Welcome to the first episode of our ‘Inside VSD’ webinar series! Join us for a 60-minute panel discussion and Q&A session where we uncover the motivations behind the Venture Science Doctorate (VSD), explore why a new kind of PhD is crucial, and delve into our unique training approach.
Traditional PhDs often fall short in fostering deep tech ventures, whereas the VSD is – a diversity-first, venture-focused program. We’re closing the gap between scientific knowledge and real-world impact, turning science and tech talent into high-impact venture creators.
Meet our guests:
– Dr. Thane Campbell, VSD Dean
– Aaron Appleton, VSD Head of Program
– Dominic Falcão, DSV Founding Director
Apply to the Venture Science Doctorate (VSD): https://dsv.vc/3NgxqsR
🕒 Timestamps:
00:00 Welcome & Introduction – Dr. Thane Campbell
01:09 Overview, motivations, and vision of the VSD – Dr. Thane Campbell
09:28 Background on Deep Science Ventures (DSV), and reasoning of the VSD – Dominic Falcão
13:09 Beginning of the VSD story, the urgency for new science training programs – Dr. Thane Campbell
21:00 Education principles of the VSD – Aaron Appleton
30:12 Overview of Term 1 courses, learning structure, and engagements – Aaron Appleton
38:37 Questions & Answers – Dr. Thane Campbell, Dominic Falcão, Aaron Appleton
59:00 Conclusion – Dr. Thane Campbell
59:39 Apply! – https://dsv.vc/3NgxqsR
Welcome from the UK and the US and everywhere that you guys are hailing from all over the world um we’re super thrilled to see you all at this vstd webinar where we’re going to um tell you a bit about the program it’s Origins um and also uh take some of your questions
At the end so do stick around to the end and we definitely want to hear from all of you um who’ve been writing into us with your questions and everybody who’s um just joined for this event to hear more about how to apply for the Venture science doctorate um but before we get
To Q&A we’re going to start with a bit of an overview that I’m going to give um and then Dom and I are going to talk about uh vst’s Origins and what it means to us um at dsv um you’ll hear from Aaron Appleton as well today um who is
Head of program at the vstd and um he’s going to tell us about the educational approach uh the curriculum and and some of the thinking that we put into it um but I will kick us off uh so first I’m Dr than Campbell I’m Dean at uh deep science Ventures and
Our education team um where we’ve launched a college and a PhD program that you might have heard of um and yeah I’m really involved with um the team and uh thinking through the earlier phases of vssd and bringing it to um this this stage where we’re now alive um and it’s
Been an incredibly exciting Journey for me and I want to tell you a bit about what it is um The Venture science doctorate and why it’s been um such an amazing journey and and what we’ve tried to build here so just briefly The Venture science doctorate um it’s a three-year PhD
Program where driven individuals can build science companies to tackle Global challenges we took this position from really thinking about what deep science Ventures does and the portfolio of science companies that we’ve built across deep Tech sectors that’s climate Pharmaceuticals Health Care agriculture um computation and we’ve built everything
That we’ve been uh learning and delivering by creating deep tech companies um really into this year model and so the vssd uh allows you to in three years have a a venture focused outcome Centric program nested in a distributed institution run diversity first um and I just want to step through
What each of those mean so this being a venture focused program this means that from the beginning uh even at the application stage even on these webinars we’re all thinking about how we might create a science company um with the research that will be done here and so
The whole process is about uh engaging entrepreneurs becoming one yourself engaging members of The Innovation ecosystem um we’re outcome Centric so each candidate in this program spends a full year running industrial bottleneck analysis to really understand the sector um to work backwards from a global challenge and then uh design your own research
Project and um we wanted to enable like full flexibility in that invention pathway and so we’ve built this into a distributed institution we working with over 30 University partners and corporate Partners um and what this offers you is the ability to work with the world’s most entrepreneurial
Professors around the world um and in some of the world’s largest re research networks um and so that allows you to really be dynamic to be flexible to be um driven by the global need uh for what you’re what you’re building as your technology emerges to be moving into
Different labs to build the right thing for that Global challenge be it a cure for cancer or be it evading gigatons of CO2 and finally this is a diversity first program this is really important to us it’s um designed from recruitment all the way through to mentorship um to be a path
For for people of color for women um for people of all kinds of different backgrounds uh and I guess I just want to spend a little bit more on exactly what this means for us because we do get a lot of questions about um how we’re thinking about
Diversity and so broadly we see this as like a really critical moment um in the history of the kind of scientific Enterprise uh for diversity and inclusion both in stem training and in the workforces that you’ll be helping to create by creating your own companies um
I guess drawing that to a point we can see that a few statistics like only 1% of uh ukri so UK funded phds in 2018 went to black students um and then you know statistics that say that only 2.4% of VC is actually going to all women founded
Uh deep Tech teams so we see that as a kind of Gap that needs to be addressed and um it’s sort of incumbent on on everyone who’s involved in education today to really take that seriously um and so that’s exactly what we’ve endeavored to do we’re we’re driven to
Listen to more voices in science and Innovation uh one because yes it could help us potentially solve the big challenges that we’re facing today faster um but also because it’s just the right thing to do all of these voices should be heard and we take both of those UH responsibilities and
Opportunities like quite seriously and try to hold them together we would promote diversity and inclusion uh across the program in four key ways through incentives Recruitment mentorship and shared decision- making so it’s it’s really crucial to design programs that appeal across categories there’s been a lot of
