¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº

This episode was recorded in 2024, our bicentenary year.

, Professor of Materials Physics and Innovation Policy and Vice-President for Regional Innovation and Civic Engagement, and , Professor of Biomolecular Engineering and Associate Dean for Business Engagement and Innovation in the , join host Andy Spinoza to talk innovation, economy and commercialisation at the University and across ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº – and discuss how we’re converting ideas into impact.

The group dive into the University’s remarkable history of path-breaking research delivering truly radical solutions – from world-changing nuclear breakthroughs at the beginning of the last century to kickstarting the computer revolution and artificial intelligence research around its middle, to the isolation of graphene at the start of the 21st century.

They consider how at ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº today we bring together expertise across economics, politics, sociology, education, innovation and beyond to address the myriad of challenges that exist on a local, national and international scale; and how through our work in areas such as digital and AI, advanced materials and biotechnology – and the positive benefits delivered for the environment and health – our commitment to innovation and delivering real-world impact continues.

Find out more about the University’s innovative work and partnerships:

• Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Catalyst (IBIC)
• Sister (formally ID ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº)

Hello and welcome to Talk 200, a lecture and podcast series to celebrate ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº's bicentenary year. Our 200th anniversary is a time to celebrate 200 years of learning, innovation and research. 200 years of our incredible people and community, 200 years of global influence.

In this series, you'll be hearing from some of the nation's foremost scientists, thinkers and social commentators, plus many other voices from across our university community as we explore the big topics affecting us all.

Today we're going to find out how you turn great ideas into world-changing ones and the impact they have on society and economic growth. From the first pioneering discourse on artificial intelligence to the isolation of graphene, many of the most transformative ideas of our time were formed in ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº. But once you have a breakthrough, then what? Our mission is to ensure the world-leading research developed here reaches its full potential and benefits wider society, whether through commercialisation, enterprise or collaboration with industry partners.

This episode's guests will discuss how at ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº we're structured to achieve this aim. We'll be talking about innovation in all its forms, highlighting its ongoing role in driving ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº's growing economy and discussing the initiatives across our university that are helping to define our city as a true global leader in innovation.

I'm Richard Jones, I'm a professor of Materials Physics and Innovation Policy, which is a good combination, and I'm also Vice-President for Regional Innovation and Civic Engagement. Everything the University does to try and boost the regional economy, the city's economy, to work with the city, that's what I look after.

Hi, I'm Aline Miller, a professor of Biomolecular Engineering within our Science and Engineering Faculty. I'm also Associate Dean there, looking after Business Engagement and Innovation for the Faculty.

Okay, well, innovation. It's a big concept and I think it is really meaningful in the context in which it's applied.

So, can I ask Richard, what does innovation mean to you and in your area?

Yeah, well, there's an old saying that an old polymer chemist told me, who I learned a lot from. He said: "Research is turning money into ideas. Innovation is turning ideas into money.”

And so, it's the way that we take all the great research that happens in the University, and we convert that. I mean, not just into money, but into impact, into tangible outcomes that affect people's lives. Could be, you know, supporting businesses. Could be creating new businesses that create jobs and growth. So, it's about that translation. It's about getting stuff out of the lab or out of the wherever we're doing our research and having a real impact on the nation, the city, communities around us.

Innovation to me is really when you look at a problem, and then you look at it from a completely new fresh angle. It's looking to solve problems, to create impact. And then what you do with that impact, whether it's a societal, environmental, or commercial, or economic impact, then you can start to really help change people's lives. So that's what innovation, sort of, means to me.

Ok, and, I mean, Richard, innovation in erm, to many people may mean digital or technical innovation and change. Is that the case? Or can innovation, you know, be wider than that?

Well, it's much broader than that. And you know, even technical innovation, yeah, we see new apps. We see new things, but the whole substrate that tech happens on, you know that that's all about physical innovation. It's about creating new devices. So, there's a whole range of places where it's important. It's creating new sources of energy, new ways of processing information, you know, new ways of dealing with health, health issues, which is a really big deal for all of us.

