The Next Leap

Thierry Heles

A researcher makes a promising discovery in a lab – a discovery like warfarin, the covid vaccine, or a way to build quantum computers. What happens next decides whether the idea ever reaches a patient, a factory or a customer. **The Next Leap** is about that stretch of work, the part between a promising result and a company. Thierry Heles talks with the people who make those calls: tech transfer officers who decide which inventions get a full patent filing and which are dropped, venture fund managers who explain why a brilliant researcher still gets turned down for funding, founders who describe the licensing clause that nearly killed their deal, and lawyers who sort out who owns an idea when a government grant, a corporate, and a researcher all had a hand in it. Each conversation focuses on the decisions themselves: what evidence convinced someone to invest, what mistake cost a team a year, and what the people who got it right did differently. You won’t get a lecture on t