A group of about 40 Taiwanese businessmen and scientists, who were in the U.S. to learn about how best to commercialize technologies from the lab, were treated last Thursday to a University of Washington panel of three veterans of the process, who shared their experiences and the lessons they’ve learned.

The panel consisted of serial entrepreneur and cleantech consultant Jeff Canin, neurological surgery and pediatric dentistry professor Pierre Mourad, and bioengineering professor Buddy Ratner. All three have been involved in several companies spun out of technology developed at UW, ranging from designing ultrasound toothbrushes to reprogramming skin cells into cells that can rebuild a heart after a heart attack, to improving how long beer can be stored without going bad (”one of the most important industries on this planet,” Ratner asserted).

Here were my Top 10 takeaways from the panel, which was moderated by Janis Machala of UW TechTransfer.

10. Bringing together money, talented managers, and good engineers is difficult.

9. Some of the stereotypes of scientists and business people have an unfortunate basis in truth. Ratner pointed out that many scientists can be tremendously naive, and often don’t realize that the technology they have is not a product—and that a lot has to be done to bridge that gap.

8. Mourad said (and the other panelists agreed) that the most important element to a successful company is the relationships between all the people involved. Citing the company that spun out of the ultrasound toothbrush technology, he said that even though the company raised about $23 million, infighting between management and the board destroyed the technologically very sound company.

7. Mourad cautioned that even though business people have all the money, “Treat tech people nicely,” to succeed.

6. Canin said that to be a good entrepreneur, a scientist or engineer must have a lot of …Next Page »

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Connie Bourassa-Shaw has been the director of the University of Washington’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) in the Foster School of Business for just three years. But her ties to the UW go back to 1987, when she was a writer for the UW economic and business magazine, Pacific Northwest Executive. She has played various roles in the UW business scene since then, including director of communications at the business school and executive director of the Program for Innovation and Entrepreneurship—a program for business school students only that Bourassa-Shaw later developed into the CIE, which serves students from all disciplines.

After a brief stint away from the university as the executive director of the Northwest Entrepreneur Network, Bourassa-Shaw returned in 2006 to head the CIE. I called her up to find out more about her thoughts on UW’s take on business, how her center helps academics find their way in the commercial world, and what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. Despite the dismal economy, which has impacted the CIE directly (she has had to put plans for new programs on hold due to budget constraints), Bourassa-Shaw remains optimistic that Seattle will continue to grow as a hub for startups.

The following is an edited version of our conversation.

Xconomy: What is the role of the CIE at UW?

Connie Bourassa-Shaw: We do all entrepreneurship, all the time. We are really trying to instill entrepreneurship into the fabric of the University of Washington, so that any student, any faculty member, any staff member who is interested in entrepreneurship can take classes, participate in activities, find the resources they need to do a startup, which include broad accessibility to the entrepreneurial community. We have very strong inroads into the community at large, both the venture capital and angel side, the equity side, and entrepreneur side. Serial entrepreneurs who understand the process from one end to the other can be a resource in terms of being a mentor or a coach.

We provide a special program for faculty, who are different from students doing our entrepreneurship curriculum. I work closely with TechTransfer, because that’s where any faculty or student has to go if they are working on something with commercial potential.

X: What are the student programs, and where do they fit into the Seattle innovation scene?

CB-S: We provide a curriculum for students. We have about 700 MBAs, and 88 percent of those take at least one class in entrepreneurship. I get asked the question a lot, how can you teach someone to be an entrepreneur? My sense is that you can’t turn anyone into an entrepreneur. But there is a type of person who is destined to be an entrepreneur. I usually say it’s a genetic defect. For those people …Next Page »

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San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders has referred to SPAWAR, the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, as one of the city’s best kept secrets, and I started to understand why during a presentation yesterday at San Diego’s Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center.

SPAWAR is a major Navy procurement agency, with a total budget of more than $2.4 billion in fiscal 2008. About 65 percent of that supports industry partnerships, which includes spending to acquire a host of hardware and software technologies needed for what the Navy calls C4ISR, Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaisance. Naturally, the Navy keeps most of this technology under wraps—literally. When maintenance crews work on U.S. warships at the Navy base here, they often wrap up parts of the superstructure before servicing the radar and other electronics.

So a presentation yesterday by Frank Gordon, who heads SPAWAR’s navigation and applied sciences department, represented an unusual opportunity to lift the veil of secrecy that surrounds the Navy labs on Point Loma. SPAWAR is an enormous organization, with more than 6,300 civilian, military, and contract workers just at its San Diego headquarters, and local spending of almost $991 million on procurement contracts and R&D programs, according to the latest data available at SPAWAR’s web site. Gordon says that at any given time, SPAWAR is overseeing more than 800 technology development programs in San Diego.

About 100 people attended the session, which was sponsored by Connect, the San Diego nonprofit group that promotes innovation and entrepreneurship. Connect was founded at UC San Diego in 1985 as a resource for academic researchers who wanted to start technology-based companies based on their laboratory breakthroughs. At SPAWAR’s government lab in San Diego, scientists also spin out new companies and technologies, said Jim Fallin, a spokesman for SPAWAR Systems Center.

Gordon, who is nicknamed “Dr. Chaos” because of his love of nonlinear dynamics, highlighted some of the advanced technologies that SPAWAR is developing for …Next Page »

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It’s been three months since Janis Machala took the helm of LaunchPad, the University of Washington’s support service for UW spinoffs. Her charge: to grow the service into a world-class entrepreneurial assistance program, and to promote the creation of new startups based on university research. I recently dropped in on Machala, a former tech executive and the founder of Paladin Partners, to see how her experience has been so far.

