Mark Mann

What universities are for.

Cambridge is one of the top universities – if not the very best - in the world.

This has been the case for centuries. Some of the best ideas have come from the brightest minds from within our walls. Our bright minds have undertaken pioneering world-changing research, become trailblazers in the fields, and inspired others to go onto great things.

While much has remained the same within our walls for many years, a crucial change came a couple of decades back with the emergence of the “Third Mission”. But what is this mission, and why is it third?

From my discussions with institutions across Europe, it seems that teaching and research come one and two. although there is much debate over which is in pole position. The third mission is the impact that the university has on the community it is in, and on society at large. Terms such as “civic universities” and “anchor institutions” may be familiar to some reading this. But here is my challenge: in the 21st century, why is the impact a university a tertiary nice to have objective? Why, given the societal need for technological and social advancement, isn’t it joint first?

I have spent over a decade in the world of technology transfer. I’ve worked with academics who are passionate about their work, people who want to see their ideas deployed at scale to the benefit of society. Likewise, I’ve worked with students who are devoted want to fixing the many problems they see with the world. These groups form an evergreen source of ideas with game-changing potential, driven by people dedicated to making a difference.

When new ideas and insights emanating from a university grow and combine with expertise from the outside world, this forms a deep well of innovation that can have a profound impact on society. Whether it is a new therapeutic, a social sciences approach that can alleviate mass suffering, or an insight from a piece of art of literature which completely transforms someone’s outlook on life, these critical university-born ideas can be life-changing for those who are affected by them. And when those who benefit realise that the innovation that has positively changed their life has come from a university, their respect and trust for that institution knows no bounds.

This is the process that gave us penicillin and eradicated rickets, gave rise to ARM and Google, and is the reason you can read these words anywhere in the world. More recently, it was three university spinouts – Moderna, BioNTech and Barinthus Biotherapeutics (through its partnership with Oxford and AstraZeneca) – that released us from the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Even as a ‘third’ objective, our collective impact has repeatedly changed the world for the better, and will continue to do so.

However, there are dark clouds forming.

At a university innovation conference in Birmingham a fortnight ago, a senior university representative said she was sure that what is happening in America - unprecedented and ill-conceived research cuts driven by ideology and the demonisation of Harvard - cannot happen here.

Are we sure about that?

Popularism is on the rise across the West, powered by rampant misinformation and – let’s just call it what it is –lies and mass manipulation. The UK is far from immune. The Brexit referendum in 2016 was not exactly replete with evidence-based arguments, and there are no more than four years before our next general election, where those aligned with Trump are predicted to perform well.

How many times have universities in recent times been tarred and feathered in the media as woke and liberal? Or perhaps how often we’ve heard that the public are ‘tired of experts’, evidenced by the alarming rise in anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists? Or seen our friends and loved ones disappear into darker areas of our digital world, only to emerge fundamentally changed?

Cambridge is the biggest science and technology cluster in Europe, with a plan to become even bigger. We have demonstrated our ability to change the world for the better, and have unlimited potential to keep doing so. But make no mistake: our ability to do so is entirely contingent on our capacity to keep our beacon of truth burning bright.

It is essential that we do all in our power to advocate for, provide world-class support to, and passionately enable the brilliant work that our academics and student entrepreneurs and their myriad of supporters do.

They need to have the time and the resources necessary to garner the maximum impact from their work. It will be my core objective as Chancellor to tenaciously empower these groups, building on already incredible foundations to push the impact of our research and innovation to new heights.

This will extend beyond science and technology. Cambridge has the finest social scientists and humanities scholars in the world. They too have insights that, through my work at other universities, I’ve personally seen can change millions of lives for the better. As Chancellor, I will help to unlock this latent potential, and enable our academics of all disciplines to have the impact their ideas deserve.

It has never been more important for Cambridge to make the most of the knowledge and talent it has and to offer it to the world – but offer is the wrong word. If you leave an idea on a shelf for anyone to take, very few, if any take it. You have to put effort into getting noticed, to fight for what you know is important and work hard to put that knowledge into action.

And that is the vision I have for a 21st century University of Cambridge – an impact-first university, where all of its members are mobilised to create a tidal wave of positive change and energy in a world that desperately needs it.

