i-Teams in Cambridge

Teams of up to 7 participants, selected from across all university disciplines, work with the support of their team mentor, their researchers and the i-Teams Programme Director (Amy Weatherup). Teams present their final conclusions to an audience of business and academic experts, and have the opportunity to present their projects as posters at the annual CUTEC Technology Ventures Conference.

Teams are asked to brainstorm possible real-world applications of their invention, and investigate their ideas by contacting external industry experts. In the process, they gain a taste of the processes needed to turn a lab technology or new product concept into a commercially-viable product, as well as learning a wide range of new skills.

Originally adapted from the successful MIT i-Teams programme, since 2006 i-Teams Cambridge has worked on over 250 technologies, involving over 1500 students and 60 business mentors. A full case study of the i-Teams story was written by Zurina Moktar in 2018, and was awarded first prize at the 3rd Innovative Youth Incubator Awards in Washington DC. i-Teams was also the subject of two peer-reviewed case studies at the EPIC conference in 2019 and 2020.

110 of our projects so far have gone on to create spin-out companies, several of which have received significant investment funding (over $300m in total). 

Some of the spin-outs have involved original members of the student i-Team or the original project mentor, and other projects continue to be actively commercialised at a pre-spin-out stage. In other cases, the i-Team has helped to make a rapid decision to stop commercialising a technology, allowing the researchers to re-focus their efforts onto projects with greater potential.