LaunchPad has just started a couple of new initiatives, she told me, including an “entrepreneur advisor” program that Rachel wrote about last week. For that program, Machala says she has signed up about 15 seasoned entrepreneurs in the Seattle area—Joe Eichinger of Redmond, WA-based CoAptus Medical and John Hansen, formerly of Bellevue, WA-based Vallent among them—to volunteer their time and mentor UW faculty and researchers on the ins and outs of starting companies. Another new LaunchPad thrust is an internship program whereby MBA students at the UW’s Foster School of Business team up with faculty entrepreneurs to work on market development plans. (More on that soon.)

It sounds like a very busy time. Machala says she’s currently tracking about 40 company prospects at the UW. They range from faculty members who have said they want to start a company to full-fledged business plans and management teams. “I’m incredibly enthused by all the entrepreneurial activity,” Machala says. “It’s far greater than I initially thought it was. What’s clear to me is the lack of business talent to drive it forward.” Almost every plan she reviews these days needs a qualified CEO, she says, and they’re tough to find.

Why is that? “Researchers hang out in their labs, and engineers don’t network,” Machala says. “They didn’t know how to get out there and engage….Anything we can do to help them leverage their time and bridge the gap, we do.”

As for her experience at the UW TechTransfer department so far, Machala says, “I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the lack of bureaucracy. My biggest fear was that it’s such a big organization, it would have lots of impediments. People have been very open, and very engaged in entrepreneurship. I haven’t felt the resistance I expected. The support is top-down.”

More broadly, I asked Machala about her philosophy on starting technology companies, especially from within an academic institution. “A startup needs three basic elements,” she says—a management team, financing, and market research and development. That all assumes the technology is strong, she adds. (Which usually isn’t the issue for UW startups.)

So where will the next Amazon or Google come from around here? If Machala knows, she’s not letting on. But she points to the wireless sector, including mobile software and devices, as particularly fertile ground—and a technology cluster in which the Seattle area is particularly strong. Of course, the aim of LaunchPad would be that whatever field the next big winner is in, it will come from the UW.

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The University of Washington’s TechTransfer department has launched a new program over the last four months that brings local entrepreneurs into the university to help academic researchers in the early stages of starting a company. This program, which is part of UW’s startup-support service, LaunchPad, matches volunteer entrepreneurs with faculty and other researchers interested in learning what it takes to build a successful company. (Xconomy previously wrote about LaunchPad here.)

Unlike more traditional entrepreneurs-in-residence programs (which UW also has), where entrepreneurs come in later in the game to help shape a particular company and often take on the role of CEO in that company, these new advisors will help with a range of projects well before they’re at the startup point.

Janis Machala, the director of LaunchPad since November, is spearheading the new program, which is being formalized this month. The experts she’s bringing in are tentatively being called LaunchPad “entrepreneur advisors.”

“Vetting research early with industry, with people who have had to go through the funding process, with people who have had to pitch their deals to strategic investors, will help give the researchers a sense of the reality of what it takes to make something translated into the commercial world,” Machala said in an interview. “This is really about trying to narrow that gap between the lab and the commercial.”

To find these expert advisors, Machala looks to her extensive network of local contacts. She just came to UW from an extensive background in the startup world, most recently from Paladin Partners, a Kirkland-based consulting firm for startups she founded in 1995. Machala keeps her ear to the ground for news of senior executives going through some kind of transition—retirement, company mergers, and so forth—someone who would have some spare time to volunteer with the researchers.

“People are really excited about this program and the idea that they can help in a meaningful way,” Machala said. And it helps that she is only asking for their time and not a check, she added. “So many of these people are being pitched to be an angel or to be on a board. They don’t have to have a formal relationship here.”

Jeff Canin, a local serial entrepreneur and consultant specializing in clean technology, just started as one of the entrepreneurial advisors last week. One of his first orders of business will be helping some UW researchers start a company around new solar cell technologies. Starting a successful cleantech company is not so different from any other successful startup, Canin said. “You have to have a differentiating solution to a large problem,” he said. “Often one finds a researcher or a technologist may have a grand idea, but it doesn’t serve a specific market.”

Among other advisors recently signed on at UW are Chris Porter, formerly of Cellpro and Pfizer; Joe Eichinger, co-founder and president of Redmond-based CoAptus Medical; Michael Hovanes, a serial entrepreneur in medical devices and imaging; and John Hansen, the former CEO of Bellevue-based Vallent (acquired by IBM in 2006). We’ll be keeping an eye out to see what impact this distinguished group has on the UW startup community.

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Why can’t big companies invent? How should inventors handle their intellectual property? And what are countries around the world doing on these fronts? I recently stopped by Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, WA, to get the scoop from Patrick Ennis, IV’s global head of technology. Ennis was a venture capitalist with Arch Venture Partners in Seattle for 10 years before taking his current post in early 2008. (Between jobs, he took some time off and, among other things, chopped wood full-time for a week.)

Back in October, Xconomy reported that Ennis is heading up Intellectual Ventures’ expansion in China, Japan, Korea, India, and Singapore. The invention company, which is led by founders Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung, currently has some $5 billion under management, 450-plus employees, and 160 university partnerships around the world. I wanted to get a deeper sense of Ennis’s philosophies on invention and intellectual property on a global scale.

Ennis organized his thoughts loosely around a talk he gave last month at the Ready To Commercialize 2008 conference, run by the Office of Technology Commercialization at the University of Texas (which happened to be IV’s 100th university partner). In Austin, he spoke on game-changing approaches to commercializing inventions. The conversation we had over lunch in Bellevue was free-flowing and touched on everything from anatomy and antibiotics to Sumerian culture and the Renaissance.

I was particularly intrigued by Ennis’s take on the current state of global competition and its historical context. “It’s a complicated world,” he said. “Leonardo da Vinci could do what he did because the world was not as complicated. Leonardo could not be a Renaissance person today—there’s too much to know.”

A few more highlights from Ennis, in his own words:

—On doing business at Intellectual Ventures: “We want to create a market for invention. We want to reward inventors, perfect the process of invention, and make invention respectable…We don’t ask for exclusive deal sourcing agreements, we like to earn our business a deal at a time, the old-fashioned way. All organizations, if they succeed, have to fight the hubris thing. You see that with all big companies. IBM had it, Microsoft had it, and Google, quicker than any other startup, got it. It’s amazing how the hubris seeped into Google real quick. And the backlash is coming—you see it in the EU and, to a certain extent, in the States.”

