options are either bone
taken from somewhere else in thepatient's skeleton, which

(01:05:40):
creates a painful second injurysite, or the use of powerful
biological molecules that cancause unwanted side effects such
as misplaced bone formation oreven cancer. Our recent work
addresses this problem bydemonstrating we can control the
response of bone cells using theshape of their environment by
three d printing implantablematerials with cell sized

(01:06:02):
features.
This reduces the need forbiological molecules and
minimizes risk to patients asthe implant cannot escape the
injury site. Or to put itanother way, if you were to have
an implant to replace a tooth,would you want a material in
there that might risk anotherpiece of bone growing into your
mouth or breaking off andcausing cancer? Or would you

(01:06:24):
want one that would very rapidlygrow the bone around the
implant?

Terrance Orr (01:06:31):
Literally, and gentlemen, that's how you
translate as an eagle.

Exactly. That was the words that were coming out
of my mouth. It's a masterclassof both translation but also one
was a problem statement and theother one was a technology
science statement. Right? Andthose different audiences,
different perspectives.
Because you didn't in yoursecond statement, other than

(01:06:53):
three d printing and forebodingthings, you didn't really talk
about any of the things theydescribed in their statement at
all.

And that's I'm not trying to demonstrate here what
a clever club I am. What I'msaying is one of the reasons
that academics find it difficultto get things out there, to get
impact, to get benefits out ofand see their research and use
is that they they talk science,and business talks benefits. You

(01:07:23):
know? And people that investwanna know you've you've got to
get straight through to theiranimal instincts, haven't you? I
mean, it was another one I cameacross, which was a very clever
lady who had come up with amethod of getting the cells in
our bodies to open up and allowthings in and then close-up
again.

(01:07:44):
And she went through thescientific explanation of this
and was in one of these iCurethings and somebody said, you
know, okay, so tell me what dopeople think? And I'm the
business advisor, I'm not reallysupposed to say anything, this
is for the, you know, theentrepreneurial leads. Total
silence. So in the end I put myhand up and said, look, can I
say something? And they said,yeah, go on.

(01:08:04):
I said, okay, here's my 30elevator speech. When you get
older, your eyes willdeteriorate. And one of the
things that can happen to you isyou get macular degeneration.
And the treatment for that is tostick a needle in your eye. My
idea is to do it with eye drops.
You know, have I got to you yet?That's it. That's it. You know.

(01:08:28):
So I

The only thing I would add to that is in science,
right, your job as an academicis to contribute to the body of
science. So it is enough, ifyou're established and well
funded and whatnot to make thecontribution, not to
commercialize it. But that'sback to your original point
about, you know, what are theincentives and how do people

(01:08:49):
succeed. I think that was thebiggest disconnect that I saw is
that, you know, on the academicside, folks were doing their job
and contributing to the body ofknowledge. But what's
interesting is from thecommercialization side, some of
them still loved the ideaenough, and they had worked out
the science to where there wasno more science to do, but they
wanted to see this thing takeroot in the world.

(01:09:11):
And they were woefully illequipped to engage in that
conversation because they'relike, Well, who do I write a
grant to to build this thing?Right? And that's not how that
works a lot of the time. So,it's really important to connect
the dots there.

And I think it comes back to what I was saying
earlier about having good ideasand chasing good ideas. Because
I don't know how it works in TheUS, but in The UK, every seven
years the government fundingbody, UK Research and
Innovation, hold a thing calledthe Research Excellence

(01:09:46):
Framework and basically you haveto put in your case studies and
show how the money that they'veput into your research has been
used and had impact outside andthey rate them. The higher the
rating that you get impacts whatmoney you get in the future. So
there now actually is, Ilya, anincentive for our academics to

(01:10:06):
get work out there and haveimpact. And it doesn't have to
be monetary impact.
It can be societal impact. Itcan be anything. But it has to
have an impact. And some of theones that I unfortunately can't
talk about them, but some of theones that I was reviewing last
week are absolutely incredible.How really simple things have
had a huge impact on theenvironment, on business, on

(01:10:32):
industry, you know, it's quitereally, really interesting.
But these are now things thatare helping to maintain the
survival of some universities,particularly research
universities. And these arethings that are now being taken
into account in promotions andthings like this. Very slowly an

(01:10:55):
incentive is being created. Butlike all these things, people
that have not grown up with thisin the system have got to move
out of the system beforeeverybody who's coming up is
used to it. It's important thatyou don't ever lose sight of the
fact that having societal impactof some form or another is going

(01:11:17):
to create a far betterenvironment for universities
than it does at the moment.

