Background
Deep Science Ventures is a venture creator building deeptech companies in 4 sectors: Agriculture, Climate, Computation and Pharmaceuticals. We deliver this work through funded partnerships with organisations like Coca-Cola, AbbVie, Anglo American, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency – ARIA, and Cancer Research UK. DSV has founded 59 companies across a broad range of domains, from direct air capture to production of green steel and therapeutics for cystic fibrosis to thermal protectants for crops. We take an outcome-centred approach, starting with the problem we wish to solve and working backwards to identify the necessary solutions, building high impact companies.
Project Outline
Project title: DSV Opportunity Area scoping: identifying neglected opportunities to build new ventures that tackle climate, nature loss or food security challenges – remote (team gather in London office every Wednesday)
Project description
The first stage in DSV’s venture creation process is to identify ‘Opportunity Areas’ – discrete areas where we see high potential impact and exciting white space, making it suitable for building new companies with our Founders in Residence. An example of this would be ‘Priming plant resilience’, an Opportunity Area that proposes to build the toolkit for modulating plant resilience on demand, and thereby deliver speed and flexibility to crop traits for handling volatile climate risks. This project aims to overcome the bottlenecks of conventional crop breeding (long development timelines, productivity trade-offs, GMO regulations) by developing complementary products that leverage modes of action such as RNAs, developmental peptides or microbial partners that can be deployed in the field.
To identify such an Opportunity Area requires first a broader landscape mapping around a challenge such as ‘crop losses to abiotic stress’ or ‘methane emissions mitigation’. This process involves desk-based research to build a system map of the challenge and potential intervention points, with the goal of uncovering specific areas that are neglected within the current commercial / innovation landscape, but where we believe there is scope for novel technologies to have high impact upon the problem we wish to solve, and which are specifically suitable for venture creation. We are seeking individuals to collaborate with our team on this Opportunity Area identification process – providing PIPS candidates with the platform to apply their technical knowledge and creativity to develop an understanding of how venture creation opportunities are identified.
DSV works on challenges across climate, nature loss and food security, and we are therefore open to taking on board PIPS with expertise and interest in these areas. We would co-define the problem space for scoping prior to agreement and start of the project. This allows the PIPS candidate to explore a challenge that they are motivated by, while also ensuring that the outputs (specific ‘Opportunity Areas’ recommended for future company builds) can meaningfully feed into DSV’s venture creation pipeline.
The project would last three months, with the ultimate output being a report that maps the selected problem space, analyses the existing state of the art solutions, and identifies neglected constraints and opportunities that need to be addressed to solve the root causes of the problem. Within these neglected spaces, the report will then go deeper to analyse the technical and commercial tractability of new solutions that could form the basis for creating new companies.
This scoping process follows an established model for Opportunity Area identification that we conduct with our partners, providing a framework to help the PIPS candidate hit the ground running with their research. While the role is mainly remote, they will work closely with support from Will Summers (senior associate) and Pina Fritz (head of scoping). The candidate should be highly self-motivated, creative and enjoy thinking from first principles – they will be challenging assumptions and digging into unfamiliar scientific domains to consider the opportunities that entire sectors might be missing!
Candidate requirements
- Technical background that is suitably aligned to the problem space they wish to scope for Opportunity Area identification
- Demonstrable interest in science translation and venture creation
Timeframe and start date
Start date is flexible, to be agreed between DSV and the individual
Contact
Dr William Summer, [email protected]