00:00:00 Robert Klupacs: Today on the podcast we have Dr Alastair Hick, the Chief Commercialisation Officer at Monash University. Alastair has been responsible for developing and overseeing a successful IP commercialisation program bringing an ecosystem approach to commercialisation and innovation. This has included the development of proof of concept and investment funds and strategic partnerships with multiple investors and corporate licencing partners.

Alastair’s credentials are very impressive. He has a BSc and Honours in Chemistry with Biochemistry, a PhD in Chemical Ecology, an MBA from the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge and is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He’s also a director of Monash spinouts Jupiter Ionics, Phrenix Therapeutics, Myostellar and Flex Immunotherapeutics; as well as an early-stage investor Uniseed and therapeutics development company BioCurate.

Alastair recently established a $15 million Monash/Breakthrough Victoria Pre-Seed fund and is chair of its investment committee, was previously a director of Amaero International prior to its IPO in late 2019, plus was a founding director of the $30 million Trans-Tasman Commercialisation Fund and a member of his investment committee. And after all that, he’s found time to talk to us today.

It’s a pleasure to welcome you to the podcast, Alastair.

00:01:30 Dr Alastair Hick: Thanks, Rob.

00:01:31 Robert Klupacs: So, we’ve got a lot to get through today, but we are extremely excited to have you because living out there in Clayton, you don’t get out to Parkville often enough. As the intro outlined, your expertise covers a huge array of areas of research, translation and commercialisation from early-stage investment, entrepreneurship, startups and spin outs.

But I just want to start before that. Take right back to the start. I think our listeners will be very interested about your journey. How did you find your way to Australia? 1 and 2. How did you find your way into this particular sphere of commercialisation at Monash?

00:02:06 Dr Alastair Hick: Okay, thanks. That’s a good question. It does go back quite a few years. So yeah, I started off as a researcher, so I did a… as mentioned, I did a Bachelor’s in chemistry and biochemistry and then spent 10 years as a researcher Agricultural Research Institute in the UK. I basically got to the point in my research career after 10 years where I was looking for, rather than going deeper and deeper into one or two subjects, actually to start to broaden my experience and that led me to thinking about doing an MBA and like most things in life, I don’t want to just do something to do it, I actually want to try something and make something really successful.

So, I sort of set myself the target of if I can’t get into a good program, then I won’t do it. And luckily enough got an offer from Cambridge and spent 12 months transitioning out of pure research and learning more about the business world during my MBA. And after that I then started looking or during that, during the MBA, I was starting to look at what I wanted to do next.

And I still loved science, always have done. And it was a case of how I start to apply my newfound business experience and couple it with my scientific and research background. And that was the time that commercialisation, or tech transfer as it was known in the UK was just kicking off. And I managed to find a role in a small company that worked in agricultural research or commercialising agricultural research from all around the world but based in the UK.

And that was my first foray into the commercialisation space. I did that for about three or four years and then a role came up at Cambridge University and we were living just outside of Cambridge, and it was, it was an opportunity that was too good to turn down – one of the best universities in the world. And I went to join what is now called Cambridge Enterprise at Cambridge.

Had a lot of fun there, learned a lot, did a lot of deals and learnt how to. I think I learned the right mindset to be successful in this space. And that was really around being pragmatic and actually getting things done.

There’s no such thing as the perfect deal. And it was more important to get things out the door in a good way rather than trying to perfect anything. And certainly, coming out of the academic environment, that’s a very important thing. So, I was lucky enough to do that for three years and then strange sort of range of circumstances led me all the way down here to Australia.

So, like most of these things, there was a bit of family, it was a bit of adventure thrown in and it was. And my brother was living out here and wife and I had been out here a few times and really liked it, and we were looking: what am I going to do next?

What are we going to do next? And we just thought, why not try Australia? And it was literally like that. So, because my brother was here, it was very easy to get a. Well, relatively easy to get a visa. So off we set. And next thing I knew, I turned up almost 18 years ago to the day, turned up in Melbourne and started knocking on a few doors.

So literally I knocked on the doors of Melbourne Uni, Melbourne Ventures, a guy called Charlie Day, who’s now the CEO of one of our spins out companies

00:05:35 Robert Klupacs: Small world.