“We’re a collection of individuals, and business is always done personally, one on one, whether you work for a 10-person company, or 450, or 4,000,” Ennis says. “That’s when companies lose their way, …Next Page »

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Two weeks ago, Xconomy broke the news of the Seattle startup EnerG2’s $8.5 million first-round venture deal with Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners and Palo Alto, CA-based Firelake Capital Management. Today, the energy storage and advanced materials company is officially announcing its approach and giving the story behind its financing. I had a chance to speak in-depth with EnerG2 chief executive Rick Luebbe and OVP venture partner Rick LeFaivre about the company, its strategy, and what it could mean for the future of cleantech ventures, particularly in the Northwest.

As we reported before, EnerG2’s technology originally comes from the University of Washington. It revolves around synthetic carbon powder and “nanocomposite” materials that have novel properties on the molecular scale, such that they are extremely efficient at storing various kinds of energy—electricity, natural gas, and hydrogen, to name a few. I wanted to find out more about how the technology works and how it will be commercialized (think better batteries for tools, vehicles, and mobile devices), but I also wanted to hear the deeper story about the ideas and motivations of the key players and how the deal came about.

The story goes back to 2003, when Luebbe and his business partner Chris Wheaton first got into the energy game. Luebbe had been the co-founder and CEO of the Seattle software firm Hubspan, while Wheaton had been vice president of North American operations at Silicon Valley-based Loudcloud (now part of Hewlett-Packard). “We got interested in energy storage because we recognized no matter which direction the energy economy went, storage would be a critical, critical component,” says Luebbe. And whether it was electrical storage or gas storage, local or mobile applications, the future was in energy. “I really enjoyed my previous career from a business perspective, but I didn’t have same passion I have for clean energy,” Luebbe adds.

Luebbe and Wheaton began looking for renewable energy technologies at the University of Washington that were practical and could be readily commercialized. “We weren’t interested in science projects,” says Luebbe. At the same time, they thought “the most practical way to enter the space was to find a technology that was a market changer,” he says. In other words, they had to swing for the fences. So they met with various department heads at the UW, and were introduced to Guozhong Cao, a professor in the materials science and engineering department, and his graduate student, Aaron Feaver. Cao and Feaver were focused on developing novel materials to generate and store energy. It was a good match.

The status quo in energy-storage technology, roughly speaking, is that you try different natural materials and see if they work. What Cao and Feaver did was use advanced nanotechnology and …Next Page »

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Microsoft announced today that it has helped launch an educational gaming startup called Sabi, which is based in Kirkland, WA. Sabi’s technology has its origins in Microsoft Research and was licensed through Microsoft’s IP Ventures program. The startup, led by Margaret Johnson, has launched its first interactive drawing and reading game, called ItzaBitza.

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Back in August, Luke sat down with the University of Washington’s incoming Vice Provost for Technology Transfer, Linden Rhoads. The serial tech entrepreneur talked about taking charge of the university’s tech transfer office, and how one of her top priorities was to meet with venture capitalists in the Northwest and in the San Francisco Bay Area, to let them know the UW is open for business.

Well, today she’s having lunch with Al Gore, who happens to be a venture partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (in addition to his advisory roles with Apple and Google, and just a few other commitments). Gore is in town for a fund-raiser with Governor Chris Gregoire. Rhoads, a longtime Democratic Party activist and contributor, will fill him in on the UW’s new College of the Environment, and the work the university has done on the state’s Cleantech Initiative. Joining them for lunch is Alvin Kwiram, professor emeritus of chemistry and former vice provost for research at the UW.

I learned about all this when I spoke with Rhoads this morning about her latest news, the hiring of Janis Machala to head up UW TechTransfer’s LaunchPad program to help UW researchers start new companies. Machala is the founder of Paladin Partners, was CEO of Pinnacle Publishing, and was a senior manager at Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Wang Laboratories. She had worked with Rhoads at ChiliSoft, which was acquired by Cobalt Networks in 2000. Rhoads calls her a “most respected mentor in the community.”

LaunchPad isn’t a new program, but Rhoads is clearly putting her stamp on it. Last summer, I spoke with Jim Roberts, LaunchPad’s business development officer, about its goals and achievements; he was half-time on it then, and he’s full-time now. Machala, who starts on November 1, is charged with working with all the UW’s licensing officers “to provide the best possible advice and help and networking for our researchers who have entrepreneurial plans,” says Rhoads, who’s an Xconomist.

Rhoads also talked about getting involved with researchers further upstream in the innovation pipeline. “We’re trying to be very proactive,” she says. Usually, a researcher discloses an invention, she says, and then tech transfer decides whether it’s marketable, or whether to start a company. “We want to get involved years before that point,” says Rhoads. “We want to help them meet the right members of the industry and investor community.” To that end, Machala will help start an entrepreneurs-in-residence program, whereby five or six entrepreneurs at a time are matched up with appropriate faculty members to give support and advice.

I asked Rhoads about her experience so far in meeting with venture capitalists (besides Gore). “They’re really excited about the opportunity,” she replied. “They need personnel within tech transfer who are very informed and knowledgable as to the investment profile that a given venture firm is interested in… We can’t just have them ‘walk the halls,’ we have to call them when there’s an opportunity.” When asked for any particularly supportive VC firms in town, Rhoads rattled off a list that included Arch Venture Partners, OVP, Benchmark Capital, Second Avenue Partners, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. She also mentioned WRF Capital, a venture organization with ties to the UW, which Luke recently profiled. “They’re trying to make money like any VC firm. Yet they have experience working with us. They’ll be an invaluable partner,” she said.

