Dr. Keith McGreggor trains scientists to think like business people.“We are not here to turn you into a business person, you’ve trained hard to become a scientist. But we want to help you understand how business people think, especially when it comes to your discoveries.” So started Dr. Keith McGreggor, executive director and lead instructor, I-Corps™ South, Georgia Institute of Technology, one of several experts who spoke at the CCTS Bioinnovation and Commercialization Pop-up Course that took place in Auburn Oct. 6th. Designed for biomedical and engineering faculty, postdocs, and students, the three-hour training drew from the Lean Startup Methodology championed by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) I-Corp™ program. Attendees were introduced to the Business Model Canvas approach that helps budding entrepreneurs determine the value proposition of their product, consider potential customers, create a start-up thesis, and then test it by interviewing potential customers.
“Applying the scientific method to business planning—generating a hypothesis about the commercial viability of your work, making predictions about who will want it, running experiments by actually talking to people, repeat, repeat, repeat—will help you eventually form the basis of a viable company,” said McGreggor.
Dr. Rachel Frazier, now a research engineer with the Alabama Institute of Manufacturing Excellence, but formerly a researcher at University of Alabama, shared how the I-Corp™ methodology helped her with the start-up of her company, Graphenics. “My research was in the growth and characterization of Group III-Nitride semi-conductors, so it was a challenge to convey the significance of bulk crystal growth development to device applications, let alone find customers,” she noted. The training, she added, “helped me look at my research in an entirely different way.”
Auburn University Associate Director of Commercialization Dr. Brian Wright discussed the top ten things university-based researchers need to know about intellectual property. He answered questions about patent applications, timing of public disclosure, licenses, freedom to operate, avoiding conflict of interest, and the roles of inventor vs. assignee.
Dr. LaKami Baker, managing director, Lowder Center for Family Business & Entrepreneurship and associate professor, Dept. of Management, Auburn University, and Dr. Michael Chambers, assistant vice president, Research Innovation, University of South Alabama, described myriad initiatives for entrepreneurs at their respective institutions. Auburn will open several new resources between now and 2018, including a summer accelerator boot camp, an ideation lab, and a new innovation and entrepreneurship center. USA is launching a minority business accelerator, the Mobile Area Educational Fund for high school students, and a graduate course that will “take USA technology off the shelf and give it to life scientists and engineers to see what happens.”
In closing, attendees were encouraged to apply for a regional I-Corp™, such as the newly granted I-Corps™ South’s cohort, Atoms & Bits. Participation in a seven-session regional I-Corp™ training can help one gain entry into a national NSF cohort, which potentially offers more than $1 million in federal start-up grants. UAB Collat School of Business professor and Dept. of Management, Information Systems, and Quantitative Methods Chair Dr. Molly Wasko stressed the value of I-Corp training even for researchers who are not entrepreneurially inclined. “Seven weeks is a very small investment to make to ensure your research, which can take years and years, will have an impact in our communities,” she said.
Learn more at https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/i-corps/index.jsp.