Young scientists have substantial advantages over others when it comes to founding a start-up.

Guest contributor Leonie Mueck

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Eoin Hyde has been running from meeting to meeting. His start-up, Innersight, is in a critical phase and he has to convince investors to give him and his co-founder enough funds to get it off the ground. Even with his hectic schedule, he’s full of energy.

“Everything is happening very fast,” he says. Until just a few months ago, Hyde had been working as a postdoc at King’s College London, following a PhD in computational biology at the University of Oxford. He enjoyed his research, but when a former colleague approached him with the request to co-found Innersight, a medical imaging company that constructs 3D images from patients’ scans to help doctors during minimally invasive surgery,  he didn’t think twice. “I had been playing with the idea to found a start-up for a long time,” he explains.

Hyde belongs to a minority. Not many science PhDs choose to found companies, at least not in the UK. According to the UK GRAD programme, only 2% of UK-based physical science and engineering PhD graduates are self-employed; it is unknown how many of those have the goal to found fast-growing technology start-ups with global reach. Alex Crompton, programme director at Entrepreneur First, finds these low numbers regretful because in his opinion, science PhD graduates are perfect founders. Continue reading →