By Shera Dalin
Washington University and the University of Missouri-Columbia are experimenting with turning scientists into CEOs thanks to a National Science Foundation grant.
The universities are training seven post-doctoral graduates in the mechanics of business to foster either new companies or help bring university research into the marketplace. The fellows are about halfway through their 13-month stints with the universities and are doing well, says Ken Harrington, managing director of the Skandalaris Entrepreneurship Center at Washington University.
“The goal is trying to contribute not just here, but nationally to the process of innovation between universities and industry in business and science,” he says. “The role of the fellows is to participate in the process to see if they can fill some gaps and, in the process, become very well educated themselves and then participate in the process. It’s a dual commitment.”
The National Science Foundation provided a $600,000 Innovation for Acceleration grant to the universities to conduct the two-year research program. But the programs are being executed in different ways to test how each process works.
At WashU, the three fellows (Amit Kumar, Justin Brown and Kunal Rehani) have been getting basic business education since they came aboard Oct. 1. As they develop business skills, they are given projects to work with aimed at bringing university research into commercial use. At the same time, they are interacting with the university’s Office of Technology Management as well as a group of 30 mentors from the community. Those mentors range from veteran entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, lawyers and CPAs among others.
“They are paired with a project leader and are involved in due diligence and supporting folks,” Harrington says. “Some are beginning to work on some interesting stuff.”
The key is to discover at what point the scientists should enter the process to be most effective—when an invention/process is disclosed by the researcher, once the commercialization research has begun or at some other point in development.
“Our feeling is that these people can be additive to that process and that entrepreneurial catalytic activity can give the researcher a path to follow,” Harrington says.
By comparison, the Biodesign and Innovation program at Mizzou is modeled after Stanford University’s Stanford Biodesign Group and includes doctors, engineers and business people. It is focused on a particular area of development: surgery. The fellows (Rebecca Rone, and Drs. Anthony Harris and Jonathan R. Thompson) get less formal business training. Rather, they talk to surgeons, nurses and other medical personnel to find out what obstacles or problems need to be solved in the surgical suite.
The fellows then convene a brown bag lunch meeting with various university researchers who may be able to help them solve the problems they uncover, add expertise in a particular discipline such as bio-engineering or suggest other colleagues who are even better suited to the challenge at hand.
“They are more into data mining in a very specific area to see if they can conceptualize the idea to see if it is patentable or to turn it into a company,” Harrington says.
On one project, the fellows may generate 250 ideas to solve a problem. After discussions on business viability, talking with experts about a host of other production or scientific issues, they winnow the list to six or seven possibilities. Fellows are investigating hernia repair surgery, and detection and study of metastatic cancer cells in human blood.
The Mizzou fellows also meet with professionals in the biodesign field to discuss knowledge in particular expert areas during a lecture series. Those experts include angel investors, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and serial inventors.
“They are trying to pick a winning idea and develop an invention that is sellable,” Harrington says.
