#7 Ash Ravikumar - Entrepreneurship Development Officer at CERN

Ask Ravikumar is an Entrepreneurship Development Officer at CERN - the world-famous research organization where the World Wide Web originated from and the Higgs Boson was discovered - and manages the Business Incubation Center there. He is also one of the rare individuals possessing twenty years of experience in technology transfer from three different continents. He gained his expertise in the US, Australia and now in Europe. Ash is definitely a forward thinker with clear values and a true gentleman. His rich collection of deep tech stories makes him the ideal guest for our podcast.

We touch upon the skillset needed for becoming a good tech transfer officer and what motivated him to get on this path. Ash outlines his understanding of how new inventions make it to market and can change the world, if we put them into the right hands. For him, tech push is not dead. This also brings us to CERN’s strategy for building and collaborating with startups and how to put the right incentive system in place - on both the micro level (e.g. cap table of a single spin-off) and the macro level (KPIs for research organizations). Finally, we get Ash’s perspective on how to measure the impact of a startup.