Humans of York: Luke Souter
"I really enjoy my job; if I could I would spend all my time in meetings talking to researchers!
“I'm part of the commercialisation team in the Research, Innovation and Knowledge Exchange (RIKE) directorate.
"RIKE is a massive support structure that is a central team and function at the University.
"Its role is to support researchers in aspects such as finding funding and supporting them with contacts.
“As the commercialisation team, we sit towards the end of the research process when the product has been developed and at the point of publication. That’s when we swoop in and support how best we can to help the product make the most impact.
“It's a growing department, the team has only been around for two years. Most of the previous work has involved searching through existing research and looking into the University as a whole, trying to clue into different departments and find the interesting inventions.
“Some researchers don't have a lot of experience in commercialisation, so my job is explaining what commercialisation is and how it can be useful to them. The second part of my job is technology scouting, looking internally at all of the amazing research that is being done at the University and looking for valuable pieces.
“This is mainly cool inventions, be that a new molecule made by a piece of kit, or a new software, it can literally be anything. Ultimately, it's something that can be packaged up in some sort of way, that could be valuable to a company who would then like to manufacture or build it.
"We’re still at the early stages of trying to embed commercialisation into the culture of the University, in the sense of having researchers understand that it is not a bad thing to reach out and work with companies.
“The reason why both my team and I wake up everyday is because there is a lot of value to be gained from the research that's being done here and it's really important to see these projects being released into actual products that can benefit people! It's really exciting and this is the message that we want to get across to researchers!”
Luke Souter, Commercialisation Executive, Humans of York, 2022