The history and the future of entrepreneurship in quantum technology
of cmir debates in public policy this one is about the first wave of quantum technologies the the research is being funded by a bei school grant and it's part of the ongoing collaboration with the Kogod school of business uh the american university in washington washington dc so we're very pleased that Erran has has joined us and also the mirella who also be speaking as a as an entrepreneur so so that's great so the format is that uh Saverio will start Erran will speak second and then mirella and then we have a discussant uh Catherine griffis so we aim to get through the presentations and the discussants session by about 25 to 2 and then there'll be a q a but um thank you saverio for leading on this so off you go hello everyone i have i think five minutes to talk about what I want to talk about okay so um quickly basically the interest we start i i i took the interest into quantum technology and i invited Helen and and Erran to um to do some research about it from uh first of all from an academic angle and a second second point of view from a more polished angle because i'm coming from um industry side I've experienced in 2018 about discovering that quantum was not really science fiction but was actually something quite around us and and and then i got involved into discussion around 5g and quantum and quantum networks the the security aspect so it and i got interested into that and during this work externally you say in the industry i go slowly slowly uh discovering this world and discovering that is actually uh not a niche area not something on the corner developed just by some specific scientists something that involved quite deeply uh countries all over the world in this mapping which is not um your complete one i put together um a bit of companies in in various countries looking at quantum on quantum technology they primarily look around three areas and here i'm using the itu classification uh which is on quantum network slash communications there is the quantum sensing and methodologies a sort of quantum iot and and then quantum computers and quantum computing and um one interesting thing that uh you you will find is and i'm sure some of the audience already know is a strong presence of the government policies in in promoting all these and in the uh orange uh boxes i put some of the main one so basically you can see all the main uh the main players being involved into into this activity now with Helen and Erran we decided why don't we look a comparative uh view uh between the uk and the u.s so at the beginning we did a bit of let's see if government policies will happen and then we went down more on entrepreneurial side let's look at the startup formations of companies in quantum technologies in the areas i mentioned before and you see there in the chart is basically um is the number of companies formed along let's say between 2012 actually there is something in the in the us less than that until um let's say october 2020 september october 2020 and you see there is a there is a kind of growth in the number of startups in these two countries and there are two points in our opinion that um highlights the importance of uh policy initiatives the first one here in the uk probably uh someone could hardly has been the first country to have a a quantum policy initiative 2013-14 and then we have in the green box a sort of revamping of the um of the policies in various directions and one of the direction these policies have embraced is more around commercialization of this technology and therefore startup formation some argument could be one of the argument is that probably was not strong enough and and probably one of the next step we should do to have a major focus on entrepreneurship but this is kind of the aim of of the research i'll tell you later uh then we said okay let's see which is the role of um what happened in the two capitals um and also to give if you want a regional system of innovation beyond into these and two capitals are very active there are three main reasons in terms of uh opening or launching startups uh into the in london and washington um you are closer policy makers and that really highlight the importance of policy maker in pushing all these there are quite a few university research centers in involving the programs if you see the uk programs looks at various hubs these various hubs are located in various universities some of them are in london and in quite a few cases i would say more in washington side the government is a client and particularly the defense sector becomes a client and this reminds you a bit uh how the internet came about and maybe you could think okay there is some similarity there um sorry yes the next point it was okay let's i'll give you some other some other indicators we basically try to uh map um to profile these startups yeah and one one way was like see the money uh uh the funded funds raised by these companies and you see here the difference between washington and london probably the main difference there and again this is work in progress um needs to be uh need to be reinforced is the presence of private investors and also another point is the presence in the us of big tech companies involving their work quite deeply quite deeply in in quantum technology but this is more or less the estimate of the of the number the money raised by those companies um which is the profile and here we are okay i try to profile it this may be uh require a bit more of work this part is mainly a micro small enterprise when i say micro either less than 10 people or small around 25 50 less than 50 employees source of funds in washington uh are a mix of government private in in london they see mainly government-led the areas of work is around security communications even there is a lot about computers computing um the security communications appears to be a bit more marketable if you allow me this term but there are some companies in the u.s for example working a lot around 5g beyond 5g activities the market visibility or market presence there are companies that have offices abroad in washington they have already in the uh large kind of port customer portfolio you can find