Here in Boston, we like to tout our universities, our faculty, our students. The academic community is one of the crowning strengths of the New England economy, not to mention a major driver of its global impact. But what have universities done for the local startup and business innovation community lately?

I’m not going to give a full answer here—it’s one of the broader themes I’m exploring around town—but I’ll give you a piece of the puzzle.

Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development has what it calls an “Accelerator Fund” that has been chugging along for four years now, and it has achieved some notable results. As of last month, the $10 million fund has given out $5.2 million in grants, which have supported more than 30 projects over five annual cycles. It’s still early to add up the returns on this investment, but already it has led to more than $10 million in partnership money for the university, and several startups that have received outside venture funding. (The Harvard office declined to give specifics on licensing revenues to date.)

What’s more, the model apparently has proven successful enough that the team is about to begin raising a much bigger fund, in the $20 million to $30 million range. And unlike in the past, when Harvard developed a laggardly reputation when it came to commercializing its research, universities around the country are starting to look at the school as a possible role model for technology transfer and startup development practices.

The Accelerator Fund, which Xconomy wrote about in early 2008, was created to help Harvard scientists commercialize their inventions by forming industry partnerships, licensing technology, and starting new companies, primarily in life sciences and biomedical fields. As technology development head and senior associate provost Isaac Kohlberg puts it, “The pipelines of Harvard were empty.” The school “suffered from a branding issue with stakeholders about the role of technology development,” he says.

Kohlberg and his team, which includes Curtis Keith, chief scientific officer of the Accelerator Fund, were brought in to overhaul Harvard’s tech transfer and development offices. Kohlberg joined … Next Page »

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You know what they say about New York City: If you can make it here….But let’s skip the clichés and old song lines and get straight to the big news. Welcome to Xconomy New York, the sixth outpost in our rapidly expanding network of local news sites about innovation.

So, all you Big Apple entrepreneurs, it’s time to get excited. The city’s biotech, tech and energy sectors are bustling, and I intend to find all the great stories of innovation that NYC has to offer. Xconomy New York will report with the same journalistic zeal that began in Boston almost four years ago, and which we have since rolled out in Seattle, San Diego, Detroit, and San Francisco.

Why New York? Because if your mission is to be the authoritative voice on the most innovative sectors of the overall economy—life sciences, info tech, and clean technology—then you must be in New York. There’s all kinds of action in digital media (think Foursquare), it’s the place that gave rise to a billion-dollar blockbuster cancer drug (Erbitux, now owned by Eli Lilly), and it’s the home of Wall Street, the place where most of the really big cleantech ideas are getting financed. Hence, we’ve arrived to report on these stories at close range.

New York is home to more than just the bulls and the bears, of course. It’s packed with venture capitalists and top-notch academic institutions with active technology-transfer arms, not to mention that oh-so-vital source of sustenance for the city’s legions of cash-poor entrepreneurs: The best 99-cent pizza slices the world has to offer.

Even though NYC is widely seen as a world capital for finance, media, entertainment, and fashion—and Silicon Valley gets most of the credit as the capital of innovation—there are plenty of great stories of invention to uncover here, too. And many of them are coming from a rapidly expanding group of technology incubators, which include Dogpatch Labs, General Assembly, and NYU Poly.

New York City is also home to pharmaceutical giants … Next Page »

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Orin Herskowitz, executive director of Columbia Technology Ventures, is sipping gourmet coffee at a bistro across the street from the Manhattan Mall, but he hardly needs the caffeine to amplify his excitement about the innovation scene at his college. Columbia Technology Ventures—the Ivy League university’s main technology-transfer initiative—has chalked up an impressive list of accomplishments ever since Herskowitz joined the office in 2006. “We get 300 faculty-submitted inventions a year,” he says, about 60 percent in life sciences and the rest in other technologies. “I like to say we have everything from iPhone apps to cancer drugs,” Herskowitz says.

Herskowitz has good reason to boast. The former management consultant has spent the last few years whipping Columbia’s tech transfer efforts into shape, instituting a host of new processes designed to speed good ideas to market. It’s working: In 2009 (the most recent year for which data is available), Columbia pulled in $154 million in licensing revenues—more than any other university—according to the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM). Columbia’s tech-transfer arm now spawns about a dozen startups a year. “Over the last two years, the whole university has come together around entrepreneurship in a way that feels new and energized,” Herskowitz says.

