Innovation in Food Sustainability Venture Creation Weekend

André Eggen graduated from the Federal Institute of Technology (Animal Science) in Zürich (Switzerland) in 1988 and obtained his PhD in animal genetics (emphasis on molecular genetics) at the Institute of Animal Science in Zürich.

He started work as a research Scientist at INRA in 1992 and became a Research Director in 2004. André led the bovine genomics team at INRA in Jouy-en-Josas with research programs on the identification of genes and chromosome regions for economically important traits in cattle, especially dairy QTLs and genetic disorders.

He has published over 130 publications in peer-reviewed journals, participated in several EU funded projects and international consortia and served as Secretary of the International Society of Animal Genetics (ISAG) from 2004-2010.

André has developed extensive experience with the breeding industry and led research programmes that paved the way for the implementation of marker assisted selection and genomic selection in dairy cattle in France.

André joined Illumina in May 2009.

Lydia Smith is Head of NIAB Innovation Farm and EastAgritech Innovation Hub at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany in Cambridge UK. She leads Interactive farmer-facing research into sustainable farming; especially crop genetic improvement and waste minimisation.

Lydia’s research gradually shifted towards improvement of plant genetic resources and new methods for their utilisation and characterisation. She built up and led the Novel and Non-food Crop portfolio of projects over 12 years; particularly concerned with bio-pharmaceutical and probiotic applications.

The need for industry participation and demonstration in this area led to the ‘Innovation Farm’ concept, a new venture, conceived and set up by Lydia, now providing a practical, grower-facing research facility, with knowledge exchange and route to application for end-users in industry at its core. Since 2016, she is also now leading the East Agri-tech Innovation Hub providing a pilot study resource for farmers and researchers to minimise waste in farming, or to reuse selected waste for new, higher value products.

Oliver grew up on a family farm in Lancashire, after three years at Myerscough College he spent ten years managing pig units throughout the north west, then spent six years as an independent Farm Business Advisor.

In 2006 he joined Barclays as Senior Agricultural Manager for Cumbria and Scotland before being appointed National Agricultural Specialist in 2012. In his current role as Barclays’ National Agricultural Strategy Director, Oliver oversees Barclays’ agricultural strategy and positioning from an industry perspective.

Ursula Arndt, PhD, is the Scientist (Seed-Investment & Technology) at the Illumina Accelerator Cambridge. She was previously responsible for the Illumina Solutions Labs at the EMEA HQ (Cambridge), the ISO 13485 accredited laboratory supporting internal and customer facing activities.

Prior to joining Illumina, she collaborated with groups such as WWF Canada, Traffic Canada, University of York and the RCMP in Vancouver.

Ursula earned an MA from the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, Germany and a PhD from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.

André Eggen graduated from the Federal Institute of Technology (Animal Science) in Zürich (Switzerland) in 1988 and obtained his PhD in animal genetics (emphasis on molecular genetics) at the Institute of Animal Science in Zürich.

He started work as a research Scientist at INRA in 1992 and became a Research Director in 2004. André led the bovine genomics team at INRA in Jouy-en-Josas with research programs on the identification of genes and chromosome regions for economically important traits in cattle, especially dairy QTLs and genetic disorders.

He has published over 130 publications in peer-reviewed journals, participated in several EU funded projects and international consortia and served as Secretary of the International Society of Animal Genetics (ISAG) from 2004-2010.

André has developed extensive experience with the breeding industry and led research programmes that paved the way for the implementation of marker assisted selection and genomic selection in dairy cattle in France.

André joined Illumina in May 2009.

Rebecca Jowsey has worked in sales for over 11 years in a variety of commercial applications within the life science field. She started as a life science specialist working for Thermo Scientific before moving to GE healthcare as the Gene Modulation Specialist providing technical support for the Dharmacon and Open BioSciences ranges. She then worked as a Clinical Account Manager before coming to work for Illumina as a Senior Territory Account Manager.

