Director of Innovation
Queen’s University Belfast
Brian McCaul is the Director of Innovation at Queen’s University Belfast (which has been ranked as the most entrepreneurial university in the UK for a number of years), along with being the CEO of Qubis Ltd, which is Queen’s commercialisation arm. Brian has worked in technology transfer and innovation space for the last 30 years, both within the private and higher education sectors. Before joining Queen’s he was a co-founder of an innovation software company based in the UK and the Netherlands, during which he established the Innovation Commons, a community of university TTOs using a shared approach, and platform, to increase external entrepreneurial involvement in early-stage projects. Before that he was co-owner of an aerospace manufacturing business based in the UK and Poland. Brian has been advocate of collaborative, crowd and open innovation approaches to increasing tech transfer capability and now leads a series of Customer-discovery programmes focused on using data driven entrepreneurship to helping early-stage founders find evidence of 'product/market-fit.