Venture Science Doctorate: a 3-year venture-creation PhD program (funded scholarship)

World’s first 3-year venture creation focused PhD program run by Deep Science Venture College at Woolf University: a globally recognised, decentralised institution widening access to higher education. Our focus is exclusively on solving global challenges in health, climate, agriculture and computation through science as the basis for designing research projects from first-principles, and creating new companies founded by candidates based on this research.

The aim of year 1 is for candidates to familiarise themselves with a given industry and mapping the landscape to identify areas of opportunity for high-impact venture creation. In a process called Scoping, candidates will identify the optimal solution to a given problem and – alongside accredited courses such as experimental design – perform lab work to develop their hypotheses, and contact partner research groups for further experimentation.

Year 2 is focused on invention and further developing the initial hypotheses, working within leading research groups to prove the technology against the original hypothesis and validate it through techno-economic analysis.

The goal for year 3 is building further on the research from the previous two years to develop a scalable technology capable of product market fit. If necessary, candidates may join multiple different research groups to do this. Having validated the technology, candidates will work with experienced venture partners to build a complementary team and a rock-solid investment case before venture incorporation and spin-out.

At incorporation, all the intellectual property is transferred into the new venture, which the candidate continues to lead as a co-founder, with continuous support from DSV.