The balance has always been that some things
that have big societal impactaren't known when they're first
being explored. In The US, it'sa little bit broader. So
generally, the National ScienceFoundation and others have
looked at what is the impact ofyour work, especially for
applied research. For basicresearch, that's a little bit of
a harder question. And so thereare folks that have both created

(01:11:50):
basic research institutions andstill some federal research that
does that.
And it's always kind of abalancing act because if you
look at all the examples, butsome of the well known ones are
Dijkstra's algorithm for routingon the internet, Right? A
traveling salesman problem wasjust a mathematical curiosity.
Before, it was a thing that ranthe backbone of the routers of

(01:12:12):
the internet. And so it's alwayskind of but, yeah, to your
point, it's gonna take time evenif there is sort of some forcing
functions for that ecosystem forsure.

Yeah. And and we have to be awake because the
world may change in the timewe're waiting for this to
happen. And then it's no longerof its time, You know, so, yeah,
we have to be awake to thesethings. It's a joy to be there,
you know, going back to youroriginal question, Terry. It's a
joy to be there.
I love being there because thesepeople are so clever and because

(01:12:44):
they do such good things andbecause going back that's where
I wandered off to my example andbecause when you show them
things like that, they canimmediately get it. They
immediately get it and they willgo off and write things like the
second one when they do it.That's incredible. You know,

(01:13:05):
talk

to for another hour about this about this whole
topic, Peter. And it's so manyso many, like, we might have to
find a way to to to get you backon so we can do a part two about
it. But in the interest ofrespecting your time, you know,
I wanna make sure that we getyou out here as we promise. But
for those that are interested inlearning more about your work or
the companies that you've helpedspin out, you know, where could

(01:13:28):
they find you in your work andhow can they get in touch with
you?

Well, they can get in touch with you through
LinkedIn. That's the one I usemost. I'm a bit of an
interrupter on LinkedIn, I writeabout what I do on a regular
basis. The next best way is tolook at a website, I can't
remember the address, butNottingham Technology Ventures.

(01:13:54):
Okay.
That's the arm's length whollyowned company that the
university uses to umbrella itsspinouts. So if you go and look
on there, there's a little bitabout each of the spinouts that
the university have done. Youwon't find my name or the name
of anyone else in the technologytransfer office on there, but
this is the work that they do.So those are the two main places

(01:14:20):
that you can find out. But yeah,I mean, if people are
interested, it's fine.
I mean, just drop me a linethrough LinkedIn and I'm sure we
can talk about something even ifit's not what they want to talk
about.

Amazing. And so we'll put those kind of links in
the comments, and we'll add someextra resources to folks for the
episode. So that'll be great.And then I guess just to take us
out, what what advice would youhave for, you know, kind of an
aspiring EIR in a similar roleto yours now that we've gotten a
chance to kind of dive in andlearn about pieces of your
story?

What advice would I have? I think my first piece
of advice is you have to be goodat identifying good ideas. By
which I mean, when you see anidea, you must be able to
connect it to something you knowwould be better if the idea was
out there. You know? And itdoesn't really matter what it

(01:15:12):
is.
My second piece of advice isstick to what your experience
is. I mean, I don't mind goingand coaching someone in a life
sciences spin out, but don't askme to help them with pivots or
marketing or any of that sort ofthing because I don't know
enough about what they're doingto actually help with that. So,

(01:15:33):
but from your point of view, youknow, you need to be able to
place the idea in a context thatyou know is going to work. I
think the last thing is, whichis in two parts, is the two
things that I think I alwayswork by. One is, is it of its

(01:15:58):
time?
And the corollary of that iswhat we talked about earlier, is
letting go and quitting andrealizing that, yeah, you've
done six months on this, youhaven't got anywhere. It's not
of its time. Leave it alonebecause it might be of its time
while you're still around and itmight not. And the corollary of

(01:16:19):
that one is being able to say Idon't know and then going to
find out. Just being honest withpeople.
But, yeah, think for me, part ofthe real enjoyment of it is the
fact that it's not about meanymore. I don't have any

(01:16:39):
objectives. I don't have payreviews. I don't have
performance chat. None of theabove.
If people don't want me to helpthem, they don't ask me. It's
very simple. If they do wanthelp, do ask me. I've got too
many now, but yeah, know a goodidea when you see it, make sure

(01:17:02):
you know where the good idea isgoing to go, be able to say I
don't know or just drop it ifit's not of its time. And I
think lastly, know the rules ofadvice, which is don't give
advice if you expect it to betaken because you'll only be
disappointed.

I think that's amazing.

We're gonna wrap it up with the last one here,
which is we always like to giveback to the people who give
their time to us coming on thepodcast. So we'd love to know
how can the entrepreneurnetwork, the EIR Live Network
help you and do what you do bestright now at this current stage
of your life?

I would think the best help is really finding, is
being able to throw somethingout there saying, does anybody
know anything about Or doesanybody know anybody who? Right?
Because for me, part of thelifeblood of helping these
people is knowing who to talk toand knowing people that can

(01:17:58):
help. You know. So I think ifthere were an, you know, if you
establish this big network, thebest thing would be, I don't
know, a WhatsApp group orwhatever, but, you know, some
sort of group where we could allgo and say I've got this guy,
he's got this idea but I needsomeone who works in the
clothing industry to help mebecause I think there's an

(01:18:21):
application, you know that sortof thing.
I think that would be, I findthat the most useful thing
about, we've got, I need to say,there's a WhatsApp group for the
Royal Society of AIR's, but Ifind that the most useful thing
is people come on and say, doesanybody know anything about
this? You know, has anybodyapplied for that? You know, that
is the most useful thing. It'sreally being able to answer.

