No Time for the Academic Entrepreneur
Anthony Rodriguez3/30/10Comments (9)
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that their ideas have merit and are fundable from the very beginning of their career. Typically, a university position is not awarded until funding is secured by the candidate in one form or another. In the first few years, they must budget their funds to fill that lab space with research equipment and a work force to begin moving their ideas forward. Many professors have to spend their first few years still doing bench work while they work towards building a suitable research staff. During this time, they also begin searching for a new round of funding. Grants turn over every four to five years but many savvy professors stagger multiple cash infusions to occur every two years to provide a level of security. That means they are continuously writing grants and seeking funding throughout their career.
Funding agencies use grant applications like most investors might use a business plan to determine if the scientist can produce a healthy return on that investment. While the business world projects potential revenue streams to evaluate the return on investment, funding agencies primarily value knowledge generation and dissemination in the form of peer reviewed publications. Investors will evaluate several factors such as the market the core technology is addressing, as well as the quality of the management team.
Funding agencies for academic research are no different except the core technology and the team is one in the same. In a sense, the mind of the professor is the core technology that will generate the revenue of the lab in the form of new knowledge and publications. The funding agencies will evaluate the grant application based upon the CV of the lead researchers involved, the relevant publications produced by the team and a plan for addressing the specific goals of the work. The professor, to be successful, must keep their mind highly trained, current and recognized by other peers as high quality in order for it to establish a competitive advantage over other researchers seeking funding to address similar questions. This requires frequent appearences speaking at different conferences and universities and continually read the latest works of their peers, or as the business world would define them: competitors.
Unlike a CEO, the professor must do all of this while performing essentially a second profession: teaching. Preparing college level lectures is highly time consuming and does not involve a simple textbook and a worksheet that we were accustomed to seeing in today’s high schools. They are expected to perform above and beyond that level, yet they are not formally trained to do so. Graduate school does not offer any direct classroom management or lesson plan preparation courses. So during that first few years when a professor is scrambling to establish a regular source of funding, produce publications, and build their name in their field, they must also learn how to be an educator. Beyond the classroom, professors also are required to participate on departmental, graduate examination and even national funding review committees. Many professors will even do contract consulting on top of all this work to supplement their limited income. The phrase ‘stretched thin’ does not seem to cut it here.
It is asking too much of a professor to expect them to perform these essential tasks of their appointed academic position and conduct the necessary due diligence required to generate momentum for starting a company as well. Despite the difficulties of initiating a startup from a university lab, many still find ways to overcome these obstacles. The entrepreneurial nature of some professors drives them to design their research efforts to lead to a commercial product. The success stories of academic translational work typically involves a professor who either leaves their position at the university or hands off their ideas … Next Page »
Anthony Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in bioengineering at the the University of Washington, and the president emeritus of the Student Engineering Business Association at UW.
Rick LeFaivre
3/30/10 12:57 pm
Great article, Anthony. As a former professor, industry R&D executive, VC and on-campus business advisor, I can attest that this is a non-trivial process. It takes a strong partnership between entrepreneurial faculty members or students and more business-focused professionals who understand marketplaces and market dynamics. When it all comes together, it can be magic.
The UW Center for Commercialization is putting a lot of energy into teaming up faculty with entrepreneurial business professionals to increase the number and quality of our spin-out companies. It’s an exciting time around here!
Joe Brewer
4/1/10 10:30 pm
Hey Anthony,
Thanks for bringing this important topic up. If you aren’t familiar already, you might like to read Judy Estrin’s book, Closing The Innovation Gap: Re-Igniting the Spark of Creativity in the Global Economy. She masterfully explores the entrepreneurial nature of the academic research world throughout the last half century.
Of particular note is the convergence of trends in U.S. institutions that undermines innovation and stifles the very entrepreneurial spirit you describe here. Judy’s book tells this story throughout.
We have to make wise investments in our innovation infrastructure and shape it according to sound principles – including the provision of space for long-term, open ended basic research that feeds technology developments and applications in other sectors of the ecosystem. Many of the vital supports of the U.S. system have been weakened or removed in recent decades.
