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!

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.

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.

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.