(01:18:44):
When you say I don't know, it'sbeing able to find someone that
can help you answer and know.
So that's what if if you had anetwork, that's what I'd like to
get out of it.

Amazing. I think we should leave it there. As is our
tradition, we've gone somewhatover our initial time. But
amazing discussion. I'm glad,Peter, that you had the
opportunity and took the time tocome on and really dig into
parts of your kind of journeyand career.
And I'm excited for kind of ouraudience and our network to take
a listen. So I really appreciatethe time. And, you know, as

(01:19:16):
Terrance said, maybe there'll bean opportunity to dig in a
little bit more because there's,you know, way more experience
and insight than is time on onepodcast. So I really appreciate
it.

No. I've enjoyed myself. So I'd be happy to come
again, Terrance, if you invitedme and Nelia. So, yeah, thank
you very much for putting upwith me.

This episode was, was one that could be sort of
thought about with the deepestlevel of experience that you can
think about. You know, when youtalk about experience that could
translate into other thingslater on when you're an
entrepreneur in residence.Peter, you know, displayed that

(01:19:55):
and much more, today. And itreally left me thinking in sort
of three buckets, Ilya, thinkingabout his experience because we
know from the multiple EIRs wetalked to and Peter was no
different today was that noplan, no first plan survives
contact. Right?
Like and sometimes the second orthe third plan won't survive

(01:20:15):
contact with the enemy or theorganization or the residents,
frankly, that you're going into.And Peter is able to draw from
fifty plus years of experiencethat gives him hindsight that
also enables the foresight andthe insight that he has today,
you know, and to do the workthat he's doing as a at the

(01:20:36):
Royal Society and theuniversity. So that's really my
impression of the episode todayand how I would think about it
and wrap it up because I don'twanna steal the thunder from the
other things that our audienceis gonna hear. What do you
think?

Yeah. No. Absolutely. I mean, just to pick
on on your perspective a littlebit, I really enjoyed that he
was able to sort of dive deep.And I mean, you even called it
out in the episode where it'slike, you know, that's how you
know you really were in thereand doing the thing because you
can peel it back, be sort of inthe trenches, so to speak.
And it was really enjoyable forme to kind of listen to Peter

(01:21:13):
and then even like in some wayshave him realize some things
that he hadn't really thoughtabout. And so that's what really
kind of a lot of these greatconversations lead to, I think.
The other part for me that wasinteresting is that he kind of
had an informal education andpreparation in dynamic systems
optimization and many of thethings that I actually get

(01:21:35):
excited about and know. But likehe did it in a very deep, like
hardware manufacturing realm.And it's unusual a little bit,
but he was able to pull intointellectual property, of the
business case side of things,the actual physical production,
what physics does for a jetturbine, just like all these

(01:21:56):
pieces that I think make himkind of both unique.
And I bet you in like auniversity setting, I bet you in
his university people find himreally compelling because he can
talk about, you know, when wedid this thirty seven years ago,
right? Here's kind of how Andit's crazy because some of these

(01:22:16):
technologies are thirty, fiftyyear platforms. And so in some
cases, a lot of those insightsare still directly applicable,
let alone sort of a good lesson.So anyway, I really like that
it's like really diving in withsomebody that's both excited and
an expert. And I think Peter'sall of those things.

(01:22:37):
And also, I really enjoyed thatwe had our kind of first Royal
Society, EIR. I've talked to ahandful. But that international
perspective and the fact that wewere able to exchange notes on
the academic setting, theindustrial setting, everybody
does it a little bitdifferently. But there's
definitely places and ways inwhich it rhymes. And so kind of
the final thought is I thoughtthat was a good input, I'm

(01:22:59):
hoping to bring more of thatinto our discussions going
forward.

A massive plus one. The people are going to be
in for a treat to listen to atrue translator today. And we're
going to do some livetranslation of all of his deep
experience on the episode. Socan't wait for you guys to tune
in. Love it.
Thanks for joining us on EIRLive. We hope today's episode
offered you valuable insightsinto the entrepreneurial
journey. Remember to subscribeso you don't miss out on future

(01:23:23):
episodes and check out thedescription for more details. Do
you have questions orsuggestions? Please reach out to
us.
Connect with us on social media.We really value your input.
Catch us next time for moreinspiring stories and
strategies. Keep pushingboundaries and making your mark
on the world. I'm Terrance Orrwith my goals, Ilya Tabakh
signing off.

(01:23:44):
Let's keep building.

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Episode 14 - The Accidental EIR with Peter Winton

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Episode 14 - The Accidental EIR with Peter Winton