We will defend academic integrity and freedom and demonstrate that it is these core principles that drive human progress. We will unleash the research and innovation that comes from these principles and change lives globally as a result. And we will evidence that the truth that comes from academic inquiry – our beacon of truth – is where the real innovative ideas with the potential to shape a better future for society comes from .

Join me in making our beacon burn brighter than ever in a world that’s in desperate need of our light.

Vote Mark Mann for Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.

Funding priorities for a 21st Century University

Universities are overflowing with ideas. On that, I don’t think anyone disagrees. The challenge isn’t one of ideation, but of stamina.

The heroic image of this stamina in action is a solo innovator, plugging away in some dimly-lit basement, sweating their way to a breakthrough. This is a far cry from what innovation looks like in reality. It is less an individual effort, more a rough and chaotic collaborative encounter. In short, it is not about a solitary F1 driver on a podium drenched in champagne, more a whole rugby team covered in blood, sweat and mud.

But what fuels this effort? We cannot apply the rugby player’s diet of high protein, low carbs and plenty of bitter. Instead, we need to talk about something far more shady.

Money.

The overflow of creativity at universities are all competing against each other to get funded. Obviously, there needs to be some triaging, but often universities develop their funding priorities, and the rest doesn’t get airtime, or gets the equivalent of a 5pm meeting on a Friday.

This is something I had to keep in mind when I got the window from the Other Place’s development office for social innovation: August.

August. Aka. Silly season. Aka. I’m out of office and won’t reply until September.

I didn’t expect social innovation to get the equivalent of a commercial at halftime in an England World Cup match, but it does suggest it really isn’t a priority for universities.

It puts the ‘third’ in Third Mission.

Let’s be clear: the role of university development offices is to raise money for the university itself. But surely raising money to invest in what a university produces isn’t just a ‘nice to have’, but absolutely mission-critical in achieving the goal of making money?

At Cambridge, we should raise the priority of funding the outputs of our great university. This way, our outputs become outcomes - both financial and societal. But even more crucially: doing so meets the demand.

Creating positive impact in a world that clearly needs it is what my generation is thinking about. But it’s not just fringe X/Millennials like me. It’s the rest of the millennial generation, it’s Gen Z behind them, and I’d wager Alphas will come in swinging demanding a world in which they have agency on too.

We live in a rapidly changing world. Those who will inherit what is coming will demand change, and they want a role in ensuring it is change that will benefit the world. We should be asking ourselves challenging questions about where we invest, what we back, and prioritising funding that allows us to fuel the fire of change.

To illustrate this, let’s talk about an area that’s changed yet we fund it like it’s still 2019: infrastructure.

I was at another great university last week, Warwick, visiting its magnificent new Faculty of Arts building. A net-zero building, fantastic engineering and a great space to work in. And it was pretty much empty.

Straight after lunch.

On a Monday.

When I worked at the BBC, Greg Dyke had made the decision to dig a big hole under New Broadcasting House and put News down there. The accommodation was such that people were expected to work from home for two days a week. Staff were very often frustrated as they no longer had their own office and workspace – a very vocal and expletive-laden frustration, often broadcast loudly around New Broadcasting House.

And then the pandemic.

No more problems.

Use of workspace has never returned to previous levels, despite militant attempts from business leaders to drag colleagues back in, kicking and screaming (a futile effort as the same cohort demanding change also despise the pre-2020 office status quo).

That is not to say we shouldn’t be investing in infrastructure – far from it. A lecture theatre for a 700 year old college that has never had one? Absolutely. New labs? The Cavendish was falling to bits when I was there 25 years ago, and the new Cavendish is magnificent and necessary. But could the same be said for new open plan offices?

Instead, our investments in infrastructure should go towards creating the economy of the future, not the past. Likewise, our investments more broadly should be forward-facing, creating the world we want to see, not reinforcing the worst of the one we’d like to leave behind.

That’s the role backing social innovation can play – turning our sciences, social sciences and humanities outputs into outcomes we want to see.

Will it be easy? Absolutely not. I wear the battle scars of failing to set up a social investment fund myself. But the demand is clear, as is the capital. While development directors are currently out there selling name plaques to anyone who can afford them (and I do encourage them to reach out if they want to rename their College bar ‘The Mannhole’), bursars are coming to me, saying: “alumni your age are saying that they don’t want to donate to College, but are interested in a social innovation”.