Innovation happens all the time, and it's often not terribly visible. People don't notice the fact that their products have got a little bit better. Things work a little bit better. Things are a bit more efficient. So, yeah, there's some kind of big breakthrough innovations that look really obvious. And then there's just the kind of relentless progress of everything, just getting a little bit better, people working out how to do things in a better way, getting slightly better products, working out how to make the, you know, the processes by which they make them a little bit more efficient. So yes, both big, radical changes, but lots of little stuff as well. And it's that that adds up to progress, really.

What's the link between innovation and economic growth?

There's a couple of angles to it. One is thinking about creating more money that comes through the economy. So that's thinking about building processes better so they're more efficient and take less time, so the companies can make more products and make more money on an annual basis. And, then if you start to innovate, you can start to create new jobs and then that helps create a better economic environment for the region and the UK and globally.

Within that sort of drilling down, there's a couple of different areas we can look at.

So, innovating in partnership with companies and businesses. That's where we can translate some of our knowledge that we have at the University, new ideas can then go and help make new products, make processes more efficient, more bio sustainable, to help then meet global challenges such as the sustainability of the planet.

And then thinking about the entrepreneurial side of things, then you can start to think about taking some of our innovations out to create new startups, to create spin-out companies. And that's when you're taking new knowledge out and creating new entities to help solve current challenges that we are facing in our everyday lives. But then also that helps create jobs and helps then feed the economy, so then it starts to make money, then it can start to grow and thrive and not just survive. So, it's feeding back that circularity of growth.

Aline's mentioned the spin-out companies that are coming out of the research, being conducted at the University. There is a growing ecosystem, isn't there, in not only in the University, but in Greater ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº, in this kind of area where people may believe that America is a sort of natural home for that kind of activity.

But Richard, can you sort of give us some detail of how that's growing in this city?

Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, people do think, "Oh, this only happens in the States”. That's not true. There's a very big kind of spin-out venture capital supported spin-out scene in the UK. Greater ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº is probably the biggest centre of that outside Greater London and Oxford and Cambridge. it's been growing very rapidly.

There are some companies that have been going a while that have made a difference. I think of the late Paul O'Brien, a great chemist in the University, who sadly died a few years ago. But he had a great spin-out called NanoCo. It produced quantum dots. It sounds really obscure, but now loads of your televisions, electronic devices will use these. And he did some cool chemistry in the lab, worked out new ways of making these things.

Again, the driving force there was actually a little bit environmental. These things weren't entirely new, but most of these things involved toxic materials in a lead and cadmium. So, he developed with his team a bunch of new routes to ones that were less toxic. And they've now made a big impact in the market. And many of the mobile phones or televisions that use this technology will draw back to that intellectual property that Paul invented a couple of decades ago now.

And it's not just in nanotechnology, is it Aline? Life sciences and environmental sciences… do you know of other businesses that are coming out of ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº University that the general public might hear about in years to come?

Yeah, absolutely. There are several companies that are starting to come through the pipeline that are starting to flourish and grow. Holiferm is one example where it's looking to use natural sources. Moving away from petroleum-based chemicals to create new biosurfactants. And then those surfactants can then be used in everyday products like shampoos and conditioners, and cleaning products. So that's one company that's starting to grow.

Beenish Siddique has got a company AEH Hydrogel, that's looking at using gel products. So it's a new hydrogel type material which has got graphene included in there and that's looking at creating and allowing vertical farming in hot countries or in urban environments to help generate new food stocks to help feed a growing population.

There's lots of different companies and pockets coming up and through. And how do we encourage, you know, the students and, especially in the research phase, to, I suppose, not leave ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº and go to other places.

There's work being done, isn't there, to foster that entrepreneurial drive?

Yeah, it's a really exciting time for the University as we build our ecosystem and in our own innovation. So one of the things that we just launched recently was the Innovation Academy, which is a cross-university initiative that brings together the Masood Entrepreneurship Centre, the University Innovation Factory and our Business Engagement team. And it's all about helping raise awareness, accelerating entrepreneurship and impact creation and connecting people so we can create a network to really help spread the word, but also then help you mentor each other and build up our entrepreneurial community.

So we launched that initiative very recently and we've got several activities that are falling out from that. Webinars for lunching and learning around how to get involved with business engagement, how to go talk to companies, how to partner with them, how to engage and get your research connected within to solve an industrial challenge.

