Bernard is a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM), University of Cambridge, supervised by Professor Chander Velu. He is a member of Emmanuel College and Hughes Hall.

Research Interests

His PhD investigates how deep-tech spin-outs build viable pathways from university research to commercial scale. Cambridge and Oxford anchor the UK's most concentrated corridor of science-led enterprise, yet the process by which ventures in this environment translate early-stage science into scalable businesses remains poorly understood, particularly when the technology, the product architecture, and the market are all still forming.

Working from contemporaneous archival records of Cambridge ventures, his research traces how founders make consequential decisions under these conditions: when to reconfigure a technical approach, how to protect and position emerging intellectual property, and what determines whether a change of direction builds toward something or disperses effort. The aim is a process model that connects adaptive action within individual episodes of venture development to the longer trajectory that emerges across them, distinguishing productive reconfiguration from strategic drift.

The work has practical implications for founders, investors, and technology-transfer offices seeking to evaluate pivots in real time, and for policymakers working to strengthen the pipeline from research to enterprise within the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor.

Background

He holds an MPhil in Technology Policy from Cambridge Judge Business School and a BSc in Politics and Economics from the London School of Economics. Before joining the IfM, he worked with Rolls-Royce Future Programmes on digital transformation and with Amazon in operations and development.

He is involved in Cambridge's innovation ecosystem through Cambridge Enterprise and programmes supporting university commercialisation.