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Translational Research: Getting the message across, http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080611/full/453839a.html#close |
Eric Kaler, the president of the University of Minnesota, was a coauthor on a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article titled, “Changing the academic culture: Valuing patents and commercialization toward tenure and career advancement.” The piece argues the following benefits for a university that generates a lot of basic research to also promote commercialization:
- Increased Opportunities for Research Funding (not just from federal agencies, but also from industry, foundations and alumni)
- Access to Unrestricted Funds for Further Institutional Investment (i.e. licensing royalties)
- Sustains High Scholarship Level (perhaps counterintuitively, the more a faculty researcher partners with industry, the more he or she publishes in high-impact journals, and the more those papers are cited)
- Student Success (real-life research opportunities at all levels; increased career options for doctoral students and post-docs)
- Increased Prestige (commercialization = knowledge dissemination = public recognition)
- Public Benefit (make those innovations available to society)
- Economic Development (jobs, jobs, jobs – especially important for public universities)
Let’s say that
academics buy into this argument. Then
what? Where does someone who has spent
decades developing deep expertise as a researcher even start? This is where academic
commercialization education programs, like the NSF-funded National Innovation Corps, come in.
The I-Corps got
started when Errol
Arkilic, a program director at the NSF realized the power of Lean LaunchPad
methodology to move innovations out of the lab and into marketplace, and
contacted Steve Blank, one the major evangelizers of the Lean LaunchPad (aka
Lean Startup or Lean Innovation) approach.
Steve has a nice podcast about those early conversations. The first National Innovation
Corps cohort
was run through the Lean LaunchPad paces in Fall 2011. Since that early success five years ago, the
National Innovation Corps (NIN) has expanded to over 40 major universities
around the US, offering various flavors of Lean Startup curricula and support.
The whole point
of Lean LaunchPad is to go out and talk to customers, but this is easier said
than done. There is a methodology to
customer discovery, value proposition design and business model design. The NIN is not a passive curriculum (just
reading The Lean Startup on an airplane is not going to
cut it), but an immersion experience, where teams apply concepts to their
specific projects in order to move them forward.
- At the national and regional levels, seven universities act as “nodes,” providing10-week experiential training to entrepreneurial teams composed of an entrepreneurial lead (typically a grad student or post-doc), a principal investigator (faculty), and a mentor (an experienced entrepreneur). This intense immersion program not only provides information about such topics as customer discovery and the business model canvas, but – more importantly – forces teams to go out and speak to LOTS of customers (100 is the goal) in order to (in)validate their value proposition hypotheses.
- At the local level, 36 universities currently act as “sites,” with a wide variety of Lean LaunchPad-inspired offerings. The sites develop skills at the local level and also feed teams to the node programs. But, more importantly, they adapt to local conditions and spread the Lean LaunchPad mindset and skill set across their institutions, as well as their broader educational and business communities.
Here is a directory
of current National I-Corps nodes and sites.
Here at the
University of Minnesota, our MIN-Corps program accelerates commercialization through
four touch-points:
-- Awareness
building
- Bootcamps - What does commercialization even
entail? A one-day bootcamp to expose
faculty, research staff, grad students and industry partners to key concepts,
processes and considerations. This
spring, we’ll be doing bootcamps on Medical Technology Commercialization, and Environmental
Tech & Biotechnology Commercialization
- Emerging Opportunities Forum
– What are the commercialization implications of breakthrough research? An opportunity for academics and business
people to explore new themes
-- Skills
development
-
Our STARTUP course is the classic LeanStartup curriculum, but with an
extra layer of external advisors and mentors.
This rigorous and intense semester-long program is focused on students
on the undergrad and graduate level, with the occasional participation of
post-docs and faculty
-
Value Proposition Design Workshops are our version of “Lean LaunchPad
Lite.” Primarily focused at faculty, as
well as the post-docs and grad students working on commercialization research
within their labs. This spring, we’ll be
doing workshop series on Medical Technology Commercialization and Environmental
Tech & Biotechnology Commercialization
-- Connections
-
In all our programs, we bring in external advisors and mentors. These experts challenge our participants’
assumptions and help them make customer connections to vet their value
propositions. They also may help with the
initial steps to launch their ventures. The experts are sourced from multiple
sources, including the mentors and judges who support the Minnesota Cup venture
competition, as well as the business advisory group of the Venture Center
at the UMN Office for Technology Commercialization.
-- Ongoing
support
- We’re now formalizing something
that we’ve done informally for a long time – providing advice and connections
to past program participants. The
business concepts that come out of the U of M are often very ambitious, and may
take months or years to get off the ground.
Ongoing Strategy Clinics are monthly meetings for past program
participants who are actively working on commercialization to continue to build
knowledge and connections, gain new insights, and do mutual problem-solving.
See the MIN-Corps site for more info on our
programs.
