Building Strong Industry Academic Partnerships with Mark Fairey
About this episode
Mark Fairey discusses the importance of building strong industry-academic partnerships and the process of turning academic discoveries into scalable products.
Some of the most meaningful industry–academic partnerships don’t begin with a breakthrough headline or a flashy piece of technology. More often, they take shape around a real research need, a practical solution, and a willingness to keep showing up and working through the details over time. That’s the kind of collaboration we’re exploring here, including how ideas move from early-stage science into something researchers can actually use, and what it takes to make those relationships last. My guest today is Mark Fairey, Senior Licensing Manager at STEMCELL Technologies, Canada’s largest biotech company known for its high-quality reagents, instruments, and tools used by life science researchers around the world. Mark has spent two decades at STEMCELL, moving through roles in R&D, scientific sales, business operations, and now licensing and business development. That range of experience gives him a grounded, practical perspective on what it really takes to turn academic discoveries into reliable, scalable products, and why the strongest partnerships often start long before anything is ready for market. We talk about what actually bridges the gap between a promising idea in the…
Keywords
- STEMCELL Technologies
- licensing
- business development
- life science research
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