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Cross-Disciplinary Training of Researchers in Entrepreneurial Discovery

Introduction

The work presented in this paper are the outcomes from an NSF-sponsored Partnership for Innovations program which involved the development of a new training paradigm in an attempt to:(1) stimulate the transformation of knowledge created by the nationally-renowned research and education enterprise at the University into innovations to create new wealth, build strong local, regional, and national economies and enhance the national well-being; and (2) catalyze and enhance an enabling infrastructure necessary to foster and sustain innovation in the long-term through the training of entrepreneurially-oriented PhD engineering and physiology students as the drivers of bioengineering and new business development in the city. The intellectual merit of the program was the development of a new paradigm for creating and establishing successful entrepreneurial ventures in emerging technologies. The intellectual basis for the partnership is a model derived from a constrained, systematic search of a series of studies and experiments on repeat entrepreneurs, including interviews with 15 repeat entrepreneurs who were responsible for launching approximately 50 ventures, and restrospective evaluation of business plans. These studies showed that successful ventures were due to more than just entrepreneurial alertness, as asserted by the majority of earlier studies on entrepreneurship [1-7]. The goal of the search model is to improve the odds of aspiring entrepreneurs to discover and exploit valuable venture ideas by systematically searching in areas where they already have prior, specific knowledge. The assessment of the model will be accomplished in part by a novel, theoretically-based approach for evaluating the wealth creating potential of business plans resulting from the program. This approach has been used by researchers to successfully classify 31 out of 31 business plans according to their expected financial performance. This program was an experiment to see if the search model can improve the odds of aspiring PhD entrepreneurs to develop successful business ventures in the growing biomedical device industry.

The program consists of three integrated components incorporating the search model: (1) an Innovation Training Program for researchers and PhD level graduate bioengineering students; (2) an Innovative Research Fund to provide “discovery grants” for early stage research projects; and, (3) the Business Development Network to assist innovators with one-stop shopping for patenting, determining market feasibility, business planning, licensing, and new business start- ups (Figure 1).

PhD Students Innovation Innovation Business Training Discovery Development Researchers Program & Prototyping Network

Figure 1. Schematic on the integration of the three proposed key initiatives.

This paper will focus on the Innovation Training Program as well as present updates on the status of the entrepreneurial ventures which were facilitated by this program.

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Keynton, R., & Fiet, J., & Patel, P. (2010, June), Cross Disciplinary Training Of Researchers In Entrepreneurial Discovery Paper presented at 2010 Annual Conference & Exposition, Louisville, Kentucky. 10.18260/1-2--16843