00:05:36 Dr Alastair Hick: It’s a very small world. And Monash and Professor Edwina Cornish, who was the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research there, I met her just before Christmas in 2006. And they were looking. They were undergoing a restructure of the commercialisation efforts at Monash at that time and were looking for some experience. So, it’s literally right person, right place, right time, and I’ve been there for nearly 18 years.

00:06:01 Robert Klupacs: God, what a fantastic story. Because unlike most people that come out to Australia, you had no job to come to. So, complete spec. Complete spec.

00:06:06 Dr Alastair Hick: No and, and I think that’s a. Something that I try, I do quite a lot of mentoring now. It’s one of the things that I try and talk to my mentees about is have confidence in yourself. You know, if. Have confidence in your skills and your experience. And when I’m talking to people in their career development, have confidence in who you are, what you know. And good people, you know, we’ve always got a shortage of talent. Good people will find good roles.

00:06:38 Robert Klupacs: Yeah, well, it’s a great segway. So, you’ve been at Monash, as you said, since very late 2006, but really started early 2007 and then you worked through them and established Monash innovation in 2015. Can you tell us about Monash Innovation? Because you came, when you came in, as you said, they were restructuring, but it’s taken. It took a while to get to Monash innovation level. Can you tell us what it is, why it was established and some of the ways it’s helping the whole university ecosystem embrace and support commercialisation. And looking at the companies you’re a director of, biotech and med tech in particular.

00:07:13 Dr Alastair Hick Okay, yeah, it’s a good question. And like lots of universities around the world, the commercialisation efforts at Monash have gone through a few iterations over the years. This is not uncommon. And. But around 2013, 14, we’d had gone through one of those changes and it was like, what happens next? And so, I came up with the proposition of actually bringing our commercialisation efforts together under the banner of Monash Innovation.

And we’d been doing some, some pretty good stuff in the, in the years before that, but it was, it was, it was fairly unstructured, and the university backed this idea. And so, 2015 we established Monash Innovation, which at that point was. It was seven people, so it’s pretty small outfit for a university the size of Monash.

And it was very much focused on very traditional commercialisation activity. So that was IP protection and management. It was leading to mostly licence deals to existing companies. And that started off and we got that working really really well. And to be honest, it’s just grown from there. So, I’m always one looking at who looks to what’s the next interesting way we can help things get out of the university into the world being developed and used.

And so, I’m always seeing what others are doing around the world, what I’ve learned during the years and thinking, what else can we grow? And so really, it’s been an evolution of our support activities. So it’s been everything from establishing proof of concept funds to strong links to investors, to developing a much stronger spin out program, to one where we now have a whole ecosystem, an innovation ecosystem that we’re developing with some very clear sort of factors that are driving that success that we now work off.

But if I’d have gone with that grand plan at the beginning, it wouldn’t have flown. So, it was really a case of, okay, so I know where we want to go. I’m not exactly sure how we’re going to get there, but we’re going to get a whole lot of good things happening along the way.

And I think that’s been a key to our success. We haven’t just focused on trying to build something great, but actually delivering all along that journey.

00:09:33 Robert Klupacs: So how many people are actually in the Monash Innovation ‘cluster’ for want of a better term?

00:09:39 Dr Alastair Hick: Yeah. So, the team now is just over 30 and it’s split into three groups who work together on lots of different things, but they have a different focus. So, I have a about half the team is focused on traditional commercialisation, what we originally set up with Monash Innovation. I have three – soon to be four – people focused on support for our spin outs and startups, in our new ventures and investment team.

And then I have a small team of six people in the Generator, which is our entrepreneurial hub. And so those three and a couple of support staff across all of that. So those three teams are the ones who form the Monash Innovation Group.

00:10:19 Robert Klupacs: Very interested in the Generator, as you said, it runs a wide range of entrepreneurship programs across the whole of Monash, which we understand is to foster talent from within. So, what support and advice do the programs provide to young entrepreneurs and perhaps old entrepreneurs as well? And in what ways has that program evolved from when you first set it up to where it is now?

00:10:42 Dr Alastair Hick: That’s a very good question. So originally, I had a student come in from one of the student entrepreneurship societies, came and knocked on my door in 2015 and said, ‘has Monash got any entrepreneurial programs that it’s running? There’s something at Melbourne called MAP, and there’s something, something at Sydney called Incubate and why can’t we have one?’.

