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Session #2154

Using Inter-college Undergraduate Teams to Support Technology Commercialization

Elizabeth C. Kisenwether College of Engineering

Anthony Warren and Chintan Parekh Smeal College of Business

The Pennsylvania State University

ABSTRACT Based on a May 2003 National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) course grant, undergraduate students from the Colleges of Engineering and Business are enrolled in a pilot course entitled Market-Pull Technology Commercialization. The course was developed in conjunction with the Penn State Technology Transfer Office. The goal of the course is to help improve the lower-than-desired return on investment on university research leading to commercialized products/services. The technology commercialization process is complex:

a) the creators of technology rarely have insight into the markets for their inventions, are often not interested in the details of commercialization, can be secretive, and often tend to move on to the next discovery or invention rather than take the intellectual property protection steps of provisional patents.

b) the business and financial communities often do not take the time, or have the resources, to understand the new technologies and perform complex due diligence. This lack of due diligence can contribute to rejection of innovation because companies may discount the new technology as NIH - "not-invented here".

c) the lawyers, to provide effective support of technology transfer and commercialization, need understand the technology, have a vision for where the technology can address market needs, and can craft the license and option agreements to satisfy all the other stakeholders in the process – researcher, business, educational institution.

Effective transferring innovation to a commercial product requires these three different functional communities to interface – technical researcher/inventor, business and legal. The ‘how-to’ literature in this field is largely focused on legal process rather than the human factor issues which are far more important. The subtleties of the transfer must be transacted through

“Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual 1 Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2004, American Society for Engineering”

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Parekh, C., & Warren, A., & Kisenwether, E. (2004, June), Using Inter College Undergraduate Teams To Support Technology Commercialization Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--12808