some sort of case studies and what they have done um they have collaboration also with large companies involving quantum a bit less in london of these so somehow we can say that the washington side is slightly more market developed if you want uh support networks um here in the uk we have uh the national quantum computing center uh instead in washington there are two organizations one is the quantum industry coalition and the other one is quantum economic development consortium in both these organizations in both both cities there are instruments tools for entrepreneurship challenges and this is more for me discussing a very informal way with entrepreneurs in in quantum in um in washington they're talking a lot about funding but the london community if you want talks a lot about funding yes but also the ability to have uh support in strategy mentoring marketing activities the argument is i'm good in quantum i don't know anything else about business development so i need to help there we have new costs in patents and around 20 patents in washington uh so far in london i found some a couple of pending one but is an area of work in progress there is another big issue and this is one of the reason also to have mirella with us is that there is a gender issue um 114 executive and board members are working in these companies in london and washington there are only 13 women and there are three female founders one in washington two in london one is mirella um there is probably a diversity issue i put question marks because we have not uh addressed that too so um now what we are trying to do uh we should we sort of have a first wave of entrepreneurship in quantum we can say that um the the exp the things we want to do in this research to understand how to drive the second wave or to empower the existing wave and movi moving the life of these startups um and we have discussed a lot about okay probably the government policies have to have a more entrepreneurial focus more commercialization focus stronger than in the past uh how do we involve the investors there is the involvement of the investor but maybe not at the level uh we we want uh we need two initiatives around uh mentoring coaching incubating accelerating uh there are some stuff already but probably is not enough um also the cross nations and public private collaboration is important one most of you probably know that rigidity computing is working here in london for the first uk quantum computers is an interesting story do we want more of that to promote more entrepreneurship through collaboration um and also i think this is more me at the moment on emerging technology on on tech the debate is really around 5g and ai how this thing is changing everything maybe we should bring quantum into it because it contributes a lot and how can we learn from the past yeah and um so these are all items that i would like you to discuss so to write your idea on the chat while i'll pass the uh the word to Erran thank you thank you very much that's that's great summary thank you hi erran hey so uh my slides are loaded and uh i need to uh you want me to put it on to start it yeah what what do i have to do i think yeah yeah all right and uh good all right i think i think we're good so hello everybody it's good to be here i'm visiting you from the other side of the pond i'm at uh the kogod school of business at american university it's uh nice to be with you all and saverio thank you for leading us and taking us into the world of quantum it's uh saverio's curiosity that got us the three of us into this i want to take you um into uh primarily the the time dimension of this in terms of how long all this is taking so it's very much focused on the timeline and and uh the uh wisdom that we get from looking at quantum as just another emerging technology which it is and in the end i'll mention something about u.s government support from here from washington so the overall picture is to be patient with this uh quantum maybe we can date it almost a century ago to the the dawn of quantum mechanics the einstein boar and bourne and heisenberg but then we um we jump forward almost to the end of the 20th century um to um in order to put together a quantum computer uh there was there were still challenges and it's schor's algorithm that uh which dealt with uh factorization of polynomial polynomial which um allowed the thinking of uh the architecture of a quantum computing computer and notice that that happened at schor at the time was at bell labs which was a big tech company of their r d center at the time it was atnt and bell labs is no longer with us then we have a jump of almost 20 years until the commercial activities really uptick and i'll show you that in the next slide now there were there was activity in that 20 years but the really noticeable one the one that got us into this research uh happened began just a few years ago and and uh developments are really um bunched up uh important developments in commercialization and technology are really bunched up in the last few years we have uh in 2019 we have ibm's unveiling of its first commercial computer i think you can see if i'm scribbling here right um at 20 qubits and they're not selling the hardware they're just selling the service kind of like accessing the cloud and then the same year google claimed um quantum supremacy quantum supremacy is when a quantum computer does a computation that it's basically infeasible in the traditional architecture that we all use every day which is the the zero one binary um so that only happened very very recently this is a wonderful chart that's that complements what Saverio just talked about which is the commercialization of quantum this came out of the the journal nature and what the the most important thing i want you to see here is this that um there's been a big jump in deals in the last few years beginning about 2016 you see that in 2017 we have 278 deals and so uh this is a bit a big change in this technology we also see here that the the span are the types of deals also span a larger spectrum these are the five types of quantum technologies instrumentation communication computing computing software and sensors and we see more diversity across the five