Research Comms Podcast: Ashley Jennings
‘Storytelling equals sales. Storytelling equals connection to your potential audience.’ Ashley Jennings, on preparing founders, inventors and innovators to take their discoveries to market.
Ashley Jennings is the Managing Director of the Texas Innovation Center in Austin.
In this episode of Research Comms, Ashley talks about the thriving innovation scene in Austin; about how the Texas Innovation Center is helping startups to get the traction they need; and about the importance of storytelling as a way of raising awareness, developing relationships, and gaining trust.
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The below is a short excerpt. For the full interview download the podcast.
Tell me a bit about Texas Innovation Center, and what role it’s playing in helping facilitating Austin's homegrown innovation talent.
So from a high level overview, Austin has our incubators and accelerators and we've got our Chamber of Commerce, our SXSW. I think a lot of people who don't come to the 40 acres don’t realize that we've also got the University of Texas right on our back yard. And so the more that UT plays with the city and the galvanizers and the accelerators here in Austin and throughout Texas, the more we can lift Texas up and be this battlefield for Startup Village USA. We sit on the university side, as I am duly appointed by the College of Natural Sciences and by the Office of Technology Commercialization, which means that we have an inside look into the early technologies, inventions and disclosures coming through our tech transfer office. What the Texas Innovation Center does is we have a hyper focus on faculty and grad students, and we will work with undergrads who are filing a provisional patent. But we work with those people who are interested in taking their intellectual property and potentially spinning it into a company for the market. We serve as a launchpad.
We have three different value propositions here at the Texas Innovation Center. First, our co-working space, so we have a little over 4,200 square feet of co-working space on campus where our researchers, our faculty and students can come to meet each other, join this innovation community, get to know what each other are working on, feel safe and explore the idea of being an entrepreneur. Because for a lot of them, they haven't even heard the word entrepreneur before that. We also are launching a wet lab incubator.
Our second value prop is that we have something called Startup in a Box, and this is really a long list of all the nuts and bolts and resources that companies need, to go from incorporation through potentially closing a Series B round, which is where we take our companies if that's what their projection is. And so that list looks like attorneys, IP attorneys, immigration law attorneys, H.R. experts, manufacturers, turnkey manufacturers, designers, commercial real estate agents that we work with. And all of these Start up in a Box of vendors that we work with are Longhorn friendly, Longhorn affiliated in some way.
Our third value prop is our Friends at the Texas Innovation Center, and this is a huge network of advisors for the center. They serve as sounding boards, and these players come from all over the world. We work with VC firms who are focused on funding research coming out of universities and angels. It's a great network and these players come in and they'll do office hours with our companies. We like to get our companies introduced early on if it's an investor so they can build a relationship as they as they grow their technology and hit their next benchmark in the lab or in the classroom.
Have you listened to these other episodes of the Research Comms podcast?
How do you go about encouraging the startups and innovators to tell their stories in effective ways?
Storytelling equals sales. Storytelling equals connection to your potential audience. My background is very unique in that I come from this broadcast world, pivoted into an entrepreneur, co-founder, role myself and then focused heavily early on in my entrepreneur career on helping startups with ‘go to market’ strategy and how to tell their story.
It's fascinating because I predominantly lived in the SAAS (software as a service) space for so long. There's a methodology around SAAS startup founders, which is the lean model and going from problem to validating the solution. Over here in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and in deep tech it’s very much, ‘we have a solution that we created out of our lab or out of our classroom,’ and then asking ‘what's the problem now that we need to go figure out to solve?’ And so I say that because we right away introduce our researchers and our faculty, our scientists, our engineers to this methodology of needs-based, needs-driven innovation. What's the need? What's the potential community that you're touching?
Here at U.T. we have launched a whole Texas Biodesign program modeled after the Stanford Biodesign program, which is then heavily successful in launching health care innovation to market and medical devices and everything under the sun in that arena. And so we bring our researchers and our faculty and our students in early. And the first thing we want to understand is, can you explain your technology to a layperson in any way?
Right now, we're getting ready for our pitch competition sweep coming up, so we're getting them ready for a roadshow. There are different pitch competitions here on campus. We really dissect the technology in in a way where we're able to put it into a pitch deck. And so we embed with our companies and we do a pitch deck workshop with them to help them tap into the power of their founder story, too, because that's so important.
And when you have the label of academic for so long, or you've had the label of engineer or super, hyper technical person, it's really hard to think of yourself in that founder role. And so we help them tap into that power and weave that story throughout their pitch and weave that story throughout the narrative of the technology and what we're bringing to the audience.
Do you have a set way of doing that? Are there certain techniques that you suggest that startups adopt to tell their story?
We have incredible faculty around campus who teach on this, specifically out of McCombs Business School. We've got a coach over there who's a ‘pitchology coach’. She's an expert in communications. The model that we really try to follow here is the Guy Kawasaki model, the 10, 20, 30 deck and making it conducive and digestible to all audiences. When getting them ready, though, to go in front of investors and telling that story, it's important to research the person who's going to be across the table to understand your audience, to understand what they're going to care about most when you're talking about that technology and about your company. And so we really emphasize, knowing who you're going to be sitting down with, knowing their thesis, what their portfolio looks like, understanding how you could potentially fit into their portfolio.
I think startup founders get in this rhythm, if you will, of just office hour after office hour in these co-working spaces and incubators lining up mentor, after mentor, after mentor without actually studying and building a fruitful long term relationship with them. We really emphasize studying, researching, understanding that company’s thesis. We also go as far as to do due diligence in the back end, where we have a company who is being approached by a firm. We will contact some of the other companies that they've invested in on their portfolio to understand what those founder relationships were like with the partners and with the investment committee and what their process was like. We are fully founder focused here, which means our faculty and our students. So we we really do err on the side of protecting and understanding and sitting in the room with and helping be on this side of the table with them as they're having those conversations.
Where did your interest in tech and innovation begin?
So my background, I'm a three time Longhorn. I have a masters in science, technology, commercialization, two time startup entrepreneur. I am a former trained network news field journalist, so I started my career in the Northeast, where I was originally in D.C. and New York, covering breaking news stories on the ground for a domestic news channel before getting recruited to an international organization to help launch their domestic hub out of Manhattan at the time. And so I was up in the Northeast for a little under four years.
It was a fascinating moment to be in media, you know, technology on the hardware and the software side was transforming rapidly. We're going from pretty big tapes and cameras and VHS to our smaller SD card readers and microchips and undercover cameras. Going from satellite trucks to satellites put in backpacks so we can walk around on the ground and go live from our breaking news environments that we were in.
And so it was a really interesting time, and that's really where I got the tech bug, and was hit with the question, “Wow, how do we utilize technology across all industries? Not just in media but how is technology transforming various verticals and being used for impact on a global scale in various ways?”
Research Comms is presented by Peter Barker, director of Orinoco Communications, a digital communications and content creation agency that specialises in helping to communicate research. Find out how we’ve helped research organisations like yours by taking a look at past projects…
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