Written by David Miller, Senior Social Ventures Lead at Queen Mary University.
My name is David Miller, I lead on SHAPE commercialisation and social ventures at Queen Mary University in London.
I’ve been in post around six months now, the role is a new one for Queen Mary and the first time the Innovation team has put in place a dedicated role to work with the HSS faculty. I’m new to the academic world with my career mostly in social enterprise / innovation.
Since starting in post, I’ve participated in in the SHAPE COP events which have been very useful as well as attending the tech transfer fundamentals course (also very useful but more STEM focussed).
I really enjoyed attending the PraxisAuril Conference 2024. As someone new to the sector, it was great to have the opportunity to learn more and build connections. I must say that it was a very friendly welcoming crowd, and I had many interesting conversations in and around conference sessions and even on the tram back to the hotel. It was good to be able to meet both other KE professionals in other universities as well as members of the research funding community and others. I’ve come away with a number of good contacts I hope to talk to further in the coming months.
I particularly liked the conference introduction on day one setting the scene in terms of the social and economic challenges facing the UK and locally in Blackpool. It was hard not to feel somewhat saddened by the decline and poverty apparent in Blackpool, but it felt right that this was addressed directly and bringing the conference to the city was a good thing to do.
I was pleased to see that SHAPE was fully included in the conference programme. For the most part, I followed the SHAPE pathway sessions, all of which were interesting. My personal highlight was learning about the approach of the Durham Social Science Lab and how they integrate research with early commercialisation projects. This resonated with me especially because at Queen Mary we are just getting started with this and our focus is on how to build that early-stage academic engagement (with commercialisation) which is not always easy. The Durham model felt like something that could help address this challenge. I will be interested to see how this develops, it certainly helped inform my thinking.
David Miller
Senior Social Ventures Lead, Queen Mary University