TEC Student Entrepreneurship Program
Today was the official launch of the Ingenuity Enterprise Program which includes the TEC Student Entrepreneurship Program supported by the Technology Commercialization Centre (TCC) at the University of Alberta School of Business in collaboration with TEC Edmonton and Alberta Ingenuity. We identify technologies around campus and form teams with MBA students to conduct analyses and develop technology commercialization plans to move science and technology into the marketplace. This year was our first pilot program and we had many MBA students involved in technologies including a new software search engine based on artifical intelligence, an eco-sensitive wood preservatives, mobile telecommunications hardware, and a new method for the introduction of genes into plants via cholorplast transformation. My hope is that the students and other stakeholders involved in these projects will contribute to this blog to discuss their experiences, but also that this communication modality will be used to construct a broader dialogue about technology commercialization in the greater Edmonton and Alberta-wide community.
Technology commercialization is absolutely crucial to spur economic growth and development as well as diversification of the economy. We have great science and a great deal of government money has helped to build this resource. Much less attention has been paid to how we can build on this science to foster economic growth and development--that is how to enable commercialization of science and technology. To do this requires the creation of a broad infratsructure as well as a change in cultural understandings that make technology commercialization an appropriate focal point for our star scientists as well as for our taxpayer dollars. While I have many ideas on this topic, I will leave this post purposively short and encourage others to contribute their ideas and foster a dialogue on these issues. My hope is that this blog may be used as a central point for such a broader dialogue between university, industry, government and others as well as a place for network building and solving practical problems related to technology commercialization. Let the interaction begin!
Professor Michael Lounsbury
ml37@ualberta.ca
3 comments:
Micheal congrats to you and the Tech Com program!!! As for the event, great attendance and show of community support. The initiatives are a move in the right direction however they are still closer to the technology/researcher/"entrepreneur of ideas" vs the commercialization/
developer/"entrepreneur of commercialization"...thus it is up to the entrepreneurial spirit of the TCC and the MBA Tech Com students and graduates.
Darryl,
You bring up a useful point; thus, we need to construct this intersection and the blog is one mechanism--thanks for this suggestion. I wonder if you would be willing to promote this to encourage tech folks to participate through your involvement in the Alberta Chamber of Technologies? I see this project partly as a community building one at this stage and hope we can catalyze this process.
Michael Lounsbury
Having attended the launch of the Ingenuity Enterprise, I was very impressed with the current TECEdmonton and UTI initiatives aimed at supporting the commercialization of student IP. As a past-grad student from the UA who had IP come out of my thesis work but was unable to immediately pursue commercialization, I see the enormous value of the Student Entrepreneurship program and the Ingenuity Enterprise.
As a current faculty member at the University I interact with many colleagues who have come up with great ideas, but do not have the experience or motivation to pursue the commercialization of the technology. This is particularly true for the new academics who are struggling to build their research programs, secure research funding and develop their staff and trainees. For the new academics, "publish or perish" is a reality, and the commercialization of the new technology they develop is not a priority. To effectively extract and commercialize the technology that is being developed at the Universities is going to require sufficient faculty incentives to offset the need to quickly publish new findings as well as sufficient resources to support the evaluation and processing of the new IP. Programs similar to the student Entrepreneurship program need to be developed for the University faculty to provide them with the resources they need to commercialize the technology. In may ways these services already exist at TECEdmonton and UTI, but are not being actively communicated to the academic community.
The MBA program and the TCC could be a very effective bridge between the academic community and the tech commercialization services.
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