And I said, that’s interesting because, you know, it’s an evolution of. Again, evolution. What I’m was talking about earlier and I thought, this is quite a good idea. Let’s see if I can make something happen. So basically, I borrowed somebody for a couple of months from, from one of my colleagues and we ran a program, actually said we’re going to run a pilot and see what happens and and that was the start of it. So, it started off with five or six teams who came through that program moderately successful, shall we say. But actually, it demonstrated that there was a need and actually a couple of the teams did really, really well and demonstrated to the university that this was something worth considering.

That led to the start the university funding the generator in the following year. And it started off as a very much student and alumni-focused program. And it ran that way for a couple of years and wasn’t under my stewardship at that point. And then about four or five years ago it came back to me and what I tried to do, what I’ve been doing over the last five years, is bringing more of the staff and the research back into that.

So, it’s now focused on developing entrepreneurial talent from our staff, from our researchers, from our students and our alumni. It has the lens of everything, looking at everything through the lens of entrepreneurial talent. How do we develop entrepreneurial talent, so young or old we’ll take them all, as long as they’ve got some association with Monash.

00:12:32 Robert Klupacs: And do you share with the MBA programs and Business Schools at Monash? 00:12:36 Dr Alastair Hick: Yeah, so there are some programs , there’s programs in the Business School that run some entrepreneurial programs as well. The difference is that the the Generator is purely extracurricular, it’s outside of the curriculum, it’s open to anybody. And we’ve deliberately set it up that way so we can have staff, we can have students, and actually the fertilisation, cross fertilisation between their ideas and how they think has been incredibly valuable.

So, it’s sort of a parallel program to some of the things that will go on at the Business School.

00:13:10 Robert Klupacs: So, is that sort of just like giving advice to people or is it giving them services that they can tap into? Is it all of the above?

00:13:17 Dr Alastair Hick: So, it’s. Think of it as a funnel. So, we start off with how do we inspire and get people interested in entrepreneurship? So, we might bring in people who’ve been successful entrepreneurs to give talks. We’ve developed a whole series of online content that people can access to teach them about the basics of startups and commercialisation.

And being a university, we’ve obviously designed that with proper learning objectives in mind. So, it’s not just talking heads, but actually there’s learnings as we go through. So, it’s a program, and interestingly enough now that’s now being used by multiple of our faculties in some of the courses that they’re teaching. So that’s now starting to go to a much, much wider audience.

So that’s the sort of top end of the funnel. And then we have a series of programs that become more and more hands on. So we start off with something called the Validator, which is about validating your idea, actually making sure it’s not just your friends who tell you you’ve got a great idea, but actually getting out to the market, how to engage, how to take feedback, how to, how to learn from that.

And doing that in a cohort holds people to account. And then we go all the way through and we’ve got a couple of other programs, one focused on or two focused on researchers now and then one focused on early startups and then one which is our sort of flagship program and accelerator program that takes startups and takes them through a three month journey of accelerating their progress.

00:14:42 Robert Klupacs: Yeah, we know a little bit about what other universities are doing across the country, but yours seems to be quite different, seems to be quite a lot deeper. How would you describe what you’re doing in the Generator compared to other universities across the country and perhaps internationally as well?

00:14:56 Dr Alastair Hick: Look, I think we’ve always tried to be, I think two things to think about with what we’re doing. One is partnerships. So we always, we want people to come in and out of our programs, okay, so they can come from other programs into us, they can come from, from our programs and go out elsewhere, whether that’s to other entrepreneurship programs or to investors or wherever it may be.

So, we try to be as porous as possible so people and ideas can come in and out. And we think that makes for the best both learning environment, but also the best entrepreneurial experience.

The other thing that we’ve been trying to do is integrate what we do in entrepreneurship with our commercialisation activities. So, there’s sort of two sides of the same coin. Sometimes we get opportunities that are pure technology based, and we can just do a deal to an existing company. Other times we need to build the business and how can we get the entrepreneurial talent to do that. Sometimes it comes from the researchers and sometimes it comes from elsewhere. But how can we develop the programs that can help us do that?