Research to show that um people from different ethnic groups don’t really buy this U model of going to sit under the wise Professor for X years and do as they’re told um and so our incentives are very much around creating your own company creating that technology uh and
Approaching a solution for a global challenge every step of the way our recruitment is designed around what we’ve found to be the key knowledge traits and attitudes from Founders that we’ve trained through all of dsv’s portfolio companies across genders across ethnic barriers and and groups and across even different
Geographies um and so we’ve really designed recruitment to be something that’s um as unbiased as we could possibly make it looking at those traits and skills making it a process that shows us the things that people love to do uh rather than what they look like or
What their name sounds like um the mentorship angle of of how we’re uh bringing inclusion and diversity in is really key and by expanding the network across all of the University partners that we have um we’re really able to bring professors and pis and and research support mentors from lots of
Different backgrounds as in when you may need to draw on their expertise and then the shared decision-making aspect is really critical to move not just from diversity but to inclusion so we’re handing first principles decision-making protocols to all of the candidates that we work with you see our criteria for
Making decisions and you engage with it and that’s how we share decision-making power with you to really see how you would solve these problems um and and to learn from from us as well so that’s like a overall picture of the kind of four big pillars Venture Focus outcome Centric distributed and
Diversity first for vstd at this point um Dom Falco is going to join the conversation with us so Dom is uh the founding director of dsv and has been involved from the beginning has cared about education uh throughout the whole journey of creating um The Venture
Creator that is that is dsv um and has brought a lot of wisdom and and really Keen insights into how to build this properly um from day one so Dom thanks for um being here to to join the webinar and thanks for having me say I think
Very few people refer to me as wise but um it’s it’s it’s it’s nice it’s nice it’s an aspiration um as Dan said I’m one of the founders of deep science Ventures um a little more color on the organization as background we’re just in the process of creating our 40th
Science-based company they vary from Therapeutics companies to Industrial climate tech companies so they’re some of the most difficult companies to build all focused on solving hard problems before starting deep science Ventures I was working at Imperial College and my job there was focused specifically on supporting early career researchers and
Engineers to commercialize ideas developed during their studies so at Imperial we had an accelerator program a number of training initiatives so I ran the kind of entrepreneurial training activities there and we built companies that were subsequently acquired by Google Facebook Apple Spotify um the pattern that you tend to see is majority
Of Concepts developed out of research in existing universities they were coming out of single research Topics by teams from a single discipline um with the technology created first and then attempted to commercialize second and it kind of it can work quite well in software but we saw a much higher
Failure rate in scientific Concepts specifically like impact Centric scientific Concepts um and we saw this very big opportunity in multidisciplinarity and flipping it so you start instead with the problem but doing that inside of university is very difficult so myself and a colleague left Imperial College to try and start
Science-based companies outside of a university and in in terms of why this might make sense our experience that universities focus more on intellectual property commercialization than Venture creation so they care more about filing patterns and getting royalties from those patents than about spin outs they
Saw spin outs as sort of a last resort if they couldn’t license the IP we saw that um most individuals in the universities were recruited because of their academic Acumen rather than their entrepreneurial potential so we saw the potential to create a space which was concentrated with people who had that
Level of ambition we saw that universities were designed more for academic Discovery than combinatorial innovation that doing stuff across departments was sometimes very difficult because of differing intellectual property policies across those departments and because of very specific remits given to those academics in terms of the things they had to try and
Achieve papers are more likely to be published in a single academic discipline than in a multidisciplinary context we saw that universities were more focused on salary after you graduate then on the value of the things you create for example the value of the company you formed and they were more
Concerned with whether or not you graduate than whether or not you spin out they organized by discipline rather than problem area basically universities weren’t The Kind of Perfect environment to go if you wanted to solve big problems and specifically if you wanted to solve them with a company and so we
Left to create deep science Ventures focused on people who already had phds are creating that environment for them and we’re now expanding that to create the pH PhD training program as well so we’re partway through our first cohort at the moment and so the idea with this PhD
Program was to see if we could train people for invention rather than Discovery so the question we were asking is can you use a sort of cutting edge of pedagogy to train the individuals working on The Cutting Edge rather than the kind of medieval apprenticeship model which is sort of like as thing
Said training people to follow instructions rather than training people to be independent and inventive thinkers so training them to develop new Fields entirely rather than to be indoctrinated in existing um um fields and I had the Good Fortune of meeting s when he was doing his PhD at what was supposed to be
An industrial program a program focused on commercialization and I think this maybe is a good time to kind of hand back to say to talk about how that kind of collision happened yeah I know um and so I guess just stepping slightly back before that uh the context of my own doctoral
Research is is where this story began for me and it was like a highly ambitious um three University plus GSK Plus St microelectronics project and the project was aimed at diagnosing like a spectrum of lung diseases with a new device that the group was going to make um so it was