As for specific ways to make it easier for venture firms and others to work with UW TechTransfer, Rhoads gave the example that a firm may want to license an existing technology, but the contract will typically say that if the researchers (or their students) discover something new that’s related to the technology, the firm will have to come back and renegotiate a new license. “We’re trying to think less in terms of patents, and more in the project sense,” says Rhoads, suggesting that future licenses could cover work that’s still underway. “Nobody has to be the intellectual-property police.”

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Linden Rhoads is fired up. The high-tech entrepreneur-turned-university official has been circulating around town since she started on August 14 to lay the groundwork for a new era in technology transfer at the University of Washington. First on her calendar are meetings with all of the Northwest’s venture capital firms. When that’s done, she plans to make the rounds at the usual Monday portfolio meetings with VCs in the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s spreading the word that the UW’s doors are open.

“I want the reputation of the University of Washington to be that we’re excited about doing business with the investment community,” she said last week, in her first interview since starting the job. “If the UW can commercialize the research we do here, there’s a tremendous opportunity to bring tremendous revenue to the university, produce many, many jobs, and bring innovations into the world that can help people.”

It’s certainly no small task. The story of technology transfer hasn’t changed much in recent years. The UW conducted more than $1 billion worth of research in 2007, paid for mostly by Uncle Sam, charitable foundations, and corporations. It ranks second in federal research funding nationally behind Johns Hopkins University. Yet every year, it seems, the local business community complains that it’s a royal pain to spin out university inventions into new startups, or licenses that companies can develop into moneymaking, job-producing products. A recent report commissioned by the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association said the university has a culture that frowns on entrepreneurial activity.

So what is UW doing about it? That’s what I asked in an interview at 301 Gerberding Hall with Rhoads and the woman who hired her, the No. 2 official on campus, provost Phyllis Wise.

Wise made it clear she sees room for improvement in how the university spins out research into the marketplace: “We want to get our ideas out through patents, licenses, startups, or papers and grants. We realize the important role technology transfer can play. We want to make sure we’re taking advantage of every opportunity.”

So far, Rhoads, 41, said she’s been seeking input from lots of people off campus. She’s tapping her rolodex of VC contacts from her past career as an entrepreneur with ChiliSoft, Singingfish.com, AdRelevance, and others. She’s no biologist, so she’s spent some time getting to know key leaders in local life sciences, including Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology. She’s studying the massive breadth of what the UW has to offer in its research cupboard. She’s working on organizing evening symposia to help VCs mingle efficiently with UW researchers who might have projects with commercial potential. She’s working to get some of her staff of 50 to focus more on mentoring, motivating, and even “inspiring” faculty members to build companies around their ideas, Rhoads says.

“Some of our faculty don’t know they’re sitting on information that can be dispersed in more effective ways,” Wise added. …Next Page »

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I first heard of a Seattle startup called Voltan Biofuel two months ago, when I talked to Jim Roberts, head of business development at UW Tech Transfer’s LaunchPad, a program to promote university spinoffs. Voltan was a LaunchPad company that won $5,000 for “best cleantech idea” in UW’s 2008 CIE Business Plan competition. Yesterday the company announced its official launch under a new name, AXI, with seed funding from Allied Minds, an investment firm based in Quincy, MA.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Allied Minds typically invests a few hundred thousand dollars in each of its companies. As we’ve written about previously, Allied’s strategy is to fund very early-stage technology startups fresh out of academic labs—which VCs often avoid because such ventures are unproven. “What ends at the university is still too early for most investors,” says Roberts. “[Allied] fills a void there for us.”

I caught up with Roberts to hear more about the deal. More than a year ago, Roberts says, he first visited the lab of UW biology professor Rose Ann Cattolico. She was experimenting with new strains of algae that can produce large amounts of oil for biofuels. Not by genetic modification, but rather by using natural evolutionary processes that could potentially be scaled up to large operations. Given the skyrocketing interest in alternative fuels, Roberts immediately grasped the opportunity. “As soon as I saw it, I knew,” he says.

Through LaunchPad, Cattolico partnered with two UW M.B.A.s, Eric Gertsman and Carrie Stearns, and together they entered the business-plan competition. Although they didn’t win the grand prize, they placed well and learned a lot. Having filed a patent for the technology and formed the team, both through the university, the next step was to get an investor interested.

It turns out Allied Minds has a vice president based in Seattle. Erick Rabins has been involved with the local innovation community for years as an entrepreneur and now an investor. Roberts knew him, so he introduced Rabins to Cattolico. It proved a good fit. With Roberts negotiating the terms of the technology license and other parts of the agreement, the deal was done quickly. It’s the first between UW and Allied Minds, but probably not the last. “We hope to do business with them again,” says Roberts.

Roberts says AXI will be based in Washington and will grow oil-producing algae, though its exact business model is still to be determined. “Once we do the deal, we step out of the way,” he says. “But we’ll keep in touch, we’re very interested in how it’s doing… We’re very, very confident. The technology is very, very promising.”

Still, AXI will have plenty of competition in the algae-biofuel space, what with the likes of South San Francisco-based Solazyme, Cambridge, MA-based Greenfuel Technologies, and Naples, FL-based Algenol Biofuels, to name a few. But to Roberts, this is a good thing, as well as a challenge. “There’s real demand and real need,” he says. “The market is definitely there.”

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When I stopped by Buddy Ratner’s office at the University of Washington yesterday, he looked like a proud papa. He had just gotten word that the National Science Foundation, in a report to Congress, is using one of his group’s companies, Healionics, as an example of a successful biomedical startup. Here at Xconomy, we’ve come across Healionics quite a bit recently, as mentioned to us by the Technology Alliance’s Susannah Malarkey, and as funded by a Washington Technology Center research grant.

Ratner, a professor of bioengineering (and an Xconomist), showed me the laudatory “nugget” from the NSF report, which calls Healionics a “most promising” biotech firm based on “highly innovative, cross-disciplinary” research, and an “excellent example” of how to transfer innovative biomedical technology to industry. “Healionics is poised to enter the emerging and potentially very large international market for biomaterials that enhance the biocompatibility and performance of implanted medical devices,” the report reads.