And then thinking on the entrepreneurial side, we are looking at thinking about how do you turn your research idea into a potential commercial opportunity, how do you then shape that into a sort of a minimal value proposition so you can go out and talk to investors to try to get and raise some money to help then you generate the next phase of that research that's moving your research along that TRL (technology readiness level) pathway. So there's lots of support out there that's really helping engage and create a community within the University, but also more broadly in Greater ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº.

Can we just rewind a bit because ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº has a huge track record in innovation historically.

I mean how does that affect or influence to help what's going on today?

 Well, I have a personal answer to this. I'm fascinated by the history of innovation and the history of science and technology. You know, ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº has been a totally central player in that and we're celebrating a 200th anniversary. You just have to go back to ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº in the 1810s, 1820s, and the first half of the 19th century. Absolute ferment of innovation.

You know there's all sorts of modern industries were being invented. But modern science has been invented here too. You know you had people like John Dalton inventing the idea of the atom, you had James Joule kind of coming up with what were the modern ways of thinking about energy. That of course was stimulated by all the industrial ferment at the time. So, it was really you know, it was after that environment that the Mechanics Institute was formed in 1824, that we had the, you know, the medical school formed in the same year. It was really driven by these networks of people who were interested in all the new science that was coming.

Out, but you know that's what was driving the Industrial Revolution. I think it's fascinating that was happening in ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº. You know in contrast if you think about, you know, Cambridge and Oxford at that time, you know, they were basically still training the dim younger sons of the aristocracy for positions in the church. It took a while for them to kind of catch up with the idea that science and technology were what a modern university ought to be doing.

So, from that you know, the Mechanics Institute, then going on into Owens College being founded by the industrialists with a focus on things like chemistry, which was so important for the industries of the time. You know, you have the textile industry, you had dye stuffs being invented to go from the tech to make the textile industry, and then you know out of dye stuffs came fine chemicals, came pharmaceuticals. You can kind of trace the family tree of innovation. 

Innovation is in the DNA of the founding of the University isn't it? It absolutely is that you know right through the whole idea that you could kind of formalise the way that you did investigations that you know this idea of research and development and a process that would allow you to uncover more innovations allowing you to get more, you know, to get more products. You know and that goes right through into the 20th century, you know, the great period of all the engineering firms that and you know, I'm sure we have to talk about computing at some stage, but you know it was great.

Great to think about ‘Baby’, you know, the first stored-program computer was – it wasn't just a fact that this was invented by, you know, collaboration of electrical engineers and mathematicians working out to make this really world-changing discovery. You know, you had Ferranti, as a big electronics company, right there within a year or two taking that out and commercialising it as the first computers. So, right through the history of this University there's been that intimate link between new science, new technology, innovation.

Aline, I was going to say, you work with a lot of big companies, so does the reputation of ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº help in that respect, or, I mean, companies come to the University and have an awareness of this tradition?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's and because of the reputation that ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº has in terms of being innovative and working collaboratively in partnership with companies, it's a snowball effect so it really then attracts other companies in to see what they're missing out on and to see how they can engage. And because we're set up in such a way that we can fast track a lot of these types of interactions and engagements and we understand the needs of businesses and we know how to meet those needs with and we've got the great science technology, biology, medicine, and the arts and creative in behind there to then help bolster and support and actually because ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº is so innovative and has got that relationship with businesses it's what attracted me to the University in the first place.

Not in the 1800s I need to add! But, you know, 20 years ago that's, we were joined and worked in the centre that was across engineering, science, and pharmacy and medicine looking at translating materials knowledge into clinical applications and yeah, it's what attracted me and what has kept me here, and many others, today.

Richard, your work spans the sort of, regional growth agenda, as well as the science and technology side, so what's the University's role in contributing to the Greater ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº and wider north-west economy?

Well, there's a really important direct role which comes from the kind of inventions that we have, but I think there's a bit of a kind of thought leadership role too and you know we hear a lot about productivity and the problems that the UK has in areas like productivity. ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº hosts The Productivity Institute, the headquarters of this national institute that brings together people in, you know, doing business studies, people doing economics, and even one or two people, like me, who are physicists who have got interested in this.