Columbia is one of the pioneers of technology transfer. The university began a formal initiative to spin out its inventions into the business world back in 1982—just two years after the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act gave academic institutions the right to patent and commercialize inventions. Over the years, technology transfer in New York has become much more collaborative, Herskowitz says. Not only are Columbia faculty members from different departments working together on inventions, but the university is now actively collaborating with nine or so other academic institutions in New York, including New York University, Rockefeller University, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Many famous products rely at least in part on inventions shepherded to market by Columbia Technology Ventures. Among them: DirectTV, iPod Touch, and the biotech drugs epoetin alfa (Epogen), etanercept (Enbrel) and omalizumab (Xolair). As for that iPhone app, it’s EarthObserver, created by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia. The app, released in December for $2.99, allows users to view detailed renderings of the ocean floor, icecaps, mountains and coasts. “It’s like Google Maps for the whole earth,” Herskowitz says.

But like most universities, Columbia has faced some challenges transferring good ideas into marketable products. The college was often slow to attract … Next Page »

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One common complaint I hear from biotech entrepreneurs is that negotiating a license agreement with a university can be a nightmare. There are universities—some of them within the very top echelons of academia—that are infamous for having technology transfer people who are described as very difficult to work with.

It’s not that surprising that these two factions of the life sciences ecosystem—the intellectual property generators in academia and intellectual property seekers in companies—clash over their perceived value of this key asset.

Usually, entrepreneurs and investors come to the negotiating table arguing that a discovery they seek to license, while extremely promising, is a huge bet. Patents for laboratory-based discoveries are seldom supported by exhaustive preclinical research, let alone evidence of efficacy in humans. A startup licensing IP has a lot of work to do, and hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend, before it really knows whether the discovery will lead to a drug candidate. Also quite often a patent is but one small piece of the IP arsenal a company needs to gather, so its individual value may actually be quite small, even if it is crucial that the company claim hold of it.

Universities, on the other hand, have to put in a significant amount of money financing patent applications, so they want to recoup that early on when licensing to a company. The cost to get a single US patent can be $30,000 to $60,000, says Cathy Innes, director of the Office of Technology Development at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The university owns all the IP, so very quickly it can end up with $200,000 to $300,000 in IP costs and you’re not making money on the company yet,” she says. Aware that only a small percentage of life sciences discoveries ultimately succeed, but that those which do can become real cash cows, universities also want a good deal on royalties in the event a discovery turns into a popular drug or device.

So, as usually happens, these two factions, through their lawyers, end up spending a lot of time negotiating terms, tugging and pulling at this and that clause, with each side trying to squeeze a better deal for themselves while thinking the other side is greedy. A lot of time is wasted exchanging documents that sit with the other party for days or weeks before coming back. People who do these kinds negotiations for a living say that each and every time it feels as if they’re reinventing the tech transfer wheel, even though, for the most part, the same issues come up again and again. That can’t be too much fun.

That’s why it’s so refreshing to see Innes and her team at UNC take up the tech transfer world by storm with their newest invention: a one-size-fits-all express licensing agreement. They call it the holy grail of tech transfer, though critics, I reckon, think of it more as heresy. Either way, it’s gutsy.

The terms are non-negotiable and the licensing agreement is offered to every UNC-based startup—the company can decide to take it as is, or leave it and negotiate the old-fashioned way. The terms are not very sweet for the university: a 1 percent royalty on products requiring FDA approval following clinical studies and a 2 percent royalty on all other products. The university takes … Next Page »

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Michigan State University spinout InPore Technologies makes a particle that, when mixed with other materials, makes plastic stronger, lighter, cheaper, and more flame-retardant. Yeah. I know. Doesn’t sound all that sexy. It really is, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

First, the reason the East Lansing, MI-based company recently earned a $100,000 paycheck from the Great Lakes Entrepreneur’s Quest business plan competition is not only because it has great technology to sell, but because it has people who know how to clearly describe, in the words of CEO Gerry Roston, “the story.”

The reviewers for the competition who singled InPore out of the pack said the company knew what it was doing and why they were doing it. In turn, what attracted Roston to the company about 18 months ago was its founding scientist, MSU chemistry professor Thomas Pinnavaia.

“This is the single most critical thing for any startup,” Roston says. “It’s not the technology, it’s not the money, it’s the people.”