Founded in 2007, Redmond, WA-based Healionics is one of a half-dozen companies spun out of the University of Washington Engineered Biomaterials (UWEB) center, an 11-year, $40 million effort funded by NSF that finished up last year. Its main objective was to spur innovation by addressing the problems of medical devices (a $100 billion-plus industry) and how they heal in the body—and NSF looks to be satisfied with the results. “They want to show Congress there is impact from the money they’re investing,” says Ratner, the director of UWEB.

The technology of Healionics began as a Ph.D. research project in Ratner’s lab around 2000. Every year, says Ratner, some 50,000 people in the U.S. die from catheter-related infections, and more broadly there are about 325,000 complaints about biocompatibility of medical devices. When a foreign object is inserted through the skin, the body’s natural defenses form a capsule of tissue around it or work to eject it, which wreaks havoc with any device’s operation and can cause infection. So Ratner and his student Andrew Marshall came up with a type of biomaterial that could be used to coat an implanted device and help it integrate better with the body’s tissues.

The key to the material is giving it lots of pores—holes that interact with the body’s cells and through which blood vessels and tissue can grow. It turns out there is an optimal size for the pores too, about 35 micrometers, or half the diameter of a human hair. Any bigger or smaller, and the healing properties aren’t as good. “We found a sweet spot,” Ratner says.

In turn, Healionics seems to have found a sweet spot in its business model. The company, led by CEO Robert Brown, a nine-year Microsoft veteran with an M.B.A. from UW, uses its porous-biomaterial technology to improve other companies’ medical devices, but doesn’t market any products of its own. As a result, it collects royalties on other companies’ sales without having to invest in expensive R&D or new clinical trials, so it can get by on smaller amounts of funding. Healionics has about 10 contracts with other companies, including TRBioSurgical, an Arizona-based biomaterials firm that is developing a glaucoma implant for veterinary use.

Ratner, who serves as chair of Healionics’ science advisory board, seems excited about the startup’s longer-term prospects. “They’re very successful,” he says of the company. But he’s always thinking bigger. His next step? Putting together a consortium of biotech and biomedical companies that will collaborate with UW and help fund R&D in materials, devices, and tissue engineering—and just maybe speed up the innovation chain that much more.

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The University of Washington’s commencement ceremony may have been last weekend, but Jim Roberts and his team at UW TechTransfer aren’t winding things down—they’re gearing up for the high season. “During the summer it doesn’t drop off,” Roberts says.

Roberts is the head business development officer at LaunchPad, a two-year-old initiative within the university’s tech transfer office, formed specifically to identify and help along startup opportunities from UW technologies. As he points out, over the last three or four years, the numbers of UW patents filed and licensing deals have gone up—and so has the number of spinoffs. Those spinoffs typically need a fair bit of support in their early stages.

LaunchPad provides several concrete resources. It partners with UW’s Foster School of Business and Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) to get MBA students to do marketing and commercialization assessments on new companies (e.g., is this really a startup or a licensing deal?). It also brings in law students to work with the companies. In terms of outreach to the business community, LaunchPad has experienced entrepreneurs serve as advisors to its startups, and initially they act as the companies’ strategic advisory board. Roberts’s group also helps startups find business partners. “Whenever we have a startup team, we tap into different angel organizations and venture groups,” he says. “We get the word out about the types of people we’re looking for.”

It seems to be paying off. Last month, four LaunchPad startups (out of a total of 89 teams) placed in the sweet 16 of the CIE Business Plan Competition at UW, which awards $45,000 in prizes. The LaunchPad companies were Impel NeuroPharma (nose-to-brain drug delivery system), Hybiscus Technologies (optical chip-making), Voltan Biofuel (oil-producing algae), and LiteTouch (force-sensing glove for clinicians). Impel went on to win the grand prize ($25K) as well as “best innovation idea.” The next step for Impel, says Roberts, is to bring on an attorney to help negotiate the tech license, and to look for funding.

I asked Roberts what mistakes university entrepreneurs tend to make in setting up companies. “The classic mistake is they’re unwilling to give up control,” he says. “They want to be CEO, but they’d be a better CTO. If you’re going to build this as a company, you have to bring on a team and use their skill sets.”

Roberts says his group is currently looking at possible startups in robotics, alternative fuels, nanotech, Internet, and social networks—it’s a busy time. I also asked him what he thinks about the general state of investments in startups these days. “The funding climate is pretty good in this town,” Roberts says. “It’s very active. If you really have a compelling idea and a strong management team, the funding will be there.”

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This week, iRobot made a splash with the news that it has signed a sole licensing agreement with the University of Washington in Seattle to commercialize UW’s “Seaglider” underwater robot. The specific terms of the deal with UW TechTransfer were not disclosed, but the announcement marks the Bedford, MA-based robotics company’s first foray into the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) market.

Best known for its Roomba vacuum cleaners and military PackBots, iRobot is diving into a field that includes local competitors like Cambridge, MA-based Bluefin Robotics and Hydroid in Pocasset, MA. The company sees oceanographers and military planners as the main potential buyers of the technology—anyone who wants to monitor the properties of the ocean environment accurately and over long periods of time.

“We’ve been looking at entering the underwater space for a while,” says Helen Greiner, cofounder and chairman of iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT). She says her team was impressed by the Seaglider technology, and earlier this spring, after talking with UW, she sent MIT roboticist and iRobot CTO Rodney Brooks (an Xconomist) out to Seattle. “He bridged the gap between the academic community and the company, and was a really good ambassador,” Greiner says. “Universities exist for scientific reasons, for doing research, while at the same time they want to get their baby out into the world.”

