There is a word that appears with remarkable frequency in discussions of university commercialisation: heroic. The researcher who devoted years to navigating the commercial pathway. The technology transfer officer who found a way to engage an investor despite having no commercial team. The spin-out founder who built a company while maintaining their academic role.
Heroic effort is real, and it is admirable. But it is not infrastructure. And the difference matters enormously.
The Problem with Heroic Effort
Infrastructure is repeatable. It works at scale. It does not depend on exceptional individuals making exceptional efforts — it creates conditions in which ordinary processes reliably produce extraordinary outcomes. Roads do not require heroic drivers. Water systems do not require heroic plumbers. The value of infrastructure is precisely that it removes the need for heroism and replaces it with systematic reliability.
University commercialisation, as currently practised in most institutions, is the opposite of infrastructure. It is a collection of ad-hoc processes, individual relationships, and one-off engagements that work when exceptional people apply exceptional effort — and fail, silently and repeatedly, when they do not.
This is why 83% of university innovations never reach the market. Not because the science is weak. Not because the researchers are uncommitted. Not because there is no demand for the solutions the research could provide. But because the pathway from discovery to commercial value requires infrastructure that, in most cases, simply does not exist.
"The question is not how to find more heroes. It is how to build the infrastructure that makes heroes unnecessary."
What Infrastructure for Translation Looks Like
Genuine translational infrastructure has several defining characteristics — and it is worth being precise about each of them, because they distinguish real infrastructure from the ad-hoc processes that currently pass for it.
Standardisation
Infrastructure applies the same process to every input, regardless of origin. A road does not behave differently depending on which vehicle drives on it. Translational infrastructure must assess every innovation — from every discipline, at every institution — against the same rigorous, empirical framework. This standardisation is what makes outputs comparable, trustworthy, and investable.
The QED system achieves this through the Technology Readiness Level framework, supplemented by PIPE's proprietary Solution Readiness for Market (SRM) and Proposition Readiness for Investment (PRI) assessments. A materials science project and a digital health platform are evaluated against identical criteria — producing outputs that investors and universities can interpret with confidence.
Repeatability
Infrastructure works reliably, every time. The PIPE Lab to IPO Pathway applies the same five-stage process — Disclose & Validate, Evaluate, Launch, Fund, and List — to every project that enters the ecosystem. Each stage has defined inputs, processes, and outputs. Each stage gate is an empirical Go/No-Go decision, not a subjective judgement. The pathway is designed to produce the same quality of output regardless of who is running it.
Scalability
Infrastructure scales without proportional increases in cost or quality degradation. The PIPE QED system — built on distributed ledger technology — is designed to handle growing volumes of innovations without requiring linear growth in human resource. The blockchain infrastructure that underpins IP-NFT vaults, stage-gate records, and investor documentation is as capable of managing one hundred projects as ten.
Alignment
Infrastructure works for all its users, not just some of them. The PIPE Ecosystem is designed to align the interests of universities, researchers, Associates, and investors — so that every stakeholder benefits from successful translation and bears appropriate risk for unsuccessful attempts. This alignment is structural, not aspirational: it is built into the equity, compensation, and governance frameworks of every PIPE engagement.
The PIPE infrastructure model: PIPE is not a consultancy that engages individual projects. It is an ecosystem that creates repeatable infrastructure — operating at the earliest stages of the innovation pipeline, systematically, at scale, and without requiring heroic effort from any single participant.
Why Existing Models Fall Short
It is worth being honest about why existing approaches to university commercialisation — despite genuine effort and significant investment — have not solved the problem.
TTO augmentation programmes typically add capacity to an existing model without changing the model itself. They help more innovations progress through the same, structurally limited pathway. They are valuable — but they are not infrastructure.
Accelerators and incubators provide real support to the ventures that enter them — but they operate downstream of the translation gap, selecting innovations that are already partially commercial. They do not address the 83% that never progress far enough to be considered.
Venture capital, even impact-focused venture capital, requires a commercial foundation that most early-stage university innovations do not yet have. VC is not infrastructure for translation — it is infrastructure for scaling what translation has already produced.
What has been missing — and what PIPE provides — is infrastructure for the earliest stages: the gap between discovery and the point at which existing commercial mechanisms can engage. The Lab to IPO Pathway is built specifically for this gap, with every element designed for the realities of early-stage, frontier research commercialisation.
The Network Effect of Translation Infrastructure
Infrastructure becomes more valuable as more people use it. Roads become more valuable as more vehicles drive on them. Networks become more valuable as more participants join them. The PIPE Ecosystem is designed with this logic in mind.
As more universities engage with PIPE, the Associate Network grows with more diverse domain expertise. As more Associates join, the quality of matched expertise improves. As more projects are validated, the investor pipeline becomes richer and more diverse. As more investors join, the capital available for early-stage translation increases. And as more Protégé Companies list on PIPExchange, the pathway to liquidity becomes clearer and more credible.
This network effect is not incidental — it is central to the PIPE model. The more the ecosystem grows, the more value it creates for every participant within it.