types here ah um collaborate does uh does some butchering of my slide so bear with me here everything is an s-curve and adoption and diffusion is what it says here um now the s-curve is very important for us to understand the timeline of quantum uh there's the time dimension over here on the y-dimension is the um is either performance or adoption or both so quantum is just another emerging technology and every emerging technology uh travels along this s-curve some s-curves are very steep some of them are flat and this inflection point is is critical here because at this inflection point this is where um things really began to pick up as you can see here the growth curve in quantum we're still very much in the embryonic stage in order to think about this some more um here's five technologies from a range of uh areas and what you see here is how many decades it took to commercialize these technologies so for example um from the point of invention to the point of commercialization for cars it was over 20 years uh solar photovoltaic um is more than almost 40 years from invention to commercialization now with quantum i'm not sure what the point of uh invention uh can be pointed to but in any case the overall picture is that it takes decades to commercialize another way to look at quantum is to look at the famous squ gardner-hype curve what gardner did about 30 years ago a little bit tongue-in-cheek is to create a hype curve all technologies go through a buzz at the beginning excitement and they rise up this curve very very quickly and then when they don't live up to the excitement the buzz the hype they crash now they don't really crash but the excitement goes away so look where they put quantum here they put quantum now right now at the very peak of the hype curve in 2020 on the computer infrastructure hype curve and that means that we're likely to see we're quite likely to see in the next few years a little bit of the excitement of quantum going away until we begin to see productivity and commercialization at a broader scale um here's the involvement of the state which i think that saverio already covered so i want to move on and i want to thank you for joining and i will hand it over thank you erran that's that's terrific um um great information that i've not seen before so that's really good so thank you and we'll hand over to mirella now hi okay so hopefully you can see my screen um okay i'm getting a little bit of feedback but hopefully that's not affecting you a little bit of uh audio back um okay so if if there's anything wrong just let me know when i'll try to tweak parameters so thank you very much for inviting me today i'm very pleased to be part of this discussion my name is mirella koleva i'm the ceo of quantopticon quantopticon is high-tech firm that is operating in the realm of quantum technologies and today i'm going to uh basically tell you a little bit about my entrepreneurial experience as a as a quantum tech um uh entrepreneur and uh i'm going to speak uh just as a disclaimer i'm going to speak in my personal capacity and i will not necessarily uh reflect the views of quantopticon so to give you a bit of a flavor about about my my experience my education and my career up to the point where i um i fully dedicated myself to quantopticon and started working full-time as a ceo um i come from a background of physics i i completed my master of science degree in physics in 2008 where upon i decided to do a master of research and a phd in the life sciences so i i crossed over disciplines a bit i did my phd on a very interesting protein called sonic hedgehog and as part of my phd i had to build or i built um a specialized microscope with a very high resolution based on a technique called super resolution imaging that received whose inventors received the nobel prize in 2014 so i built uh the first of its kind uh the first of its kind super resolution microscope in imperial college um i then on uh went on to do a little stint um as a research fellow at the european molecular biology laboratory in heidelberg in germany and then i continued building bespoke microscopes for biomedical applications first at the university of oxford and then in king's college london in my capacity as a postdoctoral research scientist and i left my position in 2019 to work full-time on quantopticon so a little introduction uh to to from a technical side on the quantum world obviously saverio and erron did a very good job of introducing uh quantum but uh from it from a technical and scientific point of view uh we we already live in a world revolutionized by quantum mechanics um virtually all of the electronic devices that surround us um are based on components called transistors that operate on the principles of quantum mechanics and we are actually on the verge of a new quantum revolution that is going to sweep the world and enable us to make even more exciting technologies that will completely revolutionize revolutionize our lives um and will bring in some amazing advantages we we all need innovations in order to solve to solve the pressing problems of today and the second quantum revolution will enable us to build quantum computers that will be able to discover new drugs and vaccines it will enable the building of ultra-sensitive sensors that could prevent floods and save us from environmental calamities and build ultra secure communications channels that will allow us to transmit information that cannot be intercepted by criminals and cannot be stolen so all of these quantum components for these technologies are currently actively being developed right now there's a lot of activity around the world uh on this um unfortunately the design and optimization of quantum components is a very onerous process and it relies on multiple complex experiments um which essentially consists of um making a hazarding a guess as to what is a good design uh building that uh into a prototype testing it finding out that it's not quite what's desired and then repeating the cycle many many times until the uh the manufacturer arrives at um a component that actually meets the specs and and is high high performance component so what my company actually does is do away with this expensive process and basically