Given the right backing, if we give the idea a bit more sunlight, you can tap into a wealth of people who could invest in such a fund. From investors, to government, to alumni like me who are currently giving nothing in cash, we tell them this:

Cambridge is here to change the world for the better, and we want you to be a part of it.

The polls for the Chancellor race open tomorrow. If this is the role you want to see Cambridge play in the world, please consider lending me your support.

Why universities must back purpose driven spin outs

Over the last ten years we have seen innovation in universities go from strength to strength. Spinout creation and growth is ballooning, driven by ever bigger investment rounds for UK tech, with many reaching the vaunted ‘unicorn’ status as their value rockets past a billion dollars.”

But it was not always thus. At the beginning of the 1980s, universities didn’t even own their own inventions. Instead, they were owned by the government. Then came the Bayh-Dole Act in the US, giving universities the right to their IP and the mandate to develop it. Thatcher’s government soon followed. It took another quarter of a century until technology spinouts grew in number and impact: universities preferred licensing the technology to large technology companies rather than going through the palaver of starting their own.

Ten years ago, just as the technology spinouts from universities were beginning to make a real dent, I was called into my boss’s office as a request had been made. The University’s Humanities and Social Sciences Divisions had asked for support to see whether any of its ideas could be commercialised.

I had just joined from the BBC and was well accustomed to working at the boundary between the technologists and the creatives, so my boss threw me at the problem. “I have no idea what they want,” he said. “Just talk to them and see what happens.”

Why were these divisions asking to do this? The Research Excellence Framework (REF) had by then gone through one iteration. The scheme awards block funding to universities from government based on the quality of its research, and an increasing amount of the funding was being awarded for the impact that the research makes. The divisions were already having a great impact with policy work and public engagement, but they were doing very little in commercialisation and wanted to explore if it was possible.

This is when I learned that universities don’t just come up with technology concepts. In fact, these are very much in the minority. Discovering this began what, for me, has been by far most fulfilling decade to date.

I was given free rein to try anything out. I made some terrible mistakes attempting to apply legacy tech transfer approaches, and soon realised that the innovations that come from these disciplines are very different.

The intellectual property they create is largely knowledge-based and therefore runs immediately into a problem: when a geographer creates a new index to characterise something, you can’t file a patent on it.

But when you look at the wider economy, neither does anyone else. The UK economy, as is the case with most of Europe, is a service-based economy. Even in Germany, only 20-25% of the economy is in technology and manufacturing. Primary industries have essentially been wiped out. In supporting technology spinouts, universities have essentially targeted the hardest sector first.

Building a tech-based company is hard. It needs a lot of money and patience, but is a high risk/high reward approach that can drive enormous leaps forward. Service-based companies, on the other hand tend to grow more steadily and organically. There is a myth that service-based companies don’t scale: try telling that to KPMG. Service-based companies can and do scale; they just grow and in a different way.

With this in mind, I set about learning how to create service-based spinouts from universities.

I would soon additionally learn that the nature of these innovations meant that an entirely different type of company needed to be created.

Much of the research in humanities and social sciences is done on people, and thus typically is protected by a strict code of ethics. Consequently, the way innovations that were found in areas such as social policy, international development, geography and homelessness needed to live up to this code as they were rolled out.

Therefore, social enterprises, or more generally social ventures – a business in which the directors are bound by a mission statement embedded in the constitution of the company to build the company ethically – were clearly the model needed to roll out these innovations in a responsible way, protecting academic integrity at the same time.

And create them we did. Many have scaled, one has “exited.” As they did, colleagues in the sciences began social ventures too, realising that that their innovations also suited the model.

Progress has been gradual and steady. Many companies haven’t made it, but this is the case in technology as well. Universities don’t like failure much – a bit of a culture challenge there. But the impact you get when they are successful can be enormous.

The of the door, SOPHIA Oxford UK – a non-profit - later spun out a for-profit company from it, Wise Responder Inc. It characterises poverty, measures it, works with partners to improve outcomes based on their insights, and measures again to see if improvements have been made.