And the final point just to make is one of the reasons that we run programs is to try and do these things at scale. Monash is a huge university, 85,000 students, nearly 20,000 staff across multiple campuses, both in Australia, in Melbourne, but also in Malaysia, Indonesia, China, India and a small centre in Italy as well.

So, we’re already running programs that go to our students in Malaysia and looking to roll those out to our other campuses in the next year.

00:16:44 Robert Klupacs: Let’s talk spin offs because it’s been what everyone wants to do these days and I know this is likely an old figure, but from what we could find in 2023, our stats tell us that your commercialisation team has spun out 26 new ventures based on Monash IP. And you particularly were awarded Technology Transfer Professional of the year in 2023 by Knowledge Commercialisation Australia. A fitting acknowledgement of your work.

Like all parents, there’s no such thing as a favourite child, but I would love to know what’s been giving you the most joy out of those 26. And do you see this continuing evolution of more coming out every year or does it get harder every year?

00:17:25 Dr Alastair Hick: Does it get harder every year? Yes, it’s does. I think one of the things to say is that the numbers on a year-to-year basis are quite stochastic. They go up and down according to circumstance. So, 2023 was actually exceptionally good year. So not including the figures you’ve got there, we did 10 spin outs in 2023.

In 2024, we won’t do as many, it’ll probably be three or four. But we’ve been helping a number of our recent spin outs in the sort of 2021, 22, 23 vintage years to raise some significant amounts of money. So, we’re the, the, you know, the work varies, quite goes up and down year by year in the, the different parts because we’re, we’re not just looking to spin out a company, we’re looking how can we help it be successful.

So, it’s, if you go back, you know, 10 or 15 years, it used to be your job was done once you’d raised the funding round and off it went and good luck and and send us a big cheque when you’re successful. Well, we all know that doesn’t work very often and so we’ve put a lot of effort into making sure that we give these companies the best chance of success.

So, favourite children, that’s a tricky one because it’s always really interesting. The things that you think are your favourite when they come in the door, often aren’t by the time, a couple of years down the track. Look, I’ll talk of one that’s going. I’ll talk of two, because there’s two very interesting ones at the moment that are literally just about to close funding rounds, expected to close, one in the next week and one before Christmas.

And both of those. So, one’s in therapeutic space and one’s in clean tech space. And why are they my favourite children? It’s actually because of the people. It’s. And it’s not because they’re, you know, you know, the sort of people you necessarily want to have a beer with. Although both of them, you would in this case.

But it’s actually because of how they’ve. They have taken the opportunity and driven it. And they’re not just. They don’t just know the answer, because they don’t. They actually are very receptive, so they’re very coachable, but they are learning very, very quickly. So on both of those opportunities, I’ll mention the companies, one’s called Electrolyth, and it’s just about to raise just under $30 million Aussie dollars for lithium extraction technology.

And the other one’s called Phrenix. You noted earlier, I’m on the board of Phrenix and Phrenix is about to close a significant seed funding round with overseas investors. But both of them, the teams behind the companies, have been what is going to give them the best chance of success. So, the trajectory of both of those companies is driven by the people.

It’s not. Yes, they’ve got great technology, but without the people, they would either be going a lot slower or nowhere at all. And so, you know, you hear it time and time again. It’s the team. Yes, it’s the team.

00:20:29 Robert Klupacs: Yeah, I just wanted to pick up on that because we’ve had lots of people come through, both ends of the spectrum, all founders, saying, look, I’m a founder, I’m an academic, I want to take this all away because I’m the smartest person. And then we’ve had other venture capitalists saying, take it out of the hands of the founders as soon as possible. Where do you sit on that?

00:20:43 Dr Alastair Hick: Yeah, and you’ll hear this a lot if you hear us talk at Monash. And it’s always. And I’m sitting on the fence here, it depends. But it does depend. How many good academic founders are there? Not very many, but there are some. We can look at a company that spun out of Monash best part of a decade ago, 4DMedical spun out by Andreas Fouras.

00:21:07 Robert Klupacs: We’ve had Andreas on here

00:21:08 Dr Alastair Hick: Yep and you know, Andreas, very strong founder, very driven and he managed to make that company a very big success. And we’ve got a couple of others where we’ve had similar sorts of founders. A couple of the characteristics is that they talk to a lot of people, they engage with a lot of people, and they learn on the way.