substitute it with simulations and simulate simulate the device in silico and uh say uh and and determine exactly what parameters will uh what the parameters need to be in order to yield a high performing component so it removes the expensive um time-consuming uh and onerous experiments and labor-intensive experiments um out of the process and it essentially allows manufacturers to bring their components faster to market so this is what the user interface of our software looks like it's called quantillion and we have uh two patents pending on the underlying theoretical algorithm that it's based on now um i founded the company in 2017 together with uh dr gabby slavcheva uh gabby slavcheva is a renowned theoretical physicist uh who specializes in quantum and condensed matter theory um she is i'm very proud to say that she's actually also my mother and is an incredible um role model so i'm very lucky to be able to work with her and to have such a mother um so she uh she's the one who conceived and developed the theoretical model uh that is incredibly powerful in predicting um the quantum phenomena that go go on in these devices with incredible precision um she developed the model over something like 15 years um and in 2016 i got involved in uh in the development of quantillion myself when i further expanded her theory and made it applicable to quantum systems of a much broader range hence widening the application of the software to many different problems and i implemented the theory into code and now that's an essential part of quantillion this is a little timeline of the evolution of quantopticon since its inception uh quantopticon was incorporated in february 2017 which makes it now four years old um a few uh a few months down the line we won an innovate uk grant um quite a large one together with our collaborators from the universities of cambridge and oxford as well as the tyndall national institute of ireland this grant was instrumental in helping us to build a user interface a user-friendly graphical user interface for the software and further down the line in 2019 we we teamed up with the university of edinburgh who helped us accelerate the code which was taking a very long time to compute so a single simulation was taking something like a month to run before they got involved and they brought it down to something more sensible like a couple of days and a few a little bit later on i joined the kings 20 accelerator which is run by king's college london and i have been part of it ever since and in november 2020 we um we managed to finish our minimum viable product and launched it at the uk national quantum technologies showcase now i would like to mention a few of the um a few of the factors during my entrepreneurial journey that really helped me along and helped my company um i have to say um the innovate uk quantum specific funding calls have been extremely helpful and as i mentioned before we we managed to win an innovate uk grant which was um really crucial for for getting uh getting our product to market um another really useful uh organization has been the quantum technology enterprise center qtic which is based at the university of bristol there is a specific program that was run by the center until very recently called the enterprise fellowship this is a one-year one-year program of mentoring training in events for quantum entrepreneurs that includes um a 30 000 pound salary package and a travel and consumables budget to the value of 12 500 pounds which is a an incredible deal um unfortunately i found out recently that this had been discontinued um and i was very sad to hear about that as i think it's a great uh opportunity for leveling um for enabling um an equitable environment for entrepreneurs of different socioeconomic backgrounds it's not hard to imagine that if you have a lot of money then it's much easier to fund your company and to get ahead and progress and make your company successful um so having this um having the salary uh as a as a means of um you know um having an a secure income while you're building a company is um is a great uh great idea and i would really like to see this um fellowship returning to the university of bristol and i must say i didn't actually um i didn't um i didn't have the opportunity to avail myself of this fellowship because it was at the wrong moment for me um but i think it's a it's a very uh it's a great idea um another um government initiative that has been really helpful for quantopticon has been the uk national quantum technology showcase um the this is um this is an annual event um that that showcases the um products and services of the quantum technology community in the uk um until last year it was um uh restricted to within the uk uh but since um because of the pandemic situation and going online the organizers last year decided to uh to open it up to participants outside the uk which has been absolutely great for us it's it's provided a lot of visibility exposure it has helped us to identify potential customers get in touch with a lot of people um and have uh have an actual uh we could have a we had a virtual booth where we we presented our software and it was it was ideal uh it was an ideal uh marketing exercise for us and of course the kings 20 accelerator has been incredibly helpful being part of a an entrepreneurial community is always great even if the other ventures in the accelerator have nothing to do with quantum technologies but you can get support in various interesting ways in in other ways apart from the scientific matter scientific and technological matter the accelerator has been great also because it provided us with small grants and they we won one of the awards uh cash awards that enabled us to really um uh carry out the final step in um in finalizing our user interface and yes without it we would not have been able to finish our minimum viable product the accelerator also great and they they provide expert advice from seasoned um serial entrepreneurs who are very savvy in their project in their uh in their um in their area of expertise and uh there are uh for there are experts who specialize in different areas and there's for example software specialists um who are incredibly helpful in working