Incredibly Visionary in a way what we we sort of set out to do um but in a lot of ways uh a lot although some amazing things got done which I’m super grateful for still I think um in terms of the experiments that I got to do and and the
Different um fields that from sort of Cell Biology to um High throughput Imaging to machine learning that we got to fuse in a kind of creative way um we fell into a lot of the same traps of like standard academic research even with all of this sort of um energy
Behind it to really do something different and so that showed me like firsthand the force of academic culture and that like at the end of the day if you don’t move incentives and you don’t move social processes if those don’t change um then we’re we’re not going to
See a different Vision emerge from Academia and uh a different vision is exactly what I encountered in a in a like amazing and stunning way at Deep science Ventures that has really shaped my career as you can see um but when I went to dsv during my PhD um I
Encountered a room full of people like myself with scientific literacy going after moonshot R&D going after the creation of science companies that could impact millions and billions of lives in positive ways and and that was like nothing I’d ever um been around before and it was hugely energizing and uh
Inspiring and so I sort of took from that that there were really different social processes that we could bring into science R&D and training and um you know I also got to see companies like antiverse being created from those processes which um synthesize antibodies in silico in a day which is a
Huge uh step forward on the 18-month process that took uh took place before antiverse um and so then I was sort of back to the PHD um with a completely different mindset that was my Plato’s Cave moment of seeing that things could genuinely be different from the kind of hallowed Halls of
Academia that have always been the way they’ve been um and that they might actually be better if they were um different in in ways that promoted solving Global challenges and and so going back to the BHD after that was extremely disorientating and and um an interesting thing in its own
Right but what it um what it gave me is a serious drive and and sort of urgency to want to invent something myself having been in a room full of dedicated inventors for a few months and I I actually got to do that um I think with that different lens and mindset and
Having seen hundreds of of entrepreneurs in different ways during that time um I just felt the the confidence and the ability to ask myself the questions that we’ve been asking in dsv’s programs and um my own invention was one that I wound up going to GSK to tell the story of um
I was invited to their their headquarters and I spoke to their stevenage and Philadelphia teams and that was an incredible moment as you can imagine at the end of a PhD um and I I left with full endorsement written from GSK to see my technology developed um and then I
Encountered uh the same barriers that maybe a lot of you already know about um in technology transfer and that Dom alluded to that it’s just not a priority to see new companies spun out and so we don’t have proactive mechanisms for doing that particularly from the PHD level we don’t have clear mechanisms
Either um and so that was a huge barrier for my own path um at that point I learned the hard way that this wasn’t going to happen but there were several around just in my group who had also tried to invent things who who couldn’t um and so
With seeing that like glos Smith Klein wanted this to happen but uni didn’t didn’t enable it um made me think maybe maybe it should have happened and maybe we need to change that process and I knew immediately where I could go to spool something out that would change
That process but it took me a couple of years of actually working in that Tech transfer office um so I I moved very much towards them to figure out how things work there and and during those years I surveyed um and ran project uh research projects and and um engaged the
University in all kinds of ways to to eventually reveal that there were about 8,000 students at that one university university Adra who wanted to also create serious science companies so the missed opportunity started to seem like a a Citywide thing and not just my lab um I’m I started working with dsv on
This uh new model um yes and and basically drawing heavily from what dsv is already learned and developed and uh one of the first things we did is write a policy Proposal with the Federation of American scientists which you can check out it’s called forging 1000 Venture scientists to transform the Innovation
Economy and uh writing that policy proposal was like another moment where I saw um a lot more to this issue to this the problem and the opportunity um where there were actually at a national level there was huge urgency to to do things like this and there were already no B
Laurates like Paul RoR talking about why we need new science training programs and referring to like the Sputnik moment um which is this crazy moment in American and Russian history where um the US responded by actually creating a PhD program and that program had some very unique characteristics it was
User-led it was industrial it was interdisciplinary it was poor aable across universities um so we also drew a lot from historic precedent and that program Title 5 phc created the fields um as Dom was alluding to the fields of electrical engineering chemical engineering and the same Dynamics actually created the field of computer
Science so I realized that this was way bigger than like even what one University should be doing and that the national opportunity um fully Justified anything that I could be doing in the next few months to try to um build this out and we’ve had an incredible time um
Speaking to different governments uh corporates universities around and just seeing like the huge um hunger for new modes of PhD training and new modes of Academia at large like institutions um and and so it’s been an incredible journey and uh and I’m glad to be uh here with you guys to to
Eventually take some questions on how you can engage with uh the Venture science doctorate um but before we do that appreciate some of you have been putting your hands up please do drop questions in the chat um and we’re just going to hear a little bit
More from Aaron uh who’s going to tell us about the educational principles of the program thanks yeah let me pull up a deck here all righty all right hi everyone uh my name is Aon Appleton uh I’m the head of the Venture science doctorate program and I’ve spent about the last decade
