Bridging the invention to commercialisation gap in the UK

5050 is coming to Britain

The UK is a global powerhouse of invention.

Penicillin, DNA’s double helix, MRIs, monoclonal antibodies, the electric motor, the telephone, and the World Wide Web were all invented or discovered by brilliant UK minds. Yet, none of those inventions were successfully commercialised in the UK. Not one.

This is not a new story. In 1966, Charles Kao, a PhD from UCL, was working at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in Essex, researching the potential of glass for optical communication. Everyone deemed glass a hopeless medium: light would scatter and fade too quickly for practical telecoms.

Kao discovered, however, that if he could purify glass fibers enough, they could carry huge amounts of data over vast distances with minimal signal loss. The problem: to replace the standard of the day – copper wires – he’d need to slash signal loss from a whopping 1000 decibels per kilometer to 20, a decrease by a factor of 10^98. It seemed an impossible task.

Kao struggled to find anyone to fund this effort until John Bray, the newly appointed research director at the British Post Office, recognized the potential. He funded the research and Kao was successful in demonstrating the potential of communicating over long distances using light in fiber optic cables.

But it was an engineer who heard about Kao’s work on a visit from America – William Shaver from Corning Glass Works – who commercialised it. The Corning team he assembled used a 2000°C oven from the company’s semiconductor arm to produce a fiber with 17 dB/km loss. By 1972, they hit 4 dB/km – low enough to enable the internet.

Corning's first commercial fiber optic system was deployed in Long Beach, California in 1977. Kao received the Nobel Prize in Physics, but it was a US industrial conglomerate, not its inventor, that turned this innovation into the backbone of global communication.

It was a variation on a well-worn theme. Britain invents the future – then others go build it.

This pattern is primed to be broken. At Fifty Years, we think we can help. Since 2015, we’ve backed over 100 deep tech startups and helped them raise over $4.6B in funding. We’ve built deep tech companies ourselves. The Spinout Playbook, which we published last year, is widely used by academic founders.

We've distilled everything we know about deep tech entrepreneurship into 5050, our free, 16-week programme to help great scientists and engineers become great deep tech founders. We’re excited to bring 5050 to the UK in partnership with ARIA, a new government R&D funding agency built to unlock scientific and technological breakthroughs.

The 5050 programme answers the following questions:

• Is this technology ready to be commercialised?

• Can this startup become civilisationally important?

• What do I need to make a startup idea work?

• How do I recruit a world-class team?

• Am I ready to be a founder?

Through 5050, participants:

• Zero in on civilisation-scale problems to tackle.

• Develop the essential entrepreneurship skills to grow into great founders. 

• Learn the critical components of building a deep tech startup, from recruiting to fundraising to negotiating IP rights.

In just four cohorts, 5050 has helped launch 45 companies, many of which would have never existed otherwise. Chi Zhang and Tay Shin, for example, joined 5050 as postdocs at MIT. They did not believe their science was ready to commercialised or that they were ready to become founders. 5050 helped them discover they had the traits that make great founders. After a 12-year academic career, they spun a startup out of MIT halfway through the programme.

5050 participants not only get a crash course in how to turn their research into a deep tech startup – from techno-economic analyses of their technology to breaking down ideas into fundable milestones – they also join a deeply-supportive community of scientists from leading labs, engineers from companies like SpaceX and Tesla, and 5050 alumni, many of whom are now founders eager to share their experiences.

The UK is suffused with talent, technical brilliance, and creativity. Our goal is to inspire and equip scientists and engineers in the UK to build the next decade of civilisation-defining companies. To break with the patterns of old.

Britain invents the future. We think it should be built and scaled on these shores as well.

If you’re a scientist or engineer curious about entrepreneurship, sign up to hear when applications open. If you know someone who should join 5050, recommend them or send them this post!

If you want to help us build 5050 UK, we’re hiring! Drop us a note at hello AT fiftyyears.com