Rebecca holds a post graduate degree in forensic science (Sanger Sequencing). She also worked for several years in the lab running the qPCR facility, 2D gels, proteomics and HPLC, GCMS work.

Bobby helped co-launch Illumina Accelerator Cambridge, UK, the second location for Global Illumina Accelerator, a genomics and VC-backable company creation engine. In his current role, he looks to grow the life sciences and genomics ecosystem by partnering with entrepreneurs, investors and individuals within the innovation/entrepreneurial ecosystem. His current focus is looking at new models that can support entrepreneurs and startups in different geographies. Previously, he was responsible for heading commercial market and business development for Illumina EMEA. His focus was on how the application of genomics enables precision health. He advocates for building ecosystems that support better population and patient outcomes.

Before joining Illumina, he worked in the NHS to deliver sustainable transformation programs and spent several years working in the pharma industry across early research & development, group planning & strategic projects (executive) office and leading the UK value-based medicine and pricing innovation stream.

Bobby read his BSc in biology, with a focus on neuroscience and genomics, and an MSc in IT from the Queen Mary University of London.

Shima is broadly interested in critically studying management and entrepreneurship practice to explore the implications on people and the planet. Her recent work focuses on global food, agri and environmental challenges, and the nature, networks and education or training needs of entrepreneurs and their ventures in providing solutions to such big challenges.

Shima has spent the last 25 years helping companies (from startups to MNEs) as well as governments and international funding agencies to improve their performance on sustainability. Shima is one of the founders and Director of Value in Enterprise, the responsible business consultancy company. She has also been among the founders of several organisations that aim at engaging communities in their own development in Egypt and the US.

She most recently co-founded the Impact Women’s Network to raise the visibility of enterprising women globally and enabling the creation of greater impact through the power of the collective. Shima has been a Trustee of the Institute of Small Business and Entrepreneurship.

Louise is an experienced philanthropy professional, who draws on the experience of her 20 year career in the global capital markets, and applies these skills to areas in society where needs aren’t met.

She has co-founded two successful social ventures:

1. The Haller Foundation brings a model for economic development which is sustainable and environmentally sound. Based in East Africa it supports fragile communities to address poverty through integrated programmes which combine WASH, smallholder farmer training, environmental regeneration and mobile technology to lay the foundations for prosperity. Started as an NGO is 2004 it has developed income streams to enable it to be financially sustainable.
2. Better Endings offers progammes in the employee wellbeing sector to change the way we approach end of life across six spheres: legal, emotional, physical, legacy, spiritual and financial. It aims to help employees and their families to be better prepared for the end of life.

Louise is an alumna of Cambridge Judge Business School and Trinity College.

Janos is responsible for FaceKom’ overall business strategy which is a leading remote client identification solution in Europe. In his spare time, he invests in pre-seed sustainability companies as an angel investor.

Prior to his current role, Janos invested in pre-seed and seed-stage companies in the areas of resource efficiency, clean air & transport, connected homes, energy tech in the UK. Prior to Sustainable Ventures, he was an investment manager at Day One Capital which is a CEE-based generalist fund investing at Seed and Series A stages.

He was also Vice President of Operations at SPCE, where overseeing day-to-day operations of a seed-stage marketplace company taught him the nitty-gritty part of startups. Parallel to SPCE, he was studying at the London School of Economics and his freestyle initiative got rated as one of the 10 most promising social enterprises in the UK in 2017 by McKinsey & Company.

Oli is Operations Director at Outfield, leading Outfield’s development and R&D efforts. Oli’s background is in aerospace engineering, and he has previously worked at Marshall Aerospace on both military and civil aircraft design projects.

Oli oversees the development of the systems that make up the Outfield precision agriculture platform, including automated drone surveying, machine learning based image recognition, and a scalable web platform.

Jim is Outfield’s Commercial Director and sales lead, engaging with companies and organisations across the agriculture and food sector.