Such vital infrastructure must be wisely re-invested and rebuilt.
Best,
Joe Brewer
Project Coordinator
Seattle Innovators
Janis Machala
4/4/10 10:40 pm
Anthony:
I love that you, as a PhD student, think about these things and are so insightful about the challenges that your professors face in their running of labs and teaching undergraduate and graduate students as well as mentoring graduate students. It’s amazing that any faculty member is able to see their inventions come into the commercial realm. It’s a long path, and not a straight path, from lab bench to market. Having more serial entrepreneurs tied into the efforts in commercialization can help augment the inventor’s time and smarts. I am glad we’re making a lot of progress in bringing together the outside world of business people and commercialization experts with university innovators.
Guillermo Garza Milling
4/6/10 6:05 pm
About your initial question.
Entrepreneur is not a matter of academic doses, is an evolutionary methodology, far away of the content driven classes.
Standard Incubators and BA models, are out of phase with the total entrepreneur cycle.
Ask Technology people in the Industry to feed the Scientific at the Academia and value their participation.
Experience or at least observation is part of the scientific method.
If Academia are doing so well as Industry does, think about working one by one, with a strong feedback practice.
Why not interchage works for a month or two.
There is a huge potential working together.
Jeff Chamberlain
4/12/10 4:41 am
Anthony, you’ve done a great job describing the primary difficulty faced by entrepreneurial-minded professors in translating discoveries in the lab into commercial products — there often is just not enough time to establish and maintain a successful academic lab and see that promising technologies find commercial applications. I also think it’s important to bring up the desired outcome that the funding agencies have in mind when dispensing the grant money. The majority of funding that professors have available to them is for supporting basic research, whereas only a small fraction of the available money goes towards translational science where the intended outcome is a commercial product. It seems to me that if more money was dedicated to the latter situation, and professors had commercial products as their deliverable, the time spent running a research lab would include effort to translate bench-work to applications. More startups would be generated because they would be starting with an actual product, for which much of the testing and trouble-shooting had already been taken care of, thus allowing the startups to focus on the business aspects of commercialization instead of the time- and money-intensive research. I realize that this is a somewhat naive and obvious observation but, ultimately, research and industry alike follow the money.
Joe Brewer
4/12/10 11:05 am
Jeff,
You hit on a key distinction in Judy Estrin’s model of innovation. She describes a healthy innovation ecosystem as comprised of vibrant activities in three areas:
1. Research
2. Development
3. Application
If any of these three areas is inadequately supported (or the “bridge people” between them are absent), there will not be a flow of ideas from basic research to innovative application.
It may not be the best place for research scientists in academia (or their corollaries in corporate research labs) to do both basic research and development, but both need to be present in order for innovations to happen across the academia-industry divide.
Anthony Rodriguez
4/14/10 1:17 pm
Thank you all for the comments. Jeff and Joe both had great observations. There is a process to innovation that needs money for it be executed. Each step to the process (Research, Development and Application) takes specific types of talents that do not necessarily overlap. But as Jeff said, people “follow the money.” Which is NOT necessarily a greed issue. It is an issue of acquiring the fuel to allow a person to follow their passions. So I think bridging the gap comes down to funding agencies scrutinizing the goals of their investments and setting up the necessary criteria for securing funding to motivate researchers reach the agencies goals. Also, I think for academia it comes down to individual departments identifying their goals and motivating their professors with carrots such as tenure to help them meet those goals. I do not think we should expect a commercial product from an academic lab as Jeff suggested. Time, resources, expertise are all large issues hindering that practice. But if academia can funnel some of the basic research to a point of initiating development, that would be a good head start for any entrepreneurial spin out.
Jonathan Jewell
10/31/10 6:40 am
Hi Anthony,
Interesting article here I think, from the perspective of a writer who is an entrepreneur from the commercial rather than academic sector. I pointed out your article on his blog and I can see that he’s commented on it now.
http://bravethinkers.wordpress.com/2010/10/30/the-hitch-hikers-guide-to-entrepreneurship-an-introduction/
I’d be interested in his thoughts and perceptions on the way in which academics follow lines of inquiry.