Burrowing myself deeper and deeper down into a whole um of a niche called learning experience design and specifically for topics in science and Entrepreneurship so this is essentially the blending of the learning Sciences together with principles from interaction design and experience design um and I’ve I’ve uh previously worked
Doing learning experience design for a range of companies um including a startup accelerator in the San Francisco area called onc um a startup building a network of modern universities across the African continent um where we were building a conservation MBA program uh to get conservation biologists uh to
Start companies all across the continent um I’ve also uh incubated a company at the Harvard Innovation Labs also dealing with uh learning design um and now I’m I’m very very excited to to be heading the vssd program and applying some of these uh principles and practices from the learning Sciences to this very
Program so in this section I’m going to dig very deep into DS into bsd’s unique approach to learning and some of the various elements of our program so over these next 10 minutes of the session uh it’ll flow like this we’re we’re going to start by talking
About the big problem from about the past Cent of traditional Masters and PHD programs and in a nutshell that’s essentially that they’ve been dominated by an ineffective approach to learning called transmission ISM and then in the second half we’re going to explore some evidence inspired design processes that
We’ve been using to develop the entire vssd program which takes a radical break from these transmissionist approaches to learning so we’ll start by first diving into a problem that again these programs have have faced over the last hundred years and it can be summed up by this single word transmission ISM so what
That is essentially it’s a concept that comes from the learning sciences and it’s this theory of learning that says knowledge can simply be transmitted top down from an expert and passively absorbed by a learner you find this occurring in many many many forms today from slide decks um unfortunately like
This one to pod courses to muks to multiple choice edtech apps um however transmission ism is built on this faulty idea about how people learn and it’s been thoroughly discredited in the learning sciences and yet this transmissionist approach is so pervasive that it’s dominated this past Century and I
Pessimistically refer to this period as the rectangle Revolution because learning is mostly occurring within the confines of a rectangular box um so throughout this timeline you you can see here on the screen I’ve highlighted some key inflection points where emerging Technologies and Rapid user adoption of those Technologies converge and serve as
A platform for both the design and consumption of learning experiences so you can see at the start there’s a film projector there with a dominant learning design output being recorded lectures perfect example of transmission ISM and if we skip ahead skip ahead Along Comes the the TV and the primary education use
Case for that ends up being live broadcasts of lectures or educational programming with a bit of a narrative Arc thrown on it transmission ISM again you can see that here in the mimia graph the overhead projector even fast forwarding into the future the very exciting Apple 2 personal computer comes
With so much potential to revolutionize learning however what ends up happening is that many of the desktop publishing tools are used to create transmissionist artifacts for learners to passively consume rather than using that powerful tool to turn the Learners into the ones doing the creating um same thing you
Know happens when the internet goes mainstream um when Cloud computers come along and uh even with you know the onset here of of the mass consumer adoption of the iPhone again showing so much potential to revolutionized learning but most popular learning design outputs have been apps built around a transm iist approach to
Learning even the Oculus Quest 2 or U somewhat more recently the distributed autonomous organizations uh what ends up happening with the most popular ones is that after a learner is granted tokenized access into a community the main learning experiences they counter encounter tend to be live lectures on Zoom um a way to
Describe What’s Happening Here comes from a former professor at mine uh at Harvard called Chris Dei which he calls old wine in new bottles so the new bottles represent new technologies that are coming along and the old wine represents the same old ineffective approach to learning this transmission
ISM that keeps being perpetuated over and over again as new technologies come along um however the vssd is working very hard to to shift this Paradigm we’re shifting away from these dominant transmissionist models to learning experiences that are built around around more evidence so evidence inspired by m the interdisciplinary fields of uh
Cognitive science educational psychology anthropology even neuro Robotics and what we’re trying to do in the shift also is that you know learning experiences right now are primarily being designed like drivers are or like like the Learners are riding a bus the driver decides where the bus is going
And the passengers are just along for a ride so the focus is mostly on courses units lessons but the vssd is Shifting this we’re creating experiences more like Learners are riding a bicycle where the rider is empowered to choose the destination the speed the route and have interaction Rich experiences here the
Focus is much more on designing Dynamic learning environments so just like deep science Ventures The Venture science doctorate is also shifting away away from like this Tech push or a technology first approach uh to learning design where a trendy new technology comes out like generative AI vr-based metaverse Dows
Whatever it may be and then learning designers Port copy digitize or emulate their content to the new delivery system which often gets in the way of the learning experience or inhibits meaningful human interaction so our vssd approach to this is that Technologies are Delivery Systems for experience and
The goals of the learning experience should be given Primacy of place then a medium can be found to deliver this most effectively um and before we really dig into the details of the vsd program I think it’s important to zoom out just a little more and start from a place
That’s inspired by evidence of how people learn best one theory of learning that sits at the heart of the vssd program is it’s called constructionism and it’s all about the first part of that word constructing and it comes from Decades of compounding research from folks like Seymour papert