Nothing against academics in general, Roston says, but, for a professor, Pinnavaia “is an extremely personable, extremely approachable person. He’s passionate about what he does, he’s open to learning from others, he wants to learn from others, he wants to make this happen. And that enthusiasm is the other thing which really drew me to the business.”

So, according to Roston, who has made a career out of mentoring early-stage companies, the key to tech startup success is to have a plan and people you can believe in. Then, of course, there’s the technology itself. It’s a small thing, really—on the nanoscale, actually. But, warns Roston, don’t call InPore a nanotechnology company. That “nano” prefix is the “kiss of death” in the marketplace these days, he says.

The company’s proprietary particle goes by the brand name Silapore. Most of the plastics you interact with everyday—from your car to the phone or computer you’re reading this story on—contain fillers that do different jobs. They make the product stiffer or add color, for example. But the fillers, themselves, can also make the plastics weaker. Silapore particles, according to InPore, have such a unique morphology—or, arrangement, texture, or topography—that it makes products stiffer, stronger, lighter, and even flame-retardant and scratch-resistant.

The scratch-resistance and lighter weight make the material attractive to the automotive … Next Page »

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When we last caught up with Ken Myer, he was stepping down as president and chief executive of the Washington Technology Industry Association after three years on the job. Last week, I heard through the grapevine that Myer has joined the University of Washington in an advisory role, after assisting with the transition to WTIA’s new CEO, Susan Sigl.

I spoke with Myer this morning and confirmed that he has taken a part-time position as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the UW Center for Commercialization. He is working with vice provost Linden Rhoads and deputy director Rick LeFaivre, who is also a venture capitalist at OVP Venture Partners. Myer’s broad role is to work with researchers in computer science & engineering and other departments on commercializing their technologies.

This is part of a program Rhoads installed since she arrived on campus, to match up seasoned executives with inventors on campus who could use some advice about the business world. Medical device expert Tom Clement, and video game veteran Alex St. John are a couple of the other entrepreneurs who have participated since the program started.

Depending on the researcher, Myer says he plans to start by “brainstorming commercial opportunities that might come from the primary research they’re doing” at the earliest stages. Or, it could mean helping them put together a business plan for a specific idea. Or it could also mean “connecting them with companies in the local tech industry who might have an interest in advising them, or perhaps have an interest in licensing their technology,” he says.

Myer has been on the job for two weeks, so he’s just getting started. Some areas of interest he’s already seeing: databases, programming languages, video games, and visualization.

“I’m really excited by the new energy they have at the Center for Commercialization that Linden [Rhoads] has brought,” Myer says. “I’m impressed by the intelligence and the really interesting research that’s going on.” He adds that he’s “going to be coming back to the industry but this is a golden opportunity to keep my finger on the pulse” of interesting technologies and people.

Myer’s term at the UW will probably be four to six months, as he takes a step back from the tech industry. He says that by the end of this year, he’d like to be moving on to the next big thing.

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[Editor's note: To help launch Xconomy Detroit, we've queried our network of Xconomists and other innovation leaders around the country for their list of the most important things that entrepreneurs and innovators in Michigan can do to reinvigorate their regional economy.]

1) Create great technologies

2) Bring more venture capital into the region

3) Get the state to give more grant money to universities + existing faculty

4) Attract great new junior and senior faculty (more funding needed)

5) Strengthen tech transfer offices.

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1. Support the relevant state-regional-level infrastructures: favorable state capital gains tax, generous support for K-12, university education.

2. Develop professional, competent, adequately funded technology transfer offices in Michigan research universities. Develop some system for lowering cost of start-up capital (low-interest state loans, etc).

3. Pick *one* geographic area (probably Ann Arbor, since young professionals would like to move/live there) and continue to strengthen the start-up ecology there (University, tech-transfer office…)

4. Pick a few areas of technology (robotics, mobile communications for automotive, border security, inland water management, whatever…where Michigan might have an unfair advantage) and invest selectively in those.

5. Develop a mechanism for attracting, recruiting, and moving first-rate scientists/engineers from abroad (there are still lots who would like to leave Russia, Poland, etc., and come to the U.S.).

6. Use the large Detroit Middle Eastern community to establish ties to capital in the Middle East.

7. Have a state-level office reporting to the governor that partners with regional development groups in Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, etc.