out how to commercialize our products and how to market it and how to attract attention from the right people so these these are the main factors that we have encountered uh that have been extremely helpful in furthering quantopticon and now i'm going to mention some of the less advantageous ones um sorry sorry to interrupt but um i'm conscious of time um okay how much longer will you need it's fantastic story but i'm i'm conscious that we need to keep time okay um i i can be very quick i can just uh finish with this slide well maybe another three minutes okay thank you okay um okay so i would i'll just quickly uh go through these um uh basically all of the quantum calls were cut this year um and as a result we had to apply for the open round um of the innovate uk uh competing with all businesses so we didn't actually manage to secure any funding this year we also find that innovate uk paying grants quarterly in arrears can be very difficult in terms of um managing cash flow in the company um also uh requiring smes to to find 30% of matched funding from their total project costs is difficult i think this is a quite a a large amount of money uh for smes who are usually bootstrapping and uh generally don't have access to to large loans because of the because of their lack of assets so they can't secure a loan against it and by comparison i wanted to mention that the quantum flagship which is the european um quantum technologies uh funding program uh actually gives a 100 percent gr gives a 100 per cent grant to smes um and it it pays them in two installments once at the beginning of the project and once in the middle which is a better funding scheme funding model in my in my opinion i would also like to say that there is a bit of an inequality between startups that are not affiliated with uh academia and those that are spun out of academia in the sense that those in academia tend to have a lot of job security because they are founded by senior academics who receive a regular salary and don't have to worry about income problems um uh universities also have trade tech transfer offices which provide um assistance with commercialization marketing and pr as well in some cases and they and university academics also have um an army of postdocs that can do their r&d research for them but i can uh they're also downsides that i can maybe discuss that in the q a um also uh i i would like to point out some issues with regards to uh there being several different technological platforms uh for quantum technologies that are currently competing uh nobody is quite yet sure which one will prevail uh but uh the fact that there are several different ones is causing conflicts of interest in the assessment of innovate uk proposals in that uh rivals um uh some some adherence to one specific school of thought will shoot down proposals from uh from their rivals and this is not an ideal situation and i think innovate uk needs to think about that um and uh yes and another uh innovate uk requirement uh that seems current at the moment is that is the requirement of lining up investors to jump in straight at the end of projects which is not ideal for all businesses for example in in my case because we're a software business we don't really need a huge injection of cash um and regular seed rounds so this is not the best model for me um and i have some data that i would like to show maybe at the q a and finally i just want to say a couple of words about the fact that i still find it quite difficult to run and grow a quantum startup despite hundreds of millions of pounds being invested by in the into the national quantum technologies program and the fact that i think um the government needs to think about how to level the playground um so that people don't fall through the gaps and all talent is leveraged and um uh being uh being recognized uh so that we could build um a world leading oh so we we can make sure that the uk is world leading superpower in quantum technologies and one way to do this is to collect more data on type of businesses that receive public funding and also on diversity data and thank you very much thank you thank you for your attention well thank you and that that's a great way to end is looking at some of the things that have worked and some of the things that are problems as a um for us as researchers you you've given us fantastic things to to think about so we're going to turn over to catherine now um what i'd like when catherine's talking is for you if you have any questions to put them in the chat and then we can deal with them when uh catherine has uh done her comments but thank you mirella that was fantastic okay okay thank you Helen and uh thank you very much for three different but complementary uh sort of views on quantum computing i think um i was asked to really look at some of the or just comment on the sort of policy implications for entrepreneurs and startups and in this field of quantum computing i think the first um point i'd like to make is um it's quite difficult at the moment to really grasp what is quantum computing in the sense that it on the one hand it could veer towards being science fiction as saverio started out by pointing to and on the other hand it is actually what is it that's real because um at the moment it's only seemingly uh google that has done anything that is truly quantum in an absolute sense that's peer recognized to some degree and nevertheless as um saverio's uh slide shows uh there's a worldwide fascination and a huge amount of money being pushed into this area both from governments and from very large companies and i think to get to the um end uh outcome of a true quantum computer uh is going to take absolutely monumental amounts of um funding in order to crack some of these very very uh intractable problems but as one of the early um uh sort of uh people in this field has said the fact that google has even got as far as it's got to shows that it's not impossible but it's just very hard so i think in terms of looking at the policy and the process for helping to both encourage and nurture this industry there are several things that strike me as need to be needing to be done one is to look at how the internet itself was allowed to develop