Those improvements have been enormous. It is now working with Vale in Brazil, a big mining company with hundreds of thousands in its supply chain, many of which are in acute poverty. Interventions are beginning with the potential to bring those people out of poverty. Earlier work in Costa Rica has enabled participants to buy a house for the first time, bringing them and their families out of poverty and to build their own family wealth. Such impact vastly improves the financial “bottom line” of a country. The savings to government alone, with better health, education outcomes combined with savings in welfare and crime, will be enormous.

But, as was the case in the technology sector at the turn of the century, the capital and infrastructure to scale this sort of business is low. Yes, there is impact investment, but you need to be turning over the sort of money Wise Responder is now before they’ll even look at you. The difficulty is getting from £0 to £500k. Wise Responder got there essentially through a network of wealthy donors that have worked alongside key figures in international development research for decades. The reason it was able to grow was because they were well-connected in New York. Most academics don’t have that black book.

And here is, what for me, is potentially more important. The impact of the international development work is being felt in LATAM, but most of the research we see in humanities and social sciences can best be applied at home: here in the UK. Social care, health and wellbeing, education, law, equality, diversity and inclusion, culture – the potential for impact is great, but they need support in those early stages.

Building that infrastructure has been what I have spent most of the last ten years doing, as well as supporting individual projects themselves. The Aspect programme, a national programme to help Humanities and Social Sciences researchers to start the early stages of developing their idea an take towards market, started as a one pager from my colleague, Paul Cogswell, which I converted into a two pager, which was then combined with another from my colleagues in research services into an outline bid, which LSE later inherited as the lead. Impact U, a collaboration I put together to link universities along the OxCam Arc, and of which Cambridge is a key partner, coordinates social venture support with a view to building an investment fund and is now issuing convertible notes of £40k to early stage social ventures. London Social Ventures is doing the same as Aspect for social ventures in London, but recognising that social ventures largely service the public sector, is building with partners in the Olympic Park, a safe space in which new social innovations can be rolled out to the members of the public that most need them.

All early stage, all vital schemes, but all of which need continued support in the way that technology innovation was supported patiently 25 years ago so that they can fully realise their full potential. And all are at risk as the Treasury looks for cuts in public expenditure.

And going back to the technology sector. When these unicorns (and the ones that go for princely sums beneath) are sold, where do they go? Are they bought by large UK technology companies? No, they are usually bought by either the Americans or the Chinese. When sold, the ideas, the wealth, the staff and the potential economic growth go with them. Sure, the investors get a return, the Exchequer will get a bit as well, as does the university it came from. And if the UK’s destiny is to be an IP-producing hothouse with the sale of IP there to contribute positively to our balance of payments, so be it.

But it’s a missed opportunity for growth, and for positive impact in the UK. And this is where our university service companies come in. We build up a company which sorts out a societal problem, makes a profit, reduces costs for the government, builds up jobs and infrastructure here, and can be something which we export overseas, providing a financial return to the UK. A win-win? Potentially, yes, and with at least half of ideas coming from the Humanities and Social Sciences being social ventures, ethically responsible companies as well.

Universities, and in particular, Cambridge, have both a responsibility and a huge opportunity to both make a huge impact and contribute to UK PLC, and it will if the resources everyone connected with the university commits the funding that these early stages need, just as everyone did at the equivalent early stage that technology found itself in at the turn of the century.

And here’s another thing, someone asked me the question “couldn’t or shouldn’t all spinouts from universities be social ventures?”

I have an unambiguous answer to that question. Yes.

Voting opens tomorrow in the election for the next Chancellor of Cambridge. If you want this to be a top priority for Cambridge, vote for Mark Mann as your first preference choice.

Cambridge’s role in securing a greener future

It’s no secret that Cambridge has a wealth of expertise in technology. Its Engineering Department alone, where I spent 7 happy years as a postgrad and postdoc, has a depth and breadth to its technological opportunity rarely seen anywhere on the planet.

Much of what is emerging rightly targets climate change, evidenced by the proliferation of battery technologies resulting in spinouts like Nyobolt, or utilising new materials to tackle plastic pollution such as the biodegradable packaging at Xampla.

It’s my pleasure to see these sorts of ideas when I judge the Parmee Prize at Pembroke College every year, and see ideas such as these in their formative stages, each a potential novel approach to the collective grand challenges we face. There is one element, though, which is often overlooked in these solutions: people and their behaviour.