John Dewey uh Jean P Le votsi and they all Point towards the findings generally that that people learn best through the Hands-On process of creating something and in scientific terms this construction is uh providing a link between sensory and Abstract knowledge and it generates understanding through representation one of my favorite quotes
That helps to distinguish the difference between this dominant transmissionist approach and constructionism is uh found at the bottom of the screen there from the late Seymour papert where he says Better Learning will not come from finding better ways for an expert to instruct but from giving the learner better opportunities to
Construct so once this Foundation of learning through making has been established we then validate our learning experience against second order principles of learning kind of like you see on the screen here um like ecological validity uh is recursive feedback uh implemented into the program are there opportunities for embodied
Cognition and so forth uh so we can ensure the learning is most effective now what that is looking like in our first term you can see a sampling of the five courses our students are just about to finish right now um so they take these um All In Parallel with one
Another it goes uh from September up through December 15 and you can see there’s a variety of different dimensions in you know training a learner to Be an Effective Venture scientist from complex decision-making where we’ve worked with some World leading experts in cognitive task analysis um to create a curriculum
For our students where they will identify an area that they would like to get better at that is essential to succeeding as a venture scientist and then they will go and interview experts using a very rigorous uh structured interview process distill all of their findings into a book that we then
Publish and uh share with the greater deep science Ventures and deep Tech Community we also have a course on stochastic Studio which is all about this this thing called hudi or self-directed learning so each student is given ,000 and you must direct your own learning you’re creating your own
Program over the coming three months um where you have to identify what is an area of growth that will most benefit me as a venture scientist and then you go full force in creating your own project presenting that every two weeks to the community getting feedback and continually pushing yourself to the edge
Of your abilities um next we have Venture science Finance so really digging into um what does it mean to be a capital allocator in the Deep Tech space so we look at you know multiple sources of funding from dilutive to non-dilutive sources of funding and really try to put
Ourself in the shoes of a deep Tech Capital allocator um as we go through and analyze different companies um and see what it might be like to sit on the other side of the seat uh as say like a det Tech investor um and then at the
Very heart of the curriculum is our scoping course um so we’ve got two that are paired together intros scoping and secondary research that supports your scoping so this is all about you know the Venture science doctorate deep science Ventures core approach to Innovation for creating these specific
Types of science companies so you’re LED through um all this very very rigorous process of you know starting with an outcome and then narrowing down until you find a list of potential technologies that may be best suited to achieving that how it’s structured is that um we’ve got you know a mix of
Async and synchronous learning experiences and then uh also it’s it’s a bit of a hybrid approach too so we’ve got um you know a lot of virtual learning but then culminating at the very end of each term with an in-person experience so you can see our uh five
Courses these two are combined at the top here that students are going through this term and they meet at this Cadence of every course meets once every two weeks and what happens in that session is in the first half since it’s all you know Project based it’s all
Constructionist um the first half of each session students are presenting the project work they’ve done for the prior two weeks and there’re are members of the deep science Ventures community present um your peers are there we always invite uh external visiting experts um and so you get multiple
Sources of feedback from all these people that are listening to your presentation um which will help you to continually improve throughout the term um and then the second half of each session we have an interactive exercise that serves the purpose of essentially introducing you to what your next two
Weeks of project work will look like um some of the time it’s playful some of the time it’s a game but it’s always going to be interactive and highly social um with the other peers going through the cohort with you as you get introduced to say um you know how to do
A top- down Tam analysis in Venture science Finance so that’s the basic Cadence and then at the very end of the program or the term um we bring all of our uh vssd students to a certain location each time a different location uh that has a high concentration of deep
Tech entrepreneurs and funders and then we involv them and the Deep science Community uh Ventures Community together um in basically a celebration and a showcasing of all this project work that you’ve done throughout the the past term um and to show you like a a more
In-depth view of what some of these uh interactive exercises look like um this is one that we typically use it’s it’s uh um done on Muro um and it’s always done in usually groups of two three or four for this one um students are partway through their scoping process
And you’re broken up into teams each team is given a certain outcome they want to achieve I think this one had to uh do something with food scarcity in a certain country um and then they go through all of these lenses here of thinking differently about how they want
To achieve that outcome and then they arrive at a very different approach from one another um and this is just kind of a kickoff to like what these scoping moves or scoping lenses can be that you’ll be working on then for the next two weeks to continually refine your
Scoping work um another one I can showcase quickly before I get to the end is this is for our complex decision-making course again um this uses a cognitive task analysis process so in this particular one they’re partway through and they’re learning how to conduct an interview type called a
Knowledge audit interview so this is where you interview a a deep Tech entrepreneur um who is an expert in a particular area you are interested in and the whole goal of it is to try and understand their tacet knowledge or basically hidden knowledge that you know isn’t publicly available somewhere and