What impressed Greiner most about the Seaglider was its efficiency and durability. Developed by researchers at the UW Applied Physics Lab and School of Oceanography, each Seaglider is about the size of a person (1.8 meters long, 52 kilograms) and is shaped like a torpedo with wings that allow it to “glide” through the water. It can travel distances of several thousand kilometers—going out to sea for six or seven months at a time—diving to depths of up to 1 kilometer and surfacing periodically to get a GPS fix or transmit data. (You can even track in real-time where the 70-odd Seagliders are deployed in the field, including one off the coast of Washington, here.)

It does all this with no moving external parts, which is key—most AUVs out there use propellers, which allow them to move much faster than the Seaglider’s 25 centimeters per second, but they don’t last very long in the field (just a few days, for instance). With Seaglider, “you don’t need a ship in the area to pick them up and drop them off,” says Fritz Stahr, head of the Seaglider Fabrication Center at UW, which builds the vehicles for research groups. “You deploy them and go away.”

The iRobot deal should benefit the University of Washington’s development teams in terms of reach and exposure. “We can’t build very many at the same time, so we’ve usually had a year-long backlog,” says Stahr. “So it’s always been in the university’s plan to do a license. This will allow the vehicle to see uses far beyond academia, to make it to markets heretofore unseen.”

Seagliders can be equipped …Next Page »

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Harvard has taken a bit of a bashing over the years on the tech transfer front. After all, MIT, the champion of university technology transfer and licensing, is right down the river, and at least some business leaders and alumni feel the school should be doing more to match its neighbor in commercializing its pioneering research.

Isaac Kohlberg agrees—and he’s on it. Kohlberg, whose official title is senior associate provost and chief technology development officer, heads Harvard’s Office of Economic Development. In just two full years on the job, he has worked to overhaul almost everything about the office, from its staff to its organization. He’s helped grow industry-sponsored research for the university at a 70-percent annual rate or higher, and has put in place several changes—with more in the wings—to up the dollars Harvard takes in from royalties and licensing deals.

But, as you’ll see, the point of his actions isn’t simply to bring in dollars to an already flush institution. (Harvard’s endowment, at $35 billion and rising, is the nation’s largest.) It’s also about doing more to move Harvard innovations—chiefly in the medical arena—out into the world where they can help people in developing nations, and Kohlberg is willing to do royalty-free deals to bring that about.

“That’s a major piece of our strategy and our mission,” Kohlberg said of this loftier goal, which isn’t exactly common in technology licensing offices, when I visited him earlier this week at his Harvard Square office to learn more about his plans. Turns out, he has a lot of them—and in fact, he’s already set in motion far more than I had realized. It typically takes years for the seeds of tech transfer to bear fruit, so it’ll be a while before Harvard catches up to MIT in its tech transfer efforts. But it seems likely the gap will soon be narrowing, if it hasn’t already.

Kohlberg came to Harvard as a change agent in summer 2005 after turning around technology transfer activities at Tel Aviv University in Israel and building New York University’s efforts almost from scratch. But he says it was really his experience in Israel that shaped much of what he is doing at Harvard. Israeli research institutions, he says, pioneered tech transfer in the 1950s, back when there was really only one major effort at a U.S. university, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation associated with the University of Wisconsin. (The blood thinner Warfarin, also known as Coumadin, was originally developed under the foundation’s sponsorship—and so was Vitamin D.) It wasn’t until 1980, when passage of the Bayh-Dole act allowed U.S. universities to keep the IP rights to technology spawned from federally funded research, that tech transfer efforts really took off in the U.S., he says.

Kohlberg was recruited to Harvard in 2005 by then president Larry Summers and current provost Steven Hyman. He got right to work overhauling operations, bringing two tech transfer offices—one at Harvard Medical School, and one on the main campus—into a single university-wide program. He then reoriented the entire professional staff, which had previously been focused on technology licensing, to full-blown business development. To that end, Kohlberg says, “We have hired a new team of directors of business development” whose job is to engage university faculty and outside firms to find, nurture, and develop research for commercialization, as well as to license existing technologies. And to symbolize this broader, more active mission, he changed the name of the organization itself—from the Office of Technology Licensing to the Office of Technology Development.

The office was reorganized according to areas of practice. Life sciences, the primary focus, has five full-time directors of business development, three based at the medical school in Boston and two in Cambridge. Kohlberg also set up a three-person engineering-materials-information technology team. Complementing them come a basketball squad-sized …Next Page »

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Need a better AIDS drug? Want to turn plants into gasoline without going through that whole millions-of-years-buried-in-the-ground thing? The University of Massachusetts is hoping its researchers have figured out how to achieve such feats, and is awarding them grants to help the research along, possibly create new companies, and bring in licensing revenue to fund further research.

The UMass Office of Commercial Ventures and Intellectual Property (CVIP) gave out eight grants of $30,000 each to researchers within the UMass system whose work, the office believes, has strong potential for commercial development. “These grants will help to bring UMass inventions and discoveries into the marketplace and into people’s lives,” UMass President Jack Wilson said in announcing the awards. He said that in addition to educating students, UMass should be “an innovation engine” for the state.

Since 2004, the CVIP has given out 26 of these grants. So far, those have led to four new licenses for UMass-developed technology, $2.5 million in new research funding, and one startup company, which UMass didn’t name. Last year the UMass system brought in more than $40 million in licensing revenue.

Here’s a list of the latest grants:

Jie Song, Orthopedics Department, UMass Medical School
“Resorbable Shape Memory Biopolymer for Spine Fusion Applications”
Song has developed a polymer that mimics certain properties of bone, and that can return to an original shape after being deformed, with the shape change triggered by a temperature change. The hope is that the material will minimize tissue damage and improve bone grafts.

Celia Schiffer, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, UMass Medical School
“Testing Novel HIV-1 Protease Inhibitors for Viability Against Resistant Viruses from the Clinic”
Protease inhibitors, which interfere with part of HIV’s reproductive process, were one of the great breakthroughs in fighting AIDS, but the rapidly evolving virus has become resistant to some existing drugs. Schiffer’s trying to design new drugs that are less likely to lead to resistance.