When I moved into technology transfer at the BBC, I quickly came to the realisation that my colleagues were producing technology nobody wanted.

In one of the projects I was working on, you could build all sorts of interactive data, such as in sport, and display it in context on the screen. I spoke to many directors about this, and the feedback was always the same: “how does this fit with the narrative?”

And they had a point.

With golf, for example, directors I saw in action at the BBC awed me with their ability to find a narrative. This would be stitched together on the fly, weaving in multiple golfers at different parts of the course, many of which were hitting their ball at exactly the same time. It is only now, watching the dreadful coverage of the recent US Open, in which all of this pointless data is crowbarred into your eyeballs, that I finally comprehended what the directors meant.

I wasn’t watching the sport. I was engaged with a story about the sport – its narrative. A skill you learn in the Humanities.

Turning back to the Parmee Prize, one idea I saw concerned a technology in which a very large gadget is placed on the top of a roof that can power your home – essentially, if you will, a solar blob.

This would be particularly useful in places off-grid regions in low-to-middle income countries, so the pitch went, as the common practice presently is burning fuel. But this reminded me of another project I came across in which a similar technology was not adopted. Strangely, no one would take up a trial, despite being incredibly poor. Why? Because it would show to their neighbours that they didn’t have enough money to buy fuel.

This shows the power of the social sciences and humanities; it is through these that we better understand people.

“Great - let’s get the social sciences and humanities involved so we can take a multidisciplinary approach,” say the folks at UKRI and Innovate UK. “We will provide funding so that they can work with the technology community on how new technology can be adopted once it has been developed.”

This, while well meaning, is the incorrect approach too. Social Sciences and Humanities are not the icing on the cake that you throw in at the end. This is precisely what has gone wrong with social media giants such as Meta – engineers such as myself creating tools they barely comprehend the power of, with the necessary expertise coming too little, too late.

While many pin our future hopes on fusion energy or carbon capture, the truth is much of the technology required to effectively fight climate change is already there. What is missing is enabling and convincing people to use it. But this does not mean bringing expertise from Social Sciences and Humanities in at the end, it means co-designing solutions from the beginning as equals.

Rory Sutherland, a graduate of Cambridge, known to many through his viral videos on social media in which he largely talks about common sense approaches to adoption of new behaviours, recently published a book called Alchemy. In it, he describes how when we work on understanding how people think, huge behavioural shifts can be made by solving problems in the right way.

How can you say to a low-income family that they cannot have a fuel-burning stove because of climate change? What right does someone from the developed nations have to say “we’ve burnt so much, made ourselves rich and potentially irrevocably damaged the planet, so you can’t have the same?”

Achieving net zero will come through understanding complex human behaviour and encouraging behavioural change equitably. This is hard, and it cannot be solved by technology alone. Without merging the disciplines, the efforts to just tech our way out of the situation will be as futile as Just Stop Oil smearing Kings College in orange paint. Neither consider the audience.

Our solutions cannot just be technological in nature, but must consider society and the human element, and their symbiosis with environmental impact. To achieve the latter, we must understand the former.

This is only part of the vast value that Humanities and Social Sciences can bring to innovation. As your Chancellor, I pledge to use my platform to convene those who can build the infrastructure necessary to unlock this potential, and help create a more purposeful and inclusive innovation ecosystem.

I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up, so why am I trying to become Chancellor of the University of Cambridge?

When I was young, I’d spend far too much of my time fretting about who I’d be when I grew up. What do I chase? What am I interested in? What if I’m wrong?

These questions – I am sure – are currently buzzing around the heads of our soon-to-be graduates. I know this well as this anxiety about who I was meant to be pursued me through Cambridge – feelings that were only exacerbated by my academic performance. I was middle of the road, not getting anywhere near the first that academic careers usually need, rapidly discovering that the same intelligence that got me to the University was also incapable of sitting exams.

I had set my heart on an academic career, but as time went on this was becoming increasingly less likely. I went to careers fairs, I met the usual corporate suspects, and networked until my throat went hoarse. Nothing ignited my spark.