The ones who think they know what they’re doing usually don’t last very long and it usually doesn’t end very well. Most of our opportunities we need to bring in some form of either experienced co-founder or entrepreneur or exec, depending on the stage. But often, you know, we’re seeing increasingly that we, our researchers might be a CTO for the or CSO for the first two, three, four years, might be part time in the university, part time in the company.

And that often strikes a pretty nice balance where you’ve got some real commercial expertise leading the company, but you’re still maintaining the technical links back to the original technology.

00:22:14 Robert Klupacs: Yeah, I know our listeners will be interested because lots of talk we saw the Innovation Minister come out yesterday saying another review about R&D and innovation and it’s really, really important for the country. But just to put it in perspective, we all know in our sector it’s really hard to raise money and the NHMRC and MRFF between its $1.5 billion is spread across the whole country.

But just putting perspective for our, for our listeners, those 26 companies that you’ve have been created, how much money has been invested in those companies? And then what do you think the multiplier effect is when they’ve got grants and other things and partnerships.

00:22:46 Dr Alastair Hick: So we’re constantly updating the number because it’s just crossed a billion dollars. And I will just put a caveat on that though, because the biggest money that we’re seeing our companies raise is in the US or occasionally in Europe. And so, you know, we had a. There’s a technology that came out of Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences Technology for lymph directed drug delivery that was developed by Professor Chris Porter and his colleagues that has gone into a. was co-developed by with a US company and now has gone into a separate company called Seaport therapeutics. Seaport in six months of this year raised a total of US$335 million. So taking that technology into the clinic and they’re already in the clinic, been into phase 2 clinical trials. It’s all based on Monash technology.

And so, what we’re starting to see now is some of our technologies raising a lot of money overseas. Here the quantum is significantly less. But we’re starting to see, you know, I talked about Electrolyst raising $30 million. Phrenix will raise between $10 and 15 million. So these are starting to get more significant than we would have seen.

00:24:05 Robert Klupacs: Does a lot of that money in your companies, even though it’s coming from the northern hemisphere, does it still get spent in Australia? Are they quite happy to leave the money in Australia?

00:24:13 Dr Alastair Hick: And again, that depends. So US investors will tend to want to spend, you’ll tend to have to flip a company and they’ll invest into the Delaware Corp. And often they keep the Australian subsidiary and that will do a lot of the early stage R&D. But the other thing that we’re increasingly seeing is that when it comes to clinical trials, they’re then coming back to Australia.

So almost all the US investors that we talk with are will have multiple companies in their portfolio who are doing clinical trials in Australia, whether they’re from Australia in the first instance because they really like the clinical trial set up in Australia, the regulatory and all the support and the great healthcare system that we’ve got.

00:25:07 Robert Klupacs: Yeah, that sort of leads me to my next question because we wanted to get you on with your position, just to get your opinion. I hope we don’t hold against you, but generically you’re in a great place to be asked this question. What do you think is the current state of innovation in Australia and particularly in the sectors that we play in here, med tech and biotech. Strengths, weaknesses and what do you think the future holds?

00:25:31 Dr Alastair Hick: Yeah, so look, I’m always glass half full person and I think actually it’s way more than half full. I think we’ve been doing ourselves a disservice by how we’ve talked about what’s happening in the sector. If you go to any of the research institutes or universities around the country, there is a huge amount of activity happening and some really interesting companies coming out of there.

I think our challenge is a talent one. I think we need to do more to get really great talent, often expats back to Australia. I can think of one of our companies at the moment that’s looking for, for a CEO and has been for a number of years or not number of months and is struggling to find a really good CEO.

We’re pretty confident if they can, that they’re going to raise a very significant amount of money. But finding really good people is the biggest blocker or the biggest challenge that we face at the moment. So how do we develop more good people? How do we take them through that journey so they get skills and experience?

And are there Aussie expats who we can get back to Australia to help us on that journey?