and become a significant force and a global force that then spawned other industries and other uh businesses because the way that has grown up it's even now a titanic battle is going on as we've seen with australia and facebook in who has control of it and who taxes it so i think in looking at some of these issues um that the small entrepreneurs because they will ostensibly be small even if they're within very large companies focusing on um uh quantum they how are they going to manage and can they address some of these issues preemptively almost in order to allow um them to be given the leeway and justify the funding that they obviously so much need in order to progress and one of the areas perhaps is um to focus on um how can we have a network of like interconnected responsibilities that are distributed across various groups of stakeholders and not all on um the shoulders of scientists or the entrepreneurs themselves but how can partnerships with social scientists help us to understand how science and society interact and how can specialists act as facilitators with enough technical knowledge to really initiate and then husband these collaborations and i think that where the problems are as i see them and this is a new field to me as well is that um principally the areas of risk who is taking the risk and who is actually being responsible as a result and um security and privacy because a lot of this money is coming from governments because they can realize the potential of what quantum computing might do for cryptography and data that they hold and we've only had to see what's happened with say um uh with uh snowden and then the panama papers and then one or two other in the financial field what happens when data gets out which has ostensibly followed all the criteria but actually there's almost an insidious uh message within that data that those companies those governments wanted to hold on to it so i think these are very big issues where the policy needs to almost develop in line with both the potential of what quantum could offer but also in in line with what the small entrepreneurial groups are starting to be able to do because even when we look at the internet itself and um the founders of the internet are themselves worried about the fact that they don't want it to be um colonized so that parts of it become inaccessible or there are too many barriers to us all having access to it as a society we don't actually want quantum computing it's just to be totally the exclusive um hold of either individual governments or individual companies who can't be controlled or held accountable or um share the outcomes of what they uh produce in order to enable so much more to happen and so much more entrepreneurial ship to follow on from that so um i think some ways to address this might be along the lines of what is different about quantum computing and where are the similarities with other breakthrough technologies in the past that we have now got to a level where we feel quite comfortable with them at some levels so i think what how how was the internet itself released and then enabled and then supported and um can we learn from that and then how can we match map that on to where there's good practice and good findings map that onto the embryonic nature of quantum computing at this very early stage and within that hopefully there could be the fertile territory for entrepreneurs to blossom and therefore to actually help um entrepreneurs like you uh who are actually really wanting to do things and on the one hand you're saying you don't need the finance but on the other you actually do need some of the barriers removed but i'd suggest you also do need the finance because this is evolving and what you want to do is have some streams of finance that not that are not so much stop and start as these over here have been and i think possibly one of the reasons why they might have stopped some of these programs might be that they are not clear what quantum can do and with google and others sort of making these categoric statements of well we've done it oh no you haven't what you did in two seconds we can do in a week um but it's it's not two seconds but actually we've done it nevertheless and we can do it now whereas you can't um sort of navigate your technology beyond that single thing that you've cracked we can actually spread our technology and do much more than just that but it might take a week and not two seconds so i think there are some issues there thank you thank you very much Catherine that's great we haven't got any questions in the chat so what i'm um oh connor would you like to ask a question yes please sorry it's just i've got a few and i didn't want to type it because it was just going to take forever and i thought it'd be easier um okay i'm a business student so i can't pretend to understand the science behind all of this i i've tuned in for the uh for the innovation part so to tie in with what i learned about the innovation and how that syncs with our economy um and then what mirella said about uh quantillium speeding up the process of the development cycle of the of the application taking it to commercialization i just wondered if she um had any insights into how how effective that was at um speeding on that process um whether there's any uh predictions of when that might come might now be like implemented in terms of like commercialization and if you have that and if she has a vision for what that might look like when it is brought into mass production and it's used commercially yeah so i'm i'm happy to take that question since it's addressed to me um so we we are still at the early stage of um commercialization at the the right time of commercialization as it were um we uh so our customers are manufacturers of hardware components for quantum optical technologies um and uh they are still in still kind of working out uh how to make these components and they don't have a an established uh you know they they don't have a they have a plan about how to make them but they haven't actually really uh got to to the stage where are confident in making them and we are just getting involved now at this process so um we are really at the beginning of actually uh commercializing