Abstract

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Abstract:

Envisioning the technologies of the future is difficult and finding the long-term funding to realise them can be even more problematic. How do our future leaders and entrepreneurs get to achieve their long-term vision while meeting their short-term investment milestones? This talk will provide a few thoughts on how the future can be imagined and broken down into small steps that provide value along the way and ensure continued investment. It will look at examples of success and failure across various sectors to see how these lofty and long-term technologies can be achieved. Finally, we shall look at the recipes that will lead to success, highlighting the importance of a diverse team, clarity of story, borrowing from other sectors and the need to understand stakeholder values.

Speaker profile:

David Homfray has worked in various innovation research roles for over two decades. He has contributed to cutting edge research and the maturation of the resulting technologies within academia (working on functional brain imaging and neuroscience at the University of Oxford), in the field of fusion research at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and upstream and downstream space technologies at the Satellite Application Catapult. He is both a Chartered Physicist, Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, Royal Astronomical Society and the British Interplanetary Society. When not thinking about future tech, David likes to engage in the fluid dynamics of brewery building and the designing of interplanetary fusion powered spaceships.