8. Develop a program to pair experienced and aspiring entrepreneurs in apprentice arrangements of 3-4 years’ duration (inside or outside Michigan).

9. Develop a public education program to explain the entrepreneurial process, and its benefits (PBS, etc.).

10. Develop more programs with explicit emphasis on creation of jobs (all of Michigan) and technology for urban renewal (Detroit).

[Editor's note: To help launch Xconomy Detroit, we've queried our network of Xconomists and other innovation leaders around the country for their list of the most important things that entrepreneurs and innovators in Michigan can do to reinvigorate their regional economy.]

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Big news is out this morning from the Burnham Institute for Medical Research. The San Diego-based nonprofit says it’s getting a $50 million donation from T. Denny Sanford, enough for the whole institution to be re-named in honor of the philanthropist.

The center will now be called the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute. That decision was made now that Mr. Sanford, who made his fortune in the private equity business, has committed to donate $70 million to the research center over the past three years. Besides his direct support of the Burnham, the financier gave another $30 million in 2008 to create the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine to support stem cell research in San Diego.

This is really just the latest coup for the Sanford-Burnham Institute, which has been on a roll over the past couple of years. The institute scored a six-year $98 million grant from the National Institutes of Health in September 2008 to establish one of four new drug discovery centers at academic centers around the U.S. Its annual budget has seen double-digit annual increases in recent years, climbing to $154 million. The staff has grown to 1,000 people at campuses in San Diego, Santa Barbara, CA and Orlando, FL. The institute loves to talk about how its scientists were ranked No. 1 worldwide in terms of impact over the past decade, as measured by citations in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

That’s all impressive stuff when scientific publications are the coin of the realm, but the Burnham is also well aware its research has yet to deliver a major breakthrough for human health like, say, Novartis’ imatinib (Gleevec) for leukemia. So over the past year, the center has intensified its push to pursue that lofty goal by hiring two key people: One is Michael R. Jackson, a former Johnson & Johnson drug discovery expert; the other is Paul Laikind, a former biotech CEO, to negotiate more deals with drug companies with the money and expertise to create the next generation of Gleevecs. So the Sanford donation is really about fueling a transformation engine that can help the Burnham cross the gap between basic research and real-world applications.

Paul Laikind

“Denny Sanford’s continuing generosity will help us make a greater impact on human health,” said John Reed, the Institute’s president and CEO, in a statement.

As it so happens, I heard about this big donation just as I was sitting down to write a feature about how Burnham intends to do a better job of applying its ideas in the wider world, by hiring Laikind as its new chief business officer. Laikind is a biochemist by training, with a 25-year track record as a biotech startup executive, most recently as the CEO of San Diego-based Metabasis Therapeutics (acquired by Ligand for $3.2 million in October). I’ve written a lot in the past couple years about academic centers around the country trying to do a better job of this notoriously tricky business of relating to the business world, including the University of Washington and The Scripps Research Institute, so I was curious to hear Laikind’s perspective.

Donations like the one from Sanford—spread out over five years in $10 million annual chunks—provide a certain amount of budget stability, and could enable researchers there to get tantalizing early experimental data that can be used to help win further federal grants, and maybe entice … Next Page »

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There’s an ambitious young director of technology transfer on the job at The Scripps Research Institute, and if he gets his way, people will soon think differently about how the San Diego research center relates with the business world.

“Historically, people have perceived that Scripps is more or less a subsidiary of a Big Pharma company for licensing purposes, so there’s no real point in licensing,” says Scott Forrest, director of business and technology development at Scripps.

“It’s not a correct perception,” he says.

Forrest, 32, has a doctorate in pharmacology from the University of Virginia, and most recently got his tech transfer experience at the University of North Carolina. He joined Scripps in February with a goal of doing a better job of spinning out its renowned biomedical science into startup companies, as well as its potential drug candidates that might someday be commercialized in the wider world. Scripps is clearly pumped about Forrest’s prospects for raising the institution’s tech transfer game. Even though the office doesn’t even have its own website to explain what it has to offer (one is coming soon, I’m told), Forrest’s supervisor raved about him in an online Scripps newsletter posting in July.

