Ghent start-up brings matchmaking into the lab
AcademicLabs is an online platform that aims to bring academics, industry and governments together
Perfect fit
“I’ve seen how research can be improved a lot when people collaborate,” says Smolders. “With this platform, we want to make it as easy as possible to find the right partners.”
The eventual aim is to turn AcademicLabs into a LinkedIn-like platform for research teams. Smolders (pictured) was so keen to set it up that he quit his four-year PhD track at Ghent University to create the start-up in November 2015 as an online community of academic research groups, sharing their expertise, services and technologies to attract partners from academia, industry and government agencies.
He describes it as “a scientific sharing economy made more accessible for everyone”. It helps research teams that want to share their expertise and assets, allowing companies and researchers to find suitable partners in a systematic manner.
Big ambitions
This can address the problem of the research community’s huge wealth of underused knowledge, state-of-the-art technologies and infrastructure. “Research and innovation will be faster, more qualitative, cheaper and less risky. Solutions to society’s problems will see the light faster and more quickly,” he says.
Backed by investment from CMAST, a life sciences business consultancy based in Temse, East Flanders, AcademicLabs will debut its new beta platform service in September to help SMEs and researchers find the right partner or facility quickly and efficiently.
It facilitated an impressive 20 matches with a database of 90 professors when it collected funding from 14 business angels during the prototype launch last year. By late September, over 90% of Benelux research teams and the top 4,000 chemistry teams in the EU will be accessible.
If you can find a synergy, you can get very interesting results
Smolders expects most of the matchmaking will take place in life sciences and chemistry, where collaboration between laboratories and other facilities are most frequent and necessary. He has done his own research into aging biology in roundworms, and was struck by how much working with fellow academics could help spur better ideas.
“If you can find a synergy, you can get very interesting results,” he says. “So, I thought, why not set up a website to simplify it?”
He’s been heartened by the response so far. “Our mission of democratising access to scientific expertise is welcomed by everyone we meet. The current barriers are clear to everyone in this area, and nearly every expert we talk to, be they a university leader or corporate partner scouting director, is convinced of our concept and approach.”
That’s why corporate investors were not so difficult to convice, he says. “We are very ambitious: Our goal is to be the world’s number-one research matchmaker within three years.”
