Postgraduate or postdoctoral life is relatively straightforward: get funding, do research, publish findings, repeat until granted tenure or offered a job in industry. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Scientific research isn’t all about the Nobel prize at the end of the tunnel; there’s also money to be made from good ideas.

Canny scientists can use research conducted in the name of scientific enlightenment — or for an academic qualification — as the starting point for a commercial enterprise.

There are several ways of doing this, says Ian Robertson, chief executive of the national Council of Graduate Entrepreneurship (NCGE) and a successful entrepreneur. “One is [a specialist company] taking them in hand fairly early on and taking a percentage,” he says. “Then there are schemes that will allow them to get support and mentoring in their specific area to set up their own business. They could also look at options such as licensing or franchising their research — you don’t have to set up an elaborate enterprise.”

Chris Doran, the chief operating officer of the software company Geomerics, hadn’t planned to use his research to start a business. “I was studying black holes and cosmology. It was purely theoretical, although fairly early on I realised that there would be bits of interest [commercially],” he says. After assessing the opportunities in academia and entrepreneurship, he decided to take a commercial path.

He did not, however, choose to set up his own company from scratch. Instead he worked with Angle, an intellectual property (IP) commercialisation company. He provided the idea; Angle provided the financial and management support. This means that he owns a share of the company rather than the whole thing.

“The choice I faced was getting income from business angels and government grants... and keeping more for myself, but that’s long and slow and can fail,” Dr Doran says.

“We work by setting up a new company wholly owned by Angle,” says Andrew Newland, the former KPMG consultant who founded Angle and is now its chief executive. “We then buy technology into that company. We run it with our money and management then develop other people to step in and take over the management while we step back.”

The researchers behind the idea can choose how much involvement they want in the company, either by working for it in a technical capacity, as Dr Doran does, or remaining in their day jobs and simply taking their shares.

Should you want to get noticed by a company such as Angle, here’s what to do: undertake groundbreaking research; don’t tell anyone about it until you’ve protected your ideas with a patent application (this generally means not publishing or speaking about it for six months to a year); and work with your university’s technology transfer organisation to get ownership of the IP.

However, choosing to start your own company is not difficult — it’s just hard work, Robertson says. “It’s not rocket science. It just needs enthusiasm, support, hard graft and funding.” Finding the money isn’t as hard as most people think, he says; banks, venture capital firms and so forth are eager to help. But you will still have to get to grips with IP. “It’s not always the university that owns it. Scenarios differ at different universities,” Robertson says. “And it should never be a barrier even if the university has a stake in it.”

But there is no guarantee that your company will thrive. “There’s always risk. If someone’s doing good research there’s the chance that they could get a good job in a big company or keep working in academia. By its nature, enterprise is always risky.” The upside, of course, is control of your own ideas — and profits.

Find out more about funding and IP ownership at ncge.com.

Find out more about science careers in our supplement in The Times on April 25.

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