Yeah, so my own scientific career has always involved collaborations with companies trying to understand how processes can be made better. I've kind of come at it from seeing in my own research how innovation is important, but I've come to get involved again interdisciplinary is something that ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº is really good at being able to talk to economists and people from the Business School about, you know, how we should think about innovation and productivity more widely has been really good, then I think you know the other great thing about ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº has been the depth of the connection with the city and with the city authorities and so you know we've seen this period of ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº really wanting to get on the front foot after you know, there's some deindustrialisation in the 80s, but you've seen a City Council that's been really committed to driving the economy and the University's been really close to that.

It's been really part of those discussions all the time and that goes on, now the combined authority got an elected mayor, but you know I spend loads of time with the combined authority helping them to think about how to make the economy better, how to kind of bring economic growth you know right across the city region and indeed across the north-west more, more widely because ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº's role really should be you know the capital of the north.

I think people watching this podcast will, if they don't live in ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº, be aware of the quite striking physical growth in the city and the University being so tightly to the centre of the city you know is it means that we as a university are part of that and do you see a kind of a relationship between that – the image of the city – and the ability to attract, you know, the brightest students, the best researchers, and the most ambitious companies?

Yeah, unquestionably. People you know, people want to come to ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº is that sense of buzz and, you know, you see this in, you know, we have new sectors growing up. I mean AI is now turning into a really big new sector. The commercial AI sector now in ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº is as big as the one in Cambridge it's, you know, second to London in England.

That's the kind of economy that needs, I mean, maybe I'm being ageist, it does probably need people who are younger than me, and even Aline, but it needs to attract young people who want to come and start a career in a place that's an exciting place to live where there are lots of people that they can learn from and you know hang out with, and that of course then brings companies and big multinational companies that think, you know, there's a talent pool here that we can exploit. That's something the University is kind of really a very important part of.

And Aline, do you see a similar trend? People come into ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº because they see a growing city as well as, you know, a top-class university?

Yeah I've been in ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº for over 20 years now and I've seen it change dramatically over that time period in terms of a city and how the city interacts with the University and it's really starting to come together and thrive so we're hoping that ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº is going to be known for more than the football, over the next ten years.

That it's going to be known for the science, technology, creative, industrial innovation hub. But, yeah, I think in terms of the city there's a lot of activity, a lot of the entertainment and art starting to really grow and thrive and that whole combination just creates every buzz about the city and it really attracts people in that we have everything that a big capital city has. But we don't have the prices of London.

Thinking about the growth of the city centre, the University is playing a very integral role in that is with the ID ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº area which people may have seen headlines about, but can we put some detail around that, Richard?

Yeah absolutely, so ID ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº is the name we give to the redevelopment of the North Campus, the old UMIST campus, and I think it was a really visionary decision by the University, probably a decade ago now, to say, you know, we're not just going to, kind of, sell that to the highest bidder, we're going to really work to make that a real hub of innovation. An innovation district. 

And so we're working with, so we’ve had quite a rigorous process to find a commercial partner because obviously this needs really serious money to build out, so we ended up forming this joint venture with Burntwood SciTech. Which I think has got a really great shared vision for what we both want out of it, you know. We want it to be a place where new businesses will come, where existing businesses will be attractive from overseas or from the rest of the country to really make the most of you know the people that we've got in the University, the resources that we've got to create this idea, you know, of an innovation district so it's good it's a really big, you know, multi-year project. It's going to take, you know, a couple of billion pounds to develop out in full.

So, we've had to get really major financial backing for this, Legal & General, you know, one of, just one of the major institutions that are supporting it. So we're working to kind of create this vision of a new part of ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº that will be focused on innovation, it will have very high value businesses coming there, people will want to go there because there'll be this ferment of ideas, a new thinking taking place, we want it to be very inclusive.

We want it to be you know open to the rest of the city so people will come there and think you know this could be for me too, I could be taking part in this innovation economy. So it's really exciting we're just about getting to the first tangible outcomes of it, it will be happening very soon and Aline has been really driving what that first outcome is going to be.

A lot of former students will remember the big old UMIST main building, is there a use being found for that?

Yeah, so that's the Renold building. I remember teaching in there as well, it's going to be the first building that's going to open on ID ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº campus, so it's really exciting in September it's going to reopen its doors and it's going to be an incubation hub and so it's going to be the beating heart of the ID ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº campus. We're going to have foundational partners that are all there to help really accelerate innovation.