But then came the inspiration that changed everything and led to me remaining in Cambridge for 11 years. And it came from the most unlikely of places, the bitter rival of our present Chancellor, the dastardly villain that is Morrison’s.

To make ends meet, I worked there whenever I came home from Cambridge. Was this bright young thing and potential future Chancellor working at the head office, two miles from my house, dazzling management with my groundbreaking strategy on arranging courgettes?

No, of course not.

I stacked shelves, I broke down boxes, and any creative flair I brought to the vegetable aisle only brought the ire of my shift manager. With another summer approaching, the dread of going back led to me pleading with my Director of Studies, Professor Mike Payne, to spare me from another clean up on the milk aisle.

Mike set me up with a summer research project on a helium atom microsope with Dr Bill Allison. My task for the summer would be to work on a new detection method: ionizing helium with a carbon nanotube.

I never quite understood why Mike went out of his way to do this given the state of my exam results. Regardless of what he saw in me, it was an intervention that completely changed my life trajectory. The project was a success. We ended up working in partnership with the Engineering Department and with it came a paper in Nano Letters, still my highest impact paper.

Fast forward a year and I was a third of a way into filling in an application to KPMG. When a particularly banal question came up, I reached for Outlook and sent an email to the person I worked with most closely at the Engineering Department, Ken Teo, to ask what had happened next in the project we had worked on together. To my amazement, an email came back almost immediately saying that they had just secured funding from the EPSRC to do a year’s worth of research on it and did I want a job?

I, of course, took it. A year later my Professor, Bill Milne, had secured my funding for a PhD, and that set me on my way for many years to come.

So many things had to come together to make this happen, but the support from Mike, Ken and Bill meant I regained my confidence. I am still appalling at exams – it took me five tries to get my driving licence – but what my mentors did for me set up an amazing career.

I wanted to speak about this as I imagine many students are currently filling in application forms – possibly to both KPMG and Morrisons in the current job market - asking themselves those same questions. Do I really want to do this?

If not, what the hell else can I do?

Behind this is a passionate desire from young people to not just profit from their work, but to find purpose in it. Young people tell me all the time that the world’s a mess. That climate is changing at an alarming pace and nowhere near enough is being done to curtail it. That there’s poverty across the world which doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

And they say that they want to help.

This is where the innovator’s mindset can really make a difference.

It was only when I took a chance on myself and struck out on my own into startup world that I came to the shocking realisation: I will never know what I want to be when I grow up. Instead, the thing that gets me up in the morning is being able to choose what to do with my day and choosing something meaningful.

It has taken me a long time to get to this point. I’m 44. But I don’t see this as lost time: some never make it at all. But a more important realisation: I’m no self-made man taking the world on alone. I am instead walking a path that’s been built with support from all my mentors, colleagues and friends.

Through innovation and entrepreneurship, we can support young people with great ideas and enable these concepts to become reality.

We have solid foundations for making purpose manifest in Cambridge, but we can build them further. And I don’t mean more business plan competitions and 4 PM socials.

I want us to come together as a community and ask ourselves: how can we set up our alumni to make the most impact they can make on the world?

Let us fully understand the most effective ways to provide tangible support for our students in so that they may find their own spark. Let’s create the ability and agility to let them test out multiple career pathways, discover divergent opportunities, and find the rhythm that makes their clocks tick. Let’s bring our community together to create serious infrastructure that matches the aspirations we can ignite, and help them build their paths to making the world a better place.

It is a fair question, given the calibre of my competition, why you would elect a man who doesn’t have any idea what he wants to be when he grows up, let alone the Chancellor of the University of Cambridge?

The honest answer is that I don’t want to “be” anything. I did not run because of the prestige, or that it would look good on my CV.

I just want to wake up in the morning and choose to do something meaningful. As Chancellor, I would choose to be like Mike, Ken and Bill: I want to help everyone here to fulfil their dreams.

Help me build an inclusive future for all our students and truly unlock their full potential by backing me in the race. Voting begins on 9th July!

Bullying

Let's talk about bullying. While we like to think it is confined to playgrounds, it remains rampant in adult life, even in places like the University of Cambridge.

I've been asked numerous times recently about what I'd do about this as Chancellor. Here, I respond to Prof Wyn Evans and others who have reached out.

The message is simple: no more.