“Scott is one of the best life sciences business development professionals that I have ever worked with,” Mark Crowell, vice president for business development at Scripps Research, said in the newsletter post. “He has an incredible technical background and an absolutely spot-on entrepreneurial and business sense. His ability to work with researchers at Scripps and with our corporate and venture capital partners will lead to solid business deals that get our technology out, generate appropriate returns for the institute, and help our partners achieve their business goals. We are extremely lucky to have him.”

Since we at Xconomy are always looking to write about bright ideas with commercial potential coming out of San Diego institutions, I figured this is a guy I should get to know. So I called up Forrest and asked him how Scripps is doing, and about his goals.

Scott Forrest

At its core, Forrest sees this as a “relationship business.” His goal is to actively help connect scientists with entrepreneurs, investors, and business development pros at pharma and biotech companies that they might not otherwise meet. And there’s plenty of room to improve at this, he says.

For example, tech transfer in the past might have waited for a superstar scientist like Peter Schultz to deliver a cool invention for patenting and licensing, and then hand it off to a big company already known to have an interest. Now, the tech transfer group wants to play a more pro-active role. Forrest says this means it will “roll up its sleeves” and do more to help a researcher form the business plans for a startup around his or her idea, help with raising capital, or make a key introduction to a pharma company that might have a place for such an idea.

“We have a lot of attention paid to us by Big Pharma companies and investors because of our scientific track record, but [in tech transfer] we haven’t always done a good job of building networks and being a source of deals, not just a processor of deals,” Forrest says.

This is all easier said than done. Tech transfer is one of the thorniest jobs you can get in an academic institution. Do a poor job of spinning out technologies into companies, and you get heat … Next Page »

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One of the Northwest’s leading medical device entrepreneurs has had a chance to rest for the first time in 20 years, do a little scuba diving, and sniff around the University of Washington for the next big idea. Now Tom Clement says he’s getting the “itch” to get back to work.

“I’m anxious to get back,” says Clement. “There is some very cool stuff going on [at UW], and most of it needs help on the business side.”

Clement, who turns 54 this month, has been in a transition this year. The company he founded and led since 1998, Kirkland, WA-based Pathway Medical Technologies, has graduated from product development mode into a company with a marketed product for clearing out blocked arteries in the legs. That meant Pathway didn’t really need an engineer like Clement at the helm anymore, and it recruited a CEO with more commercial experience, Paul Buckman.

After about 20 years of nonstop focus on building up two companies (Heart Technology came before Pathway), Clement suddenly had time to look around more broadly at the Seattle medical device cluster to see what fires him up. He has spent more time on his nonprofit work this year as chairman of the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association. Since May, he’s also been working on a roughly 15-hour a week temporary gig as one of the entrepreneurs in residence at the University of Washington’s tech transfer department, who have been enlisted by Linden Rhoads to help identify and nurture some of the best raw ideas in the university that have strong business potential.

I spoke with Clement a couple weeks ago at a Starbucks near my office on Seattle’s First Hill. At the time, he wasn’t quite ready to spill the beans on what his next company will aim to accomplish. So I asked him more about what’s he’s learned from his experience scouting technologies this year at UW.

Interestingly, he says he has enjoyed getting to know some of the other entrepreneurs that Rhoads has brought in from different disciplines—such as Perry Fell (biotech), Alex St. John (technology, gaming), Bob Wilcox (medical devices), and Gino Borland (cleantech). Clement has also spent some of the time hanging around the UW’s bioengineering and electrical engineering departments, and getting a better feel for what’s happening in the labs. He says it’s also given him a sense that he can be helpful.

“There are a lot of dedicated inventors here, but they need help in getting beyond knowing that there’s a need and they have a technology for it,” Clement says. “They don’t understand the market, the reimbursement pathway, the regulatory pathway, the competition.”

While the ideas might still need a lot of work, there is no shortage of them, and they come in a lot of varieties, Clement says. With a few well-placed introductions to investors, leading physicians, and people in the medical device industry, Clement says these ideas could be the basis for some interesting companies.

“I’m realizing the opportunity for getting companies started is greater than I thought,” Clement says.

How many of these ideas will get a realistic shot will depend in part on whether Clement and a few other Northwest medical device leaders can assemble an angel investing network with the expertise to vet ideas and attract some more capital from other angel groups, like the Alliance of Angels and Keiretsu Forum. That’s yet another story that Clement is working on, but it hasn’t quite congealed yet. Stay tuned.

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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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