So, we're going to bring in a venture capitalist, we're going to bring in accelerator programs, some founding investor partners to really help create sort of wraparound care for entrepreneurs who want to come in and sit in that building.

One of the exciting aspects that we've been pushing and driving forward is the creation of an innovation hub. It's going to be a hot-desking area and a café, so a great coffee spot up on North Campus, and have lots of soft seating so people can come into the building and can network. If you're an entrepreneur and you’re founding a business, or you've even got an idea that you want to turn into something commercial and explore it you can come in sit in one of the hot-desking areas and you'll have certain period of time where you have free access to the building and the support that's going to be there and provided.

As your business grows there'll be hands being held as you move through your commercialisation journey and start to gain funding, then you can just pay rental operational costs to really help facilitate, engage entrepreneurs and accelerate them on their journey. A real exciting opportunity for staff and students working in that space or even just got the ambition to work in that space.

Super example of the crystallisation of the old traditional ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº University and the future-looking university into the, you know, the third century, and just within that building. And some of the lecture theatres that there have been kept and will be open as conference venues but also thinking about bringing the community in so it would be there to host community events, bringing school children in to just help them be part of that ecosystem, explain a little bit about the science engineering tech that's happening in that area and really one of the successes of ID will be for the sort of the local community to be inspired to then come and work in and around ID and or come into the University and gain qualifications so then they can grow and flourish again, moving forward.

Yeah, I think it's going to be a real international magnet you know we're already seeing this interest from around the world about what we're doing here. Interest from particularly London. The venture capital community in London I think is really starting to see the potential there. It's just a short step away from the railway station so the idea is that that can be a real nucleus for all those people with money, people with connections to come in and be part of this.

Another big part of it that we can do in ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº that's difficult in other places is this idea of scaling. The UK is pretty good at producing spin-out companies, it's not been great at scaling them up, it's not been greater when the factories are built and the scaling crisis.

It's really an investment, isn't it? As a kind of a funding, traditionally funding challenge?

Yeah, so I think that's something that we can do in Greater ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº. We've got space, we've got development sites, there's things like Atom Valley up in Rochdale and Bury where if we want to get that idea there's this smooth path so we can get an idea into a spin-out, you know, do some stuff in the lab, you demonstrate it, go to a pilot plant, get proof of principle, but then we'd like to see this turning into factories that are employing lots of people. Really going back to this question of how you boost the whole economy of the north.

So that's the vision, we really see it as a driving force for the whole economy. And we've got a couple of really good vehicles that are helping kickstart those types of initiatives. We've got the Turing Innovation Catalyst, which is focusing on digital and AI and helping bridge that gap between sort of fundamental research and commercialisation or company need, and also then they've got accelerator programs to help entrepreneurs or researchers to take their idea and turn them into innovative new companies.

We've also got the innovation – no we don't. We've got the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Catalyst, which is doing exactly the same but within biotechnology. And, looking more broadly across the north-west. And we've got Pankhurst, which is doing that in and around the healthtech area, and we've got the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre right next door to ID ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº campus, which will help really translate and scale for this, anything involving graphene.

So, I think it's an exciting opportunity for the University that can help increases interactions with businesses and increase our income into the University through that route. Community engagement and outreach, helping with the social responsibility, helping with our commercialisation and helping students and staff commercialise, realise commercial opportunities from their research.

The graphene is one discovery that ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº University is known for, a lot of people would have heard about its exciting potential. Richard, could you give us a bit of background on what graphene is and what opportunities come from it?

Yeah, so graphene is a new form of carbon, it's essentially a single sheet that's a single atom thick and the carbon is bonded, the carbon atoms are bonded together in this hexagonal structure, and it's got some really amazing properties. The properties of electrons traveling in it are really, I mean it's complicated to go into, but the electrons in a way behave as if they were relativistic electrons going at speeds close to the speed of light, so there's kind of huge, massive conductivity, so the electronic properties themselves are really strange and bizarre.

And then the mechanical properties are fascinating too because that carbon bond in a sheet of graphene it’s pretty much the stiffest and strongest intra-atomic bond that we know. So, it was a massive surprise and a massive delight when it was discovered by Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov in the early 2000s. I mean, I remember at the time, you know, thinking to myself, you saw this huge explosion of activity across the world, people copying this, people piling in to see what they could do.

