We run the Momentum Programme: momentum.ac.nz

Momentum is a national student-led investment committee program which provides access to world class advice, connections, and investment opportunities to students and start-ups across New Zealand.

Our services include connecting technology and project teams with strategic management, top-tier advice and efficient access to capital.

We believe today’s students have the passion and urgency to innovate in ways that will positively impact on their own and future generations. The investment committees are formed with an experienced chair, tertiary students, and some longitudinally experienced investors and entrepreneurs. Each Momentum investment committee has a majority of student members. Investment committee members have highly diverse backgrounds, academic fields, and perspectives that they bring to bear when providing advice to presenting project teams. This allows the committees to provide advice and support to a wide range of start up technologies.

The committees refresh themselves every year, with "retiring" students choosing the next generation.

Return on Science (returnonscience.co.nz)- Return on Science is an open investment committee process which performs two important functions for the high tech start-up ecosystem. Firstly it provides specialised, international investment guidance and recommendation for both the Government's Pre-Seed Accelerator Fund and the University of Auckland Inventors Fund. The second function is that the specialised committee meetings are open and locked in time (e.g the Digital technologies committee is on the third Wednesday of every month. The price of entry is a one page CDA and attendance is available via Zoom as well as directly. We have attendees from many large funds and companies from around the world.

Since 2016, we have launched committees in Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin and Christchurch and are launching the Manawatu Committee in August 2020.

To date 75 students have been involved for at least a year and over 90 student led projects have been reviewed. In addition all members have been provided with a number of "short training" presentations and workdays on Governance and Investment, Intellectual Property and so on. Most committees have at least three members who are participating in their own start-ups.

2016 Formed the University of Auckland Inventors Fund - Open $20m Seed fund for University of Auckland Inventors Fund

2016 Joined Brandon Capital's Medical Research Commercialisation Fund (MRCF) alongside 15 other medical research organisation bringing preferential access to around A$200m of seed and venture capital for medical technologies.

2018 Worked with the G08 largest Universities in Australia to bring IPGroup (www.ipgroupplc.com) to Australasia and commit A$200m to IP from the G08 and Auckland into spin-outs

The above means that the University of Auckland (prior to the formation of the Technology Incubators) has preferential access (i.e. the capital can only invest in either 15 organisations IP -MRCF or 9 Universities - IP Group) to almost $550m of capital for Seed, Series A,B,C and expansion

Return on Science investment committee members come from diverse and global backgrounds. We have investors, founder CEOs with exits, large company IP and talent scouts, industry specialists and consultants. We have experts from USA, Europe, Israel, New Zealand and Australia. For example on the Biotech Healthcare we have executives from Merck, Abbvie and Pfizer routinely call in.

We are members of BIO and IRweb.org

Our investments are global from day one and we invest on the basis that "we know what we don't know" and go and find it.

We run PhD workshops on Lean Canvas, Intellectual Property, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Only around 15% of PhD students have careers in academia. On the other hand almsot all of our PhD students find employment with the world largest and fastest growing companies.

We provide "live" commercialisation projects to students on the Masters of BioScience Enterprise, Masters of Commercialisation and Entrepreneurship and MBA programmes.

We run 5x Lean Canvas workshops for selected academic talent, in particular focused on the emerging generation of University Leaderships to drive the concept of a T-Shaped education.

Too early to tell but we think we should do more....

We have invested almost $1m over the past 15 year on the Velocity Innovation Challenge Business Planning Competition and the other programmes from the Centre of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) (www.velocity.auckland.ac.nz).

We also run the Stanford Ignite Programme where selected students from around the world attend a 3-month start-up MBA at Stanford in Silicon Valley.

The programme has started 120 ventures, created over 700 jobs and over a quarter of a billion has been raised by these companies in their first rounds of investment.

Last year 10% of the student body took part in some CIE event.

75% of the Stanford Alumni are based in New Zealand and are involved with star-ups in some capacity.

Partnering with Global Funds - eg Horizon Ventures, Temasek, PeopleSoft, IP Group, Brandon Capital

Return on Science

Membership of Global Industry Associations Focused on R&D and Innovation

Engagement with NZTE

Leverage University:University strategic relationships - both at a University level but also at TTO partnership level

Exits to some of the largest global companies - Qualcomm and Apple, research relationships with many of the Fortune 50 companies.

Too early to tell but could do more