Jim Shaikh appointed Managing Director of Innovate Surrey Ltd

Dr Jim Shaikh has been appointed as the Managing Director of Innovate Surrey Ltd and will now be responsible for leading the commercialisation of the University's research innovation activity – supporting academics to leverage their intellectual property through licensing and the development of spin-outs, spin-ins, start-ups, and scale-ups. He joins Surrey from Imperial College, London, where he is Head of the Greenhouse at Undaunted – the innovation arm of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment. 

An engineer by trade, Dr Shaikh combines academic expertise with hands-on entrepreneurial and industrial experience. After earning a PhD in Fluid Mechanics at Cambridge University, he held academic roles at Queen Mary University of London before joining BMW in the UK and Germany. He later built a virtual product design business within a consultancy, which sparked his passion for entrepreneurship. This led to an MBA at London Business School and a 15-year career running and scaling technology businesses, including inventing, patenting and manufacturing a novel consumer product range and scaling the business prior to an eventual sale. Most recently, including in his current role at Imperial, he has focused on commercialising university intellectual property and accelerating the progress of early-stage technology start-ups. 

At Surrey, Dr Shaikh's work will build on the University's long-standing tradition of commercial innovation driven by its research excellence. This legacy includes the enormously successful spin-out of Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL), as well as other spin-outs in diverse fields such as advanced nanotechnologies, people-centred AI, and health diagnostic technologies. 

Innovate Surrey Ltd provides the commercial engine to transform Surrey's academic research into economic growth potential. The resultant spin-outs, scale-ups and other commercial entities will receive ongoing support through the Surrey Innovation District, which takes in our Surrey Research Park, our incubation and acceleration activities, and the co-ordinating and partnering roles we play in regional innovation clusters and the wider innovation ecosystem.