George Huber, Chemical Engineering Department, UMass Amherst
“Green Gasoline from Catalytic Fast Pyrolysis of Lignocellulosic Biomass”
Huber is building a prototype reactor that uses heating and cooling cycles and a catalyst to break down plant matter into oils that can be used to make biofuels.

Stephen McCarthy, Department of Plastics Engineering, UMass Lowell
“Novel Biodegradable Bone Plates and Adhesive Bonding”
A heat-activated adhesive should eliminate the need for drilling and screws in surgeries where doctors repair the skulls of children born with congenital defects. The grant will be used to develop an applicator for the adhesive.

Melisenda McDonald, Department of Chemistry, UMass Lowell
“Novel Hydrogel-based System for Maintenance of Mammalian Cells in Culture”
McDonald hopes to make it easier to keep cultures of animal cells alive for use in research with minimal cost by using hydrogels, which are mixtures of water and polymers with a gooey consistency.

Kevin Fu, Computer Science Department, UMass Amherst
“Zero Power Telemetry for Implantable Medical Devices”
Implantable medical devices, such as pacemakers, now include wireless communications to send information on the patient to doctors. By relying on the data receiver to supply to power to monitor the devices, Fu hopes to extend the battery lifetime of the implantable devices, reducing the need for procedures to replace batteries.

Babs Soller, Department of Anesthesiology, UMass Medical School
“Noninvasive Sensor for Optimizing Athletic Performance: Proof of Concept for Novel, Portable Technology”
Soller is building a smaller, lighter sensor than those currently used to monitor a person’s metabolic rate and exercise capacity. The new sensor will also include wireless communication.

D.V.G.L.N. Rao, Physics Department, UMass Boston
“Fourier Phase Contrast Microscope”
A new microscopy technique could yield a major improvement in the types of microscopes used in research.

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I was at the Power, Drugs, & Money conference in Boston yesterday (put on by the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge), as part of a panel discussing the New England innovation landscape, when the question of Harvard University’s tech transfer and spinoff performance came up. Our moderator—Xconomist, former gubernatorial candidate, and venture capitalist Chris Gabrieli—mentioned how he felt the school had under-performed on this front (there was some audience dissension on this point). He also asked how many in the audience felt there was a general lack of seed and early stage investment in tech companies in New England (very little dissension on this front—you should have seen all the hands shoot up).

Now, we had some good discussion around these issues. But an announcement today from Harvard’s Office of Technology Development seems particularly timely: the school is launching a second round of investments by the Technology Development Accelerator Fund it started last year to push university biomedical and life sciences advances toward commercialization. It is even putting some real-world startup knowledge behind the effort—by hiring Curtis T. Keith, a co-founder and senior vice president of Cambridge, MA-based biotech firm CombinatoRx, to serve as the fund’s chief scientific officer responsible, in part, for managing the funded projects and helping ensure they meet development milestones. Keith will remain a member of CombinatoRx’s scientific advisory board.

So, in one swoop, Harvard is addressing both of the issues raised by yesterday’s panel, at least to a degree. It’s getting ever-more serious and aggressive about tech transfer—and it’s also acting more like a seed or pre-seed investor, although to be clear, the fund is not a venture pool and the private donors contributing to it get no return on their money—just the satisfaction of knowing that their donations go directly toward helping the school advance the state of health and medicine.

Harvard formed the Accelerator Fund last year with $6 million in private donations. The idea, says spokesman B.D. Colen, is to raise $10 million in private contributions and make the fund self-sustaining. The fund has already completed its first round of investments—putting a total of $1.3 million into six projects spanning cancer, diabetes, and HIV, among other things. Now it is soliciting school faculty for more projects to fund, intending to invest a like amount in the second round. That’s not a lot of money, to be sure, but the money is aimed at a strategic point in the commercialization pipeline where it is hoped a little will go a long way. The fund, according to the announcement, “is structured to provide Harvard scientists with the financial resources needed to traverse the development gap and generate the confirmatory data required to attract commercial partners.”

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Ten researchers at seven Massachusetts universities and research institutions—working in such areas as biotechnology, medicine, nanotech, and clean energy—are the latest beneficiaries of a state-funded program to prod new technologies along the path to commercialization. These recipients of the Fall 2007 Technology Investigation Awards from the Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center, announced yesterday, will receive $40,000 apiece. One of the awards was given posthumously to famed Children’s Hospital Boston cancer researcher Judah Folkman, and will be taken over by his research collaborator.

The MTTC award program was launched in mid-2005 by the center’s founding (and current) director Abigail Barrow (an Xconomist). Barrow says that when her office got going in that year with state funding, “the first thing we decided was we were going to give most of it away to really pull the technologies out of the institutions.” So the center crafted the awards program, which is open to researchers at any research institution in the state, to focus in on the research projects most likely to lead to commercialization. Barrow says that the awards are given twice a year, rather than annually, because “if you’ve got an investigation that you’re drying to get out of the lab, a year’s a long time to wait.”

The catch, if there is one, is that the technology or research involved has “got to be pre-transfer,” Barrow says. “It’s before a startup company has been founded.” The idea is that the award money should be used to help validate a technology before it is licensed, or to improve the technological base of a nascent company before the firm is funded. In short, the awards are designed to help get ideas out the door faster and in better shape–and it’s only now, two years into the program, that Barrow expects to start seeing the early grants bear fruit.

A January 2006 award to Boston College researcher Kris Kempa, for instance, helped lead to a spin-off called Solasta. The firm, based in Newton, MA, is working on ultra-high-efficiency solar cells. Barrow says her office worked with Kempa and the company to develop its plans; Solasta also won a second place award at the 2006 Ignite Clean Energy Contest.

The MTTC will launch its next solicitation for the awards program this spring, and will likely announce the winners in early summer. In the meantime, you’ll likely be able to find Barrow on Beacon Hill; the MTTC director says she is actively seeking funding from the state that will be necessary to continue the program after that.