‘Beacon of Truth’ candidate Mark Mann announces UoC Chancellor race entry

Engineer turned social innovation leader pledges to keep Cambridge the world’s beacon of truth – and to turn that truth into action.

Dr Mark Mann, Cambridge graduate and academic, former BBC R&D technologist and the architect of Oxford’s pioneering social venture spinout programme, today announced that he will stand for election as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.

“If scientific theory and research are the core components of truth, then innovation is that truth in action,“ said Dr Mann.

“Only action will counter misinformation and demonstrate to society the value of truth and where you find it, in our universities. As Chancellor, I will empower Cambridge’s brilliant minds into action that will shape our world for the better. I will champion our cause to bring in partners who share our vision of positive impact through innovation, and to burn the beacon of truth brighter than ever before.”

From a state school background in Yorkshire, Mann read Natural Sciences at Pembroke College (1999) and completed a PhD in Engineering in 2008. He went on to translate research into broadcasting innovation at the BBC before joining Oxford University Innovation, where he created the University’s first social purpose spinouts and co founded ImpactU, an organisation backing mission driven ventures across the UK – including Cambridge.

If elected, Dr Mann says he will use the influence conferred by the role to:
• Defend truth and open debate – advocating for academic freedom and policies that reward rigour, evidence, transparency and integrity.
• Enable Cambridge innovators – expanding early stage funds and support and simplifying processes so that any student or researcher, in any discipline, can turn ideas into companies, social enterprises, charities, partnerships or public policy solutions.
• Champion Cambridge globally – using the convening power of the Chancellor’s ceremonial role to unite alumni, industry and governments in supporting the University’s values of discovery, integrity and inclusive excellence.

Turnout from the University’s electorate in 2011 was under two per cent and in-person only. With a switch to hybrid voting enabling a far higher potential turnout, the race to become Chancellor is wide open. Mann’s campaign therefore will not only speak to the heart of the University, but our vast global network of trailblazers and changemakers and will empower them to ensure Cambridge remains an institution that stands for truth, makes a positive impact with that truth, and the advancement of humankind.

What makes Cambridge great is the people who study, research and work here and their relentless pursuit of truth. When that truth is used by society, it changes people’s lives for the better.

But today, truth is under threat. With the spread of misinformation and political and ideological pressures clouding public understanding, society needs its institutions, now more than ever, to be beacons of truth and to do everything in their power to get that truth out.

I first came to Cambridge as a state-school student in 1999, leaving 11 years later after a PhD and research career in Engineering combined with a lifelong commitment to turn brilliant ideas into real-world solutions. At the BBC, I translated cutting-edge research into broadcasting innovation. Later, at the University of Oxford, I launched the University’s first research-based social ventures, showing how academic research—across sciences, humanities, and arts—can tackle real societal challenges, from poverty to climate change. With ImpactU, I brought Cambridge, Oxford, and ten other universities together to combine and grow resources to accelerate mission-driven ventures, demonstrating what’s possible when we combine our truths with real-world action. I now work building capacity for successful knowledge transfer from universities across the UK and Europe.

What my journey taught me is that if scientific theory and research are the core components of truth, then innovation is that truth in action. Therefore, my vision for Cambridge is a simple one: we will burn the beacon of truth brighter than ever before, and our innovation and impact will be the vehicle that carries our light into the world. In the role I will champion Cambridge’s values, amplify our voice, and actively work to help grow existing pathways and create new ones for innovation to flourish.

If elected, I pledge to:
• Defend truth and open debate – advocating for academic freedom and policies that reward rigour, evidence, transparency and integrity.
• Enable Cambridge innovators – expanding early stage funds and support and simplifying processes so that any student or researcher, in any discipline, can turn ideas into companies, social enterprises, charities, partnerships or public policy solutions.
• Champion Cambridge globally – using the convening power of the Chancellor’s ceremonial role to unite alumni, industry and governments in supporting the University’s values of discovery, integrity and inclusive excellence.

This election matters. At a time when truth itself needs guardians, Cambridge must remain both the compass and the catalyst that society relies upon. Every vote makes a difference.

Join me in protecting Cambridge’s legacy, shaping its future, and reaffirming our commitment to truth, integrity, and world-shaping impact.