They go through kind of a s a simulation here where they’re uh practicing different roles one person is the interviewer one is the interviewee and you go back and forth um to give you some practice of how to do this interview type as you get ready to conduct that in the coming two
Weeks all right and to wrap up um the the last bit here is the feedback again we try and make this highly interactive and engaging with the Greater Community this is one activity we do called feedback lenses where after a student presentation is given that student themsel selects the type of
Feedback they want to receive and then everyone present in the session selects the type of feedback they want to then give um and then you just kind of go through this uh activity where you can give that type of feedback and then lastly uh here is our intensive um it’s
Coming up next week actually where we bring everyone to London um and we are going all over the place so we’ll be out in Bristol at a place called science creates um we’ll be meeting with some of their staff uh some of their Founders and some of the uh Venture Capital
Investors um and then engaging in a term sheet negotiation simulation with them that you can see pictured here um we’re also going to be renting a whole venue called uh the the London night Cafe where students will be exhibiting their stochastic Studio work and the greater deep science Ventures Community will be
Coming through and engaging with it and providing feedback on it on Wednesday we’ll be doing a book launch you can see pictured up here in the top um it’s called an atlas Adventure Science so each student gets a chapter and this is the the results of their um complex decision-making interviews with
Different deep Tech entrepreneurs so this is a a living document we’re going to continually publish it every year a cohort goes through and each student will that goes through our program will add on a chapter that will go on to benefit Venture science doctorate students uh deep science Ventures
Founders and hopefully the greater um the greater deep Tech Community all right and I am going to hand it back to th thank you very Much Aron thanks so much for that deep dive into how everything works inside the program guys I hope that’s been a useful overview and and sort of Dash through um what what you can see is a really engaged process of building a venture step by step um and organizing your PhD
Research around that uh we do have a flood of questions which is really exciting uh I don’t know that we’ll get to all of them but we will try guys um I’ll I’ll kick us off and take a few questions on the application process so there’s a question about the habits
Um mindsets and skills that we’re looking for when people apply um and so we measure magnetism determination and expertise and each of those are categories that decompose into another three um subcategories and and so across that we have very clear things that we’re looking for for example in
Expertise we’re not just looking for technical knowledge uh the kind of standard Science Background but also commercial knowledge and first principles problem solving um and so there’s actually more detail on this um on another one of our uh webinars you can check out um unveiling The Venture science doctorate on um
YouTube there’s another question uh around sorry I’m just like spooling through these thousand questions here that’s really exciting um yeah if we’ve if someone’s already started a venture would it be possible to incorporate the first or in the first or second year depending on the process
So actually a few people have asked me this um in in LinkedIn and stuff as well people who are approaching um and so we’ve got a really structured approach to making sure that you’re designing something that’s outcome Centric so uh you on the program will spend your three years tackling a
Global Challenge and um if your company happens to be the best way from first principles to tackle that challenge then you can spend the first year learning everything aon’s been talking about in terms of scoping and that process will like reveal that that your company is
The right one to um keep working on we are asking people to keep an open mind um in that they might find through a year of digging into the space that there’s an even better way to cure cancer or um 100x the compute power of our of our
Semiconductors today and so if you find that we would hope that that would be enough to compel you to want to work on another company if you absolutely refuse to work on anything except what you’re currently working on um that might be that might be a
Area so we are asking people really to commit to the scoping ontology that we’ve spent a lot of time diving into and we we trust very heavily um and it by all means like Ping another follow-up question if any of that’s unclear I’ll probably take um well
Darmer Aaron did you see any questions that you wanted to take maybe it’s worth Aon just talking a little bit about how um scoping topics are selected and whether or not you need to have an idea coming into the program because I think there are a lot of
Questions on this and then we can segue from that to talk about how once topics have been decided and developed how the mating process works with professors and partners and then maybe we could talk about the partners that we have after that as a kind of flow does that make
Sense covers a lot of the questions I think yeah um yeah that was a great question uh so yeah you you can come into the program without having a clear technology that you want to be developing it’s encour um however what we tend to look for is people that already have a stem
Background usually um like many of our candidates in the the first cohort tend to have a master’s degree in a stem area and one that’s relevant to the four sectors that uh dsv Works in so again those are agriculture environment um computation and pharmaceuticals um so if you generally
Have expertise in any one of those four areas is you would be a good fit for the program when we go through the scoping process we start very very very broad just what does like the whole sector look like what are some you know potential um outcomes that I might want
To achieve say in environment maybe that’s a direct air capture company maybe it’s a new energy technology um it could be any number of things within that sector but then our scoping process and through the mentorship of many deep science ventur staff and Founders um you will be guided through this process and
Start to narrow in and develop um expertise around a particular problem that you really really want to invest your time for the rest of the program to dig into absolutely and um as a part of that scoping process it’s really a social process as well as a first principes way