our software and and getting customers to to pay for it essentially um i think uh my vision for the software is to become something like um uh something called um electronic design um automation software uh and cad software or computer aided design software that is currently used in the semiconductor technology and is used for making um it's it's used massively in the semiconductor industry to to make integrated circuits and all sorts of other electronic components um so we want to do the same we want to be that kind of uh enabling software except for quantum technologies um and uh yeah this is uh this is still yet this is still to come um essentially we're we're at the beginning do you have any more questions you said you had uh just one word for you it was about um have you any trouble with um get with the patent because i know that in the past software has particularly had issues in that area yes yes um it's difficult to patent the software itself uh but it's possible to patent the algorithm which is essentially what we've done um and uh yeah we needed to be careful about what wording we used but so far it's it's working and it's it's a lot easier to patent software in the u.s apparently which is the next step we're going to do so the moment we've just patented it we've filed a patent in the uk and we've filed a pct patent which is um sort of an international patent which will then be converted into a patent in individual countries around the world and one of the ones we're targeting is the u.s of course because a lot of our market will be there okay thank you uh there's a question from karina and then i think catherine wants to speak but we'll finish at uh two minutes past one so we've got another six minutes so uh karina would you uh maybe mirella you just answer you um karina's question in the chat can you can you see okay i'll just open the chat now it just says what sorts of problems quantum computers proved to be very good for so far where and where didn't they work uh well quantum computers are really not at the stage to address any um useful problems at this stage so yeah at this point at this point they're not very useful um uh so yeah i mean quantum computing is a technology that will be ready in about 10 years time or this is a projection uh this is the this is one of the quantum technologies that is going to take the longest to bear fruit as it were there are other things like quantum sensors and quantum communications that will become a reality much sooner but yeah for quantum computers we we have to wait a few more years before they they're really making a contribution okay and the only other question which i think is important as business students have you seen any exits of small quantum technologies because we know quantum companies because it's usual pattern of shake out yeah um i i'm not aware of any uh to be honest and i i would be very surprised if they were because um they are just starting to develop their technology um and their i mean a lot of the quantum companies out there are not really making a revenue at the moment anyway so um yeah we're we're far from that i i think there have been some acquisitions in the states couple of acquisitions but i think too i found the two acquisitions in the states from you know the big big players buying two small small companies well i think that's a pattern to watch catherine did you want to come in again yes uh yes thank you Helen i was going to say actually um that i i think that um with the process and the policy of developing innovation in this field um with quite a number of smaller companies that actually do a breakthrough in a very specific area their main way of getting to the marketplace is to be bought in a trade sale almost or sucked up into a bigger company whereby that can be um uh optimized that growth can be optimized fairly quickly and i think that that is quite often the way that uh very successful innovations start to get to the marketplace because actually the timing is very critical in being a breakthrough first so i think one of the issues might be whether one is a breakthrough first company or a fast follower as it's become called in order to get into the marketplace once the threshold has been broken i don't know if it's very different in the states and perhaps others would like to comment on that okay can i uh just a final comment uh i mean i obviously i agree with mirella mirella is the expert here but quantum computers are far away but you know what i have seen on on the on the 5g beyond 5g communication side um so the secure communication aspects which was one of the objective that mirella put to the slide we are not that far i mean uh i i attended a couple of meetings in which there were a couple of presentations about the use of quantum and security communication and you know i appreciate that the evolutionary value and probably is the area more uh more marketable at the moment probably the one closer to to to market yes in which you can see a lot of activities there a lot of companies working around not just quite a few companies doing also small companies i'm not talking about the big ones so maybe we need different stages maybe we need to catch the moment of this 5g story that is touching us at the moment a lot from a policy level implementation level maybe raise the bar raise the bar of quantum there so showing that you know there is there is something there real it's not just in the hands of people like uh of mirella i think there is a discourse to do a lot of narrative to put in place i i think it's very exciting Erran would you like to have a final comment on this on the session is he there okay um thank you uh everybody for attending and thank you for excellent presentations and thank you for excellent discussion catherine it we could have gone on for another hour i would have liked to have heard the end of mirella's presentation but uh i'm sure you will share uh the slides with us and it is it is it's this brilliant area to be in and congratulations to your mum and say well well done on her work and uh bringing up such a clever daughter so it's so what a family so thank you thank you erran for your thank you okay thank you everybody we'll stop there
2021-03-03 16:13