00:26:39 Robert Klupacs: Okay, fantastic. Question for you. So we’ve got quite a few more to go, but we’re going to run out of time soon. But hopefully you’ll stay with us a bit longer. We’ve looked up again the stats. You published them. Monash University’s Enterprise and Engagement portfolio has invested we came up with over $200 million of your own money in research at Monash, which we think would lead to creating a virtuous cycle.

You know, we hear all the time, you’ve touched on it before, that access to funding is what’s holding us back, particularly at the early stage valley of death and then an expansion. You’ve actually given us a different view earlier. But how do you think we improve on your story to be able to raise all that money for companies and knowing that there’s more coming along, how do we get more into the system?

00:27:22 Dr Alastair Hick: I think there’s a couple of things. One, we need to actually talk about our successes more. We’ve got to point to the success of companies that have been developed in Australia, whether they’re companies like Telex, who are now worth $6 or 7 billion, who’ve only been in existence for just over seven years, or other smaller companies that we’re seeing coming out of the research sector that are now worth $50, 100, 200 million.

We’re not talking about those successes enough so people don’t apply, recognise that there is actually. And those successes are financial successes as well. They make money for their investors. Because actually, the way to get more money into the system is to make money. It’s as simple as that. We can forget about the ‘do good’ bit, but actually investors will follow where the opportunities are.

And I think I’ll come back to the talent question. If you get enough good people working on the technologies that we’ve got in and around Australia, then we will see more of those successes and the money will follow that. There’s no lack of capital in Australia. I think we all know that.

00:28:31 Robert Klupacs: Do you think there’s a lack of infrastructure for manufacturing both drugs and devices, though?

00:28:36 Dr Alastair Hick: I think that gets to another problem, which is a scaling question.

00:28:39 Robert Klupacs: Right. Ok.

00:28:39 Dr Alastair Hick: Often we can quite often get companies to a certain stage and then we have a ‘what happens next?’ question, which could be, it could be how we can’t manufacture this locally or we can’t scale it to the point where we can actually develop a global business here, you know, or that we don’t have access to the right, you know, GMP facilities, whatever it might be.

And I think that is a challenge for us because we’re getting much better at that very early stage, as I said, you know, in terms of things like clinical trials. But actually scaling a business and being able to do generate the business side of things is something I think that where we need to put more thought and effort into.

00:29:25 Robert Klupacs: Do you think it’s, you know, because there is enough infrastructure in terms of buildings and kit that exists. I know you’ve, you and I have discussed this before, but is there a role for government perhaps bringing a lot more of those pieces together and saying, look, we’ll give you subsidised manufacturing to get it up to get those organisations scalable so they can start producing and then exporting.

Because we’ve had this discussion before, given that this review has just been announced yesterday, is there something we can put up to say to government ‘this is what you should do’?

00:29:53 Dr Alastair Hick: Look, I think without going into too much specifics, I think what we want government to do is to get things to the point where they can stand on their own two feet. Sometimes we see a little bit too much of always wanting another handout from government. The handout has got to get you somewhere.

So if government’s putting resources and funding into something, it’s got to get it to a point where it is then sustainable. And so you then start looking at, okay, so where are the opportunities for that? And you’ve got to be careful that you don’t pick individual winners because that’s very difficult to do.

But we’ve got enough expertise and areas of areas where our technology, our science and our research is of a genuine world quality and we have companies coming out of those areas to start to say actually we need to put more resource around. And, you know, it’s not for me to say where that might be, but you want to think of it in terms of how can we get those companies to the stage where actually they don’t need any more support because they are commercially viable in their own right.

00:31:02 Robert Klupacs: Yeah, Quick question for you because we tend to focus here on med tech and biotech and we love tech, but you’re head of innovation, Chief Commercialised Officer, you’re not linked to technology per se, but you’ve as you said 100,000 people in the Monash ecosystem and there’s so much creativity there. How do you harness things in the social sciences and the other stuff that could have a commercial outlet, but which you and I would never have normally spoken about, but there’s a huge amount of creativity there and your role is innovation.

00:31:31 Dr Alastair Hick: Yeah, that’s a great question. And it’s something that we’ve been paying quite a lot of attention to over the past couple of years, because it could be something that leads to improved policy, that leads to societal benefits, or it could be something in the healthcare space that changes clinical practise, that leads to benefits.