Of digesting out um all the the different approaches to solve your moon shot um and the social aspect is that you’re not just at a laptop or in a library uh doing sort of research in that way you are building scientific research but also market research findings uh logging those into an
Outcomes graph so again we’ve got a a video on our YouTube channel building outcomes graphs check that out and there’s more detail on that um there and there are a couple of articles on our website as well about the comes graph um but as you’re doing that you’re actually
Going and having conversations with deep Tech Founders in your space um academics that you could be working with or learning from policy makers right understanding in great detail from many angles of the Innovation ecosystem exactly what the barriers the constraints the requirements are to run a technology through the real world up
To the solution that you’re trying to um create and so the way that we facilitate that is by connecting you across our Network really dynamically um and so you can be chatting to us as you’re scoping to sort of ping ping one of us and say is there
Anybody who’s looking at um the nitrification of rivers that happens when fertilizers spill off and what happens in the real world around that and um that could be something that you want to delve into from an academic perspective and we’d connect you to piis and professors it could be something
That you want to understand from a commercial aspect and we’ve got lots of great commercial partners that we’re working on there uh as well so at any point dsv’s network is um something that you can be delving into to advance your scoping and we will help you to find the
Right people um that we already know and that we’ve already built into vsd so that means that you’re building quite a complex project that’s that will eventually be fit for the real world um and there are a number of partners that really want to help you do
That already uh and so I won’t list all of them because there’s over 30 um but we are working with Imperial College London Kings College London the University of Edinburgh um we’re working with top universities as well in the US so the Mayo Clinic Cornell University
And like a lot of different partners now on six continents um and so that’s a broad space for you to be one running questions through as in when um but also in years two and three when you would have hopefully completed that scoping and you’re ready to build technology in
These different Labs you won’t be bottlenecked in the same way that a lot of labs are or people doing research are today where they really sit very much in one lab in one Department which usually is built around one discipline um and and that’s the expertise they can access
We mean for you to be able to move um and as a technology is emerging into a different space um robotics meets synthetic biology you go to a synth biolab and you actually build that out so we’re just flicking through questions here um there’s one here how do you feel
About applicants who have been away from the lab for a while I’m now an R&D policy expert rather than a sector expert is that welcome yeah so I mean as I touched on very quickly just there policy can be a big aspect um of of some
Of these things so I met uh I at cob 28 right now guys I I stepped away from that because I I want to talk to you about the vstd and take your questions um but the the whole climate change angle is one where we see huge political
Commitments and will and and political processes that need updating and we’re excited about entrepreneurship as a way to reveal things that can be done faster um technology that can move us forward faster and also like processes that get um built into your business model that might be scalable um and so there’s some
Great examples of that you can check out like deep Sky who are in Canada um and and the findings that you encounter in the policy space we would want you to distill that as you’re going it’ll be built into your outcomes graph and it’ll
Be very easy for you to sort of draw out everything related to policy um and we’ll actively be having conversations with the governments that we’re working with um and so your specific point as well about uh do you need to be recently attached to RN like a university lab no
Um if you have broader experience bring it to the vssd and and certainly in some sectors it’ll help you build a company faster we got 10 more minutes looking for questions that looked particularly burning in the text box um there’s a question about engaging a few questions about engaging with
Accelerators and whether having done that before if that’s a problem uh no and I imagine it would only be a in a lot of instances that would have that would have helped you develop some of the skills and attitudes that we’re looking for um I guess if you’re thinking about bringing a
Specific technology that’s like partly owned by um other people then that would be something that we’d have to think in more detail with you about and again the first kind of Point around committing to scoping to build the absolute best thing that you can in the three years that you
Have um would would be relevant there as well there’s a question um that that I want to afflict to you my question is is an entrepreneurial Finance background requir um no it’s not but would be very beneficial especially in our Venture science Finance course um where we take
On the perspective of capital allocators um which is incredibly important in helping you prepare um to make ENT essentially a a venture investable company yeah great so I mean a lot of the skills that you will need um across VC across um prototyping and business model design you will actually be able
To gain on the program um of course if you already bring strength in the space that’ll help your acation I can take the IP question if you want so all intellectual property generated during your PhD will be assigned into the company you form and you will be the
Majority owner of that company but during the program we will temporarily hold the IP that is to make it easier for us to negotiate intellectual property rights with each of the universities you’re potentially placed with because in order to partner with universities we have to sign M us dedicating how intellectual property
Will be divied up ahead of time it makes it easier for us to just secure all of those generate the IP and then assign it into the company and be clear that assigning means that the company will fully own the IP it’s not a license from
Us it’s put into the company and the company will own it completely I can jump in for one here um krishanan asks do you need a master’s degree to apply for this program um I have mentioned that candidates have expertise in one domain with their master’s degree um so that’s what our