I think the Physics community knew that that was going to get a Nobel Prize before it happened. So, it's been really fascinating. And it's created whole areas of new physics. I'll say that the electrons behave in new and weird ways. It's set off this huge race to look at other types of 2D materials so other types of materials that come in sheets, you know bizarre new properties like the way that water gets transported between the layers in graphene again, something that Andre Geim has been really active in pursuing. It's just a kind of complete scientific wonderland really and amazing discovery.

So, the thinnest strongest lightest material, known to us. Is that correct?

And ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº's got some impressive facilities hasn't it, leading from that?

Yeah, absolutely, so we've got the National Graphene Institute, which is really concentrating on, you know, the physics end of it. And, you know, this is still quite a long way from application, some of the more exotic discoveries that people are making about how you get, you know, strange new combinations of particles that behave in strange new ways. But then we've also got the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre, which is where, you know, we're starting to see applications come out now, particularly of the kind of new mechanical properties that it's fair to say.

Yeah, I think one of the things that's really exciting about graphene is that, yeah, there's still fundamental science being progressed from it, but actually, it's got a huge breadth of different types of applications due to its really unique properties ranging from additives in trainers to make them more durable, stronger, and that was transferred from the University to a company. All the way through to then being the basis for spin-out companies, water purifications such as using the hexagonal lattice structure to help track ions then for water purification or looking at reinforcing concrete.

So, Concretene, the new company that's raised a huge number of millions of pounds where we can actually start to pour concrete in large spaces that is stronger, is more durable and is more cost-effective as well. Well, I really like my graphene running shoes, I have a pair.

Oh, do you?

Yeah, and the idea there is, you know, it's just how you get totally new properties so for example, you know shoes got rubber on the bottom and there's always a trade-off, you know is the rubber, is it sticky you know, how, what's the friction like versus how hard wearing it is so you can get very sticky rubber but it wears out very quickly or you can get very hard rubber that kind of doesn't work so well.

So, graphene is one of the, you know graphene additives is one of those places where you can break that kind of trade-off so you kind of get sticky rubber but actually it is really hard wearing and I say I'm very happy with that and the concrete examples fact is really important. I mean, the running shoes are great and people, they’re real-world impacts, aren't they? Across a whole range of things.

Things taken from the lab some years ago and now coming out with all kinds of, you know, if you go out to Kinder or Bleaklow, you'll see fell runners with graphene on their feet quite regularly. But, yeah, the concrete one's fantastic though, isn't it? Because that's really, you can see how that's going to make a really big environmental difference, because, you know, making cement is one of the biggest contributors to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, one of the hardest things to decarbonise.

So, anything that you can do that reduces the amount of cement you need to use to get the same strength, that's going to have a massive impact. So, I think, that's why we're really excited about Concretene because, again, it's this kind of magic dust element to graphene that, you know, because it's a 2D material if you could disperse it right, you just put the tiniest amounts in and it will really substantially change the properties.

So that's the sort of thing that I think people are getting very excited about. Yeah and I think because graphene was discovered here I think it attracted quite a lot of research investment money into the area for commercialisation, but also fundamental research so a lot of people have got graphene now and testing them in different composite materials so we got more than we got two components so we've even incorporated graphene into our hydrogels that we make and produce and we're using the graphene as a delivery platform for growth factors, so it's goodies and instructive things for sales to go on and replicate and do what they need to do, so it's finding applications a huge range or huge breadth of research areas.

And indeed, in sensors for actually implanting in people. That's right, yeah and electrodes for stimulating the treatment for a glioblastoma, well actually, companies come out, a ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº student founded a company and is working on that, raised several millions from Innovate for R&D funding and they're on a real growth trajectory.

Do you think that we then, you mentioned that in a health context, do you think that we're on the cusp of an explosion in health innovation, you know, in the next the next ten or 20 years?

Yeah I think so and you know again like many innovations that they come from the cross-fertilisation at different areas, so the big, you know, the big cross-fertilisation in health is going to be from data, from, you know, big sources of new data so we've got UK Biobank is moving on to the campus so that's got this, you know, world-leading collection that allows us to relate genomic information to the physiological outcomes. We've got kind of really good connection with the health service so this is again, you know, where the city comes in.

