Teaching Scientists To Become Entrepreneurs, One Cold Call At A Time

Can you turn a scientist into an entrepreneur? The National Science Foundation and Stanford University are trying to find out

Twenty-one teams of scientists and engineers who’ve developed technology backed by the NSF are in the midst of an intensive class taught through Stanford to see if they can learn to launch start-ups and even become entrepreneurs.

Called the NSF Innovation Corps, the program aims to commercialize technology inside U.S. university laboratories and to get the scientists out of those labs and into conversations with prospective customers—often strangers–about how to adapt their technologies into products.

“Cold-calling (strangers) is a very difficult thing for academics—it’s not something we normally do on a day-to-day basis and we had to do it practically on day one,” said Ellis Meng, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California, whose team is developing a very small, electrically driven drug infusion pump. “We were joking that (it’s) a strange sort of new social life…where everyone can help you, and you can learn from them.”

Stanford lecturer and former serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, who teaches the class along with Mohr Davidow General Partner Jon Feiber and True Ventures founder John Burke, said he thinks it could permanently change how companies get started, because it forces students to find and talk to prospective customers immediately as a way to shape their products.

Listening to customers goes against the students’ training as scientists, Feiber said. While scientists are inclined to keep talking to people until they find one that likes their product, entrepreneurs need to think about why the people they talk to are saying no.

“We say, ‘Understand what the customer does and what problem your product would solve, then build something adjacent,’” Feiber said. “Out of 100 people, you may find five who like it.”

The NSF has committed $5 million per year to the Innovation Corps. The hope is that in the wake of the Solyndra debacle–in which the government invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the solar panel manufacturing start-up only to have it declare bankruptcy–the so-called I-Corps will become a cheap and effective way to commercialize U.S. technology and create U.S. jobs.

The projects represent sectors including engineering; computer science; biology; math and physical sciences; social, behavioral and economic sciences; and education and human resources. They also include a team working on mobile gaming for health care and one working on a low-cost way to cool LED lights. A full list of the winning projects is here.

The 21 science teams taking part in the program were chosen in part for their ability to work together in order to survive the boot-camp-like class, which requires each team to spend at least 45 hours per week on their project.

Participants also attend a three-day introductory session at Stanford in addition to weekly online meetings, where they report their progress via Skype and WebEx to all the other teams.

As part of applying, team members had to describe how they got to know each other, what roles they thought they would play on their teams, and what they wanted to be when they “grew up,” according to I-Corps Director Errol Arkilic.

Some teams fought in front of the interviewers—which got them disqualified—while some found they couldn’t commit enough time to the project and some didn’t give very good answers to questions, Arkilic said.

“We asked, ‘Have you ever commercialized a product before?’ and if they said, ‘No, why do you care,’ we understood they were un-coachable,” he said. The 21 teams were selected from more than 350 teams that applied from all over the U.S.

Each team that participates receives $50,000 for their institutions, and the NSF plans to fund 100 teams per year “forever,” Arkilic said.

A “lessons learned” day is coming up next month when the course ends. Blank is betting that as many as four or five of the teams will win funding through the NSF’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program to keep going. Teams could also license their technology or try to get funding from venture capitalists.

Fonte: Debora Gage, Wall Street Journal (WSJ), 25 de Novembro de 2011

Agradecimento à Antonio Sánchez-Cordero que nos indicou este texto!