He has a background as a risk consultant advising private equity firms on mergers and acquisitions, with a focus on environmental and social governance.

Jim started his career as a fire and explosion engineer, managing large international projects across in the oil and gas industry. Jim is currently focussed on raising Outfield’s seed funding round.

Andrew has a long history of identifying, developing and managing innovation within corporate environments and notably created and implemented an innovation management system while working for Reuters, the European media group. His career at Reuters culminated in a role as CEO of an Asian-based Internet trading corporate spin-out in Singapore which he took through initial VC funding and on to a trade sale.

He has been involved in the creation and development of a series of companies including Investing for Good, Working Knowledge and The Mapp and is involved as a non-executive director at several growing technology companies.

With a personal corporate history that includes journalism, software development, project management, marketing and strategic sales. Andrew draws on a wealth of experience in all aspects of business management gained through working internationally, predominantly in the US and UK.

Andrew is an accomplished author including, Inventuring – why big companies must think small (McGraw Hill, 2003), Services (Kogan Page 2013), Marketing Metrics (CMP 2015), Innovation in Marketing (CMP 2016), Marketing Strategy (CMP 2016) and Contemporary Challenges (CMP 2017). These books reflect Andrew’s extensive experience in the areas of business start-up and in the specialist area of innovation management, marketing and corporate venturing.

He is currently Head of Practice and a Mentor in Residence at Cambridge Judge Business School.

Sayara manages a few programmes at the Entrepreneurship Centre, such as the Venture Creation Weekend and Ignite. She previously worked in Alumni Relations and for the Master of Finance programme at Cambridge Judge Business School.

With a background in IT and AI research, she has experience in working in education, international organisations (Médecins Sans Frontières, UNDP) and the private sector. She is a great networker and is always keen to help people to connect and spot the opportunities.

Tamzin manages the Cambridge Social Ventures programme, supporting entrepreneurs with a social or environmental mission embedded at the core of their business. Prior to this, she worked in science communication in the UK, Kenya and Australia, with universities, research institutes, government departments, startups and community groups, including projects supported by UN agencies, the EU and the Gates Foundation. She has a deep interest in food and agriculture and is just as excited by local, organic production as she is by high-tech, broad-scale farming interventions.

Maximilian represents the OxBridge Angels investment fund and has more than 10 years of experience connecting tech and entrepreneurship groups across the Cambridge innovation ecosystem. He has worked at the University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing, Department of Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology in Bioscience Enterprise, the Maxwell Centre, the Cambridge Judge Business School Entrepreneurship Centre and the Computer Laboratory. He has a background in maths and computer science and has previously worked on tech startups in the UK and Germany (Techstars).

Maximilian is part of the organising teams of EPOC (Entrepreneurial Postdocs of Cambridge), CUE (Cambridge University Entrepreneurs), CUTEC (Cambridge University Technology and Enterprise Club), SVC2UK (Silicon Valley Comes to the UK) and the Hack Cambridge Foundation.

George Crane is a fourth year PhD student based at the University of Cambridge Crop Science Centre, and the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB). George is interested in the diversity and abundance of symbiotic microorganisms in agricultural systems, quantified with a mixture of metagenomic and microscopic approaches. He has projects running from the national scale, to farm based trials, and has additional collaborative projects with the Food and Environment Research Agency (FERA), and Cambridge Computer Science.

George is co-chair of the Cambridge Food Security Forum (CFSF), an interdisciplinary network of PhD students and early career researchers at the University of Cambridge. CFSF aims to promote interdisciplinary discussion amongst researchers, community groups and all who are interested in achieving a sustainable food system.

Zhiqi is the Co-Chair of Cambridge Food Security Forum, a hub to engage students and academics in food security matters. Each year, the Forum organises a food security themed Venture Creation Weekend as well as many speaker sessions.

Zhiqi has a background in manufacturing fngineering and he is interested in understanding of the role of technology and innovation in tackling malnutrition through data and supply chain improvements.