Greater ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº has a devolved health and social care system so it now has a digital care record so all the citizens’ health records can be digitalised, so you can see you can put together you know genomic information, health information that comes from you know from people's interactions with a health service and then with the new technologies of artificial intelligence and computer simulation you can think of a real transformation coming along.

So one of our colleagues is hugely keen on this whole idea of digital in silico medicine, so you can just accelerate innovation process by putting more and more of it into the digital world you know because that's the thing that holds up medical innovation isn't? It’s, you know, how long it takes to get things tested and regulated.

Yeah and even on that testing and regulatory pathway there's a lot of research and crossover between material science and health innovation and adding the digital AI machine learning aspect to that thinking about creating, you know, for personalised medicines creating, taking stem cells from a patient and then growing those and doing sort of drug testing on them to find the exact right cocktail of drugs that are going to work for them in terms of treatment.

In particular thinking about cancer, so helping the materials side for building the in vitro models then the data analysis of that to then translate very quickly back into patient treatment pathway to help increase enhanced quality of life moving forward so real crossover of disciplines and the Pankhurst Institute is a great hub for that activity.

So, as the University enters its third century, what kind of advances and achievements can we look forward to, Aline?

So I think I'm really excited about the innovation agenda moving forward because the way the funding landscape is changing a lot of funding is now moving into translational work through Innovate UK but also as the commercialisation entrepreneurship side also increases in inward investment into our region, so for me I think it's all about how do we as a community meet the current global challenges whether that be the sustainability of the planet thinking about how we interact and use everyday products and how we manufacture those from toothpaste to hair gels to creams and ointments to help us live healthier, longer lives and how we integrate all of those things and fast track them using digital and AI.

Yeah, I think you know the world faces quite challenging times at the moment. The UK faces challenging times, and I think there's pressure on the University to respond to those, but I think the University is already there and it's already organised itself, as Aline says.

You know, we've got a productivity problem which is, you know, an economic problem that the nation as a whole faces. We've got a problem of getting to net zero, how do we translate the energy economy, you know, how can we properly do that in a way that's affordable, we've got a health care issue, we want to keep our health care system sustainable and we're in a dangerous world and that keeping the nation safe is going to be more important.

So I think you know there will be changes in that we have to respond perhaps more urgently to these challenges than universities have done in the past. I think ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº is further down that road than other universities and I think that's how we're going to prosper in these new times.

You mentioned these large-scale challenges facing us all, does the general public have to fear the word innovation in that they may feel underinformed about some of the opportunities we've been talking about today?

Yeah, I mean innovation isn't always positive at the way that it works out in society, and I think you know that's something that in the University we can handle in two ways. One is I think, you know, we do engage with our community, we do engage with the city, and that engagement you know it's not actually just about going and thinking the public aren't educated enough about education, it's about listening to what people want, it's about understanding what society wants and, you know, steering innovation in ways that do that and that needs, you know, we've got great social scientists, great humanities scholars who are able to you know take a longer perspective on innovation, a wider perspective about how it affects different groups, how people feel about it and I think that's something that we can do as a big research university that covers, you know, humanities and social sciences, as well as science, technology, and medicine, to get the kind of innovation that people are going to trust.

And that word trust is really important. Something that motivates a lot of the research that happens in the University, how do you get people to trust it?

Aline, your take on this?

Yeah, I completely agree with Richard and I think one thing is making sure that we have responsible innovation by talking and interacting with our community, but also thinking about interacting with lobbying government in terms of policy development, regulatory pathways as new modalities and new processing routes come in to play, engineering biology being one prime example, where we've got to kind of think in advance of the technological advances to make sure that we use them in a responsible way, so working with colleagues in humanities, Policy@ ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº, and really helping interact and influence policy and government.

So, thank you both to Aline and Richard for that fascinating discussion about innovation, commercialisation and the economy. To stay up to date with everything Talk 200, be sure to follow and subscribe to the series on the podcasting platform of your choice.

Head to manchester.ac.uk/200 to find out more about this series and all the activity taking place across our bicentenary year, including our free festival Universally ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº from 6 to 9 June use the #UOM200 to engage with Talk 200 and our wider bicentenary celebrations on social media.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Talk 200, a University of ¾Å¾ÅÉ«Ó°Ôº series.