Candidates now have but it is not a requirement um relating back to aspect of my presentation um I mean we really believe strongly that self-directed learning is one of the most powerful ways to learn something so if you can showcase through the application process that you have say Master’s level degree
Knowledge in a scientific domain that’s you know relevant to the vssd program um that’s uh that will suffice can take the um Equity ownership question as well while I’m on the commercial ones um so the ventor science doctorate will hold a 10% stake in companies formed but it’s a not
For-profit stake which means that all proceeds from our ownership in companies started by vstd candidates will be reinvested to create new fellowships in the future so because the program is fully funded we pay the stipend we pay research costs we pay um visiting student status consumables Etc there’s a
Significant cost for running the program and to get funding we have to show sustainability over the long term and our sustainability mechanism is starting companies and then taking a small ordinary stake so 10% in ordinary shares so it’s fully dilutable so any additional investment will dilute us
Alongside you guys we’re all aligned in terms of share classes and then any proceeds should the company be acquired that come back to us we will put into a dedicated pot to create new fellowships for future students so you’re kind of paying it forward in a sense through that mechanism
Can give us a broad Strokes to the application process so um from now until December 23rd the first window of applications is open as you might have seen on the website um so you will submit like a CV and your like a personal statement in the summary something that describes basically how
You how you come up to the entry requirements that we’re asking people to consider as they apply and then uh you’ll you’re essentially held uh and there’ll be key points throughout the cycle um where we open a a one-we window for you to complete a case study and so this is
Where we get to before I mentioned that we we assess magnetism expertise and determination and we’re really looking at um expertise and a little bit of your determination in that case study it’s designed to be completed in your own time over the span of a normal nine to
Five working week so it’s not that it’ll take you an entire week to do it um and you will as a part of doing that case study you’ll get a lot of instruction from our um videos that we’ve recorded in the past articles that we have of
Exactly how to think the way that dsv does about designing Ventures um and and how to build really strong um narratives and advantages uh into the Venture that you’re coming up with which a lot of people find helpful whether or not they join the program like it’s a system that
You can think through and people use ouros scoping ontology prevent your design but people use it in the policy space it’s it’s a broad tool for coming up with solutions to big problems so um just by applying and making it through to the next round of applications you will see um
How we do that breaking down complex spaces into specific research projects and approaches that could solve them um so you’ll get all of that from round two and then there’s a f final round where uh you come to interview so there’s a question here from Diane on talking a
Bit about the interview process as well so we can’t assess everything um on paper even with this uh case study that that I’ve been telling you about um and so at interview we have a conversation with you um it’s not meant to it’s sort of a relaxed environment where we want
To understand how you communicate um and and some of the things that are driving you and how you’ve worked in different environments and that helps us to kind of understand uh beyond the research and Commercial knowledge that you might have um and and Beyond how you can organize it the
Magnetism aspect of of uh your concise storytelling your persuasion your empathy and how you bring those things um to vsd as well so I hope that’s uh giving you more depth around exactly what happens at the different stages and so the first cycle as I mentioned closes
Um December 23rd and we’ll have another window that opens um next year and closes March 2nd I think that’s just get Aon to answer the technical Science question the one on technical learning just before we finish because I think it’s a really important question I don’t want anyone to leave
Thinking that you’re just gonna learn go on Aaron yeah yeah I saw that one that’s a great one um so Anu rag asks is there an opportunity for dedicated course-based technical learning it seems like the curriculum is mostly focused on the Venture aspect what about the science itself really really good
Question um in the whole first year you’re kind of developing this entrepreneurial Foundation as a adventure scientist but I would say roughly 20% of that as more like Technical and scientific one example to share there is our stochastic Studio course um where you design your own uh self-directed learning path one student
In there is combining machine learning together with Immunology another student is digging deep into synthetic biology and using it to figure out how to make trees grow faster for urban architecture so one example of some technical learning that’s interwoven in but then by the time you get to year two and
Three it is very very scientific you’re in a lab you know working under the supervision of a pi you know with um some other phds and postdocs um so yeah year two and three uh very very technical for sure I mean uh so two out of the three years you’re doing PhD
Level research that first year is just making sure you you aiming at something that that really matters for for Society at large um guys thank you so much for jumping on and and for so many of you staying on till the end uh we hope this has been helpful for you making a
Decision about whether or not to apply um we’ve had a great time telling you about uh how Venture science doctor works and thanks as well to everyone who’s asked questions and and put in really nice comments actually in here as well about how how inspiring you’re finding our our systems approach um
Thank you for for joining us and that brings this webinar to a close guys so so please apply and we’ll see you in the next round of applications hopefully
2 Comments
Thank you DSV for the initiative, a well required field of study to bring out someone's creative thinking. Looking forward to making an application for this program.
Thank you for this program. I have applied for the second cohort. I'm really excited!