Here are the latest award winners, whose projects were chosen from among some 75 proposals from 24 …Next Page »

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Almost every presentation on incubating early stage technology companies includes some reference to the “Valley of Death” or the “Funding Gap”—meaning the difficulty entrepreneurs have finding initial small investments to get their startup companies going and to complete technical viability and proof-of-concept work.

Several research institutions and universities have been busy over the last five years creating internal programs to help bridge the Valley of Death and move technologies closer to commercialization. This year the Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center (which I run) will grant $800,000 in state funding to about 20 “proof of concept” projects at Commonwealth research institutions. The Deshpande Center supports MIT faculty in commercializing their technologies—and Boston University, UMass, and the University of Vermont have similar (but much smaller) projects. These programs usually include a lot of other business support—advising, coaching, marketing studies, introductions to potential investors or industry partners—which helps ensure that viable business propositions are developed alongside the technical work.

This early-stage support for technology development moves the discoveries from “we think it will do this” to “it isn’t pretty, and it isn’t optimized, but it works.” And the business support helps in pitching discoveries in a compelling way to venture and industry investors. The results of these projects are impressive: several new companies have been formed and funded, and based on these successes several other institutions are considering developing similar programs.

But building a bridge over the “Valley of Death” only works if you have enough resources to build it all the way over the valley—or if someone is building from the other side and you meet somewhere in the middle. It was initially thought that angel investors would help fill this gap. While angels can provide both funding and sound advice to early stage companies, they cannot handle the volume of deals and investment required—even in a state with as many angels as Massachusetts.

There are several very new initiatives that are bigger in scale, that have more resources, and that support early stage companies in more advanced development. Partners HealthCare has created a fund which invests in spin-offs based on inventions from Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. UMass is now able to co-invest in its spin-off companies alongside venture capitalists. Brook Ventures is working on a new seed fund focusing on companies spinning out of New England research institutions. Biogen Idec, Pfizer, and Novartis all have new incubator programs. Is this the start of a trend, and is there going to be more funding available to support our very early stage companies over the funding gap—or am I just an optimist?

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With its bevy of top-flight universities and hospitals, Massachusetts boasts a fire-hydrant-like flow of some $5.5 billion in federal research dollars pumping into the state annually. How can the state best help commercialize some of that research to further boost the Bay State economy? That’s the daunting mission of the three-year-old Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center (MTTC), led by tech-transfer veteran Abigail Barrow.

The job is even trickier than it might sound at first: Barrow has to find a way to succeed with an operating budget of just $500,000 a year and a tiny team of five staffers, only two of whom are full-time. What’s her strategy?

First of all, Barrow explains, “We don’t actually do tech transfer.” That job, she says, is best left to the state’s universities and other research institutions themselves, either through their in-house tech transfer offices, or by bringing in outside professionals to help. Instead, MTTC works with the tech-transfer offices to help try to launch startups within the state. “What we do is try to connect all the dots,” Barrow says. “This means helping researchers with marketable ideas prepare their presentations and finding people locally who can help support the new initiatives.”

Toward that end, MTTC runs a seminar program for researchers about how to assemble the right team to commercialize their research. And it offers early, “proof-of-concept” funding to everyone from university undergrads to medical researchers and emeritus professors. In the last fiscal year, the agency gave out some $720,000 in such seed grants (funds that are not counted as part of its operating budget). Among the eight recipients in the latest round, announced this summer, was Scott Gallager, a biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who received funds to develop his idea for a new technology to detect toxins in drinking water. Another was John Frangioni, an oncologist at Harvard’s Beth Israel Hospital, who got “proof-of-concept” funding to help bring to market a new hand-held fluorescence imaging device for highlighting tumors during surgery.

“We work in all technology areas,” Barrow says. “We will pull together a small, select group to listen to a researcher’s pitch and give input.” Barrow says she tries to tailor these small groups to the technology in question, inviting angel investors, professional service providers, corporate attorneys, and maybe even potential customers, all of whom volunteer to help out. “The key,” she says, “is to try to get in at a very early stage.”

Even when everything goes right en route to the market, though, there’s an additional twist to Barrow’s challenge. Take the case of Illumina, the fast-growing biomedical firm in the emerging field of “personalized medicine.” Back in 1998, Tufts University researcher David Walt had the idea for the company’s seminal technology. Tufts still gets a revenue stream from the patent that helped launch the company. But, armed with California-based venture capital, Walt opted to headquarter the firm in San Diego. Massachusetts might get bragging rights as the home of the breakthrough research, but the $180-million company and its 800 employees went elsewhere.

Barrows knows the Illumina story particularly well because she came to her job as director of the MTTC after years working on technology transfer at the University of California at San Diego. “The story of Illumina is absolutely something we face,” Barrow says. “We can’t build a barricade around the borders of Massachusetts. And it’s exciting to see new ideas turn into vibrant companies wherever they locate. But there is a lot we can do by bringing in local talent to encourage researchers with great new ideas to establish their companies here in Massachusetts.” (Barrow says she can take no credit for it, but Walt’s latest startup venture, Quanterix, is local, based in Cambridge.)

Most recently, Barrow says, her agency has been trying to coordinate with other efforts to support the emergence of technology “cluster areas” within the state, both in the biomedical field, with partners like the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and the energy area, in conjunction with the state’s new Clean Energy Council. In high-growth areas like these, she says, clusters can at least theoretically serve as magnets for even more local investment.

Funded by the state legislature in two lump-sum stimulus packages in 2003 and 2006, the MTTC has operating funds to continue its work through the middle of 2009, as well as roughly $800,000 left to award in new grants. Until the funding runs out, Barrow says her office is working hard on all fronts to show legislators the value of their investment so they’ll continue the program. “The truth is our success rests largely on all the smart people we have around here doing smart research. They make this job possible,” she says. “We’re just trying to be the best catalyst in the process we can be.”

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