Some of those are commercial, some of those aren’t. And I think what we’re seeing, and we recently, about 18 months ago, we brought somebody on specifically with that remit to look at social ventures, to look at innovations from the arts, humanities, social sciences. But they could equally be coming from a clinical background, where actually it’s access to how do we develop ways to get new clinical practise out there? So not necessarily things that are commercial, but things that are, have significant value in society in some way. So, you know, as universities, we should be doing that. Not everything that we’re looking to do has to make a pure commercial return.

And we’re lucky and privileged to be in a position where we can put some resource to that and say, actually we think that there’s an opportunity for a business or there’s a new way of doing something that we want to get out there being used. We’ve got some amazing stuff in our education faculty that’s about helping children on their development pathways in various different ways and programs that have been validated in various educational settings. How do we get those out into the world more broadly being used?

So, yeah, I love working on the technology side, but these other things are fascinating because you start to look at different business models and different models of translation. It’s a lot of fun.

00:33:17 Robert Klupacs: Oh, fantastic. Coming to the end, one of the key issues of this whole podcast we set up early on was because we believe in the power of mentorship. Love to know who your mentors have been, both when you’re in the UK and now you’ve been in Australia and the impact they’ve had on your life.

And then secondly, how you mentioned earlier you mentor a lot of people. How do you go about mentoring others?

00:33:38 Dr Alastair Hick: Yeah. So, thanks. A great question. And I think, you know, mentors are really important in your life and your career, and I think so if I go back in my research career. I had a great, great mentor as my PhD supervisor, then stayed in their lab for a good few years, a guy called John Pickett, a Fellow of the Royal Society and very eminent in his area.

But the reason he was, you know, yes, he was, you know, on the science side, he was great and. but he was always thinking big. He was always thinking about, not just about the technology or the particular bit of science, but how can I apply it, what can I do with it, how can I think about it?

And then as a person, he was very supportive. So, I can remember going along to him saying, you know, I’m thinking about leaving science research and think about going and doing an MBA and wondering what response I would get. And he sounds. He said, that’s great. And he then got some people in to help me to prepare my application and, you know, interviewed me and things like that. So, people like that who go out their way to help you, both in your career, but also as an individual.

And then since I’ve. Since I’ve been in Australia, a whole variety of different people you learn from. Whether it’s, you know, if I look at our previous Vice Chancellor at Monash, Professor Margaret Gardner, who’s now Governor of Victoria, looking at her leadership and how she led a huge organisation and changed it and sort of modernised how we thought and was run, or my last two bosses at Monash, Doron Ben-Mier and Ken Sloan, both taught me different ways of thinking and about how to address challenges and issues and opportunities, but always by bringing people along with you.

And I think that’s actually a big thing in everything that we do, because when everything in the commercialisation space is not just about the individual, it’s about people and teams and relationships. So, the people who’ve helped me develop that and how I develop those relationships have been the most important ones for me.

And then coming back to. When I’m mentoring people, I really take the approach of trying to. Often, it’s about trying to understand, get the mentee to understand or think about where they want to go. It’s really interesting. They sort of. I have conversations with them about what they want their future to look like, where they might go, how do we help them get. I’m not telling them anything. We’re having a conversation and I’m leading them to where they actually want to get to and giving them the confidence, coming back to you saying about me moving to Australia, give them the confidence that they can do it.

Because if one thing I’ve learned working with entrepreneurs for the past 25 years is you can do some amazing things if you’ve got a little bit of confidence and you just take a little bit of risk and get out there and give it a go.

So I try and help people to think; to give them a bit more confidence when they finish the mentor relationship so they feel a bit more confident about themselves. Because that’s something that you sometimes see lacking in people early in their career. And particularly and just to say this with women who often not as well supported and anything I can do to help in that area, I will do great.

00:37:16 Robert Klupacs: It’s a fantastic note to end on. Thanks, Alastair. We’ve reached the end of the podcast now and I’d like to thank you so much for sharing all your insights on med tech, biotech, innovation, all levels of it, and how it can improve and some of the thoughts you had, particularly at the end there, about mentoring was fantastic.

To our listeners I hope you enjoyed listening and I look forward to introducing you to our other guests in future podcasts. There are links to everything we talked about in the show notes, and we look forward to welcoming you next time.