CU FOSTERING IDEA OF IDEAS FOR COMMERCIAL APPLICATION

Date: Saturday, February 11, 2006

How do you make it second nature for professors to think that their research results might have commercial value?

Well, the University of Colorado has discovered that it helps to have some money to scatter around among people with promising ideas. Not surprisingly, more ideas look promising.

This story, as The Chronicle of Higher Education tells it, actually started in 1993, when the university sued American Cyanamid over patent rights to a vitamin supplement intended for pregnant women, which CU claimed had been developed by two members of the medical school faculty.

Time passed, American Cyanamid became part of Wyeth, the law took its ponderous course, and in April 2004 the case finally came to an end when the Supreme Court declined to hear Wyeth's appeal of a ruling in the university's favor. So in 2004, CU's $34 million in total revenue from "technology transfer" included $28 million from the Wyeth settlement.

The university's technology transfer office (www.cusys.edu/techtransfer/) set aside $8 million of that as endowment for a "Proof of Concept Investment Program." The program invites proposals from researchers who believe something they've discovered may be "suitable for commercialization." The fall 2005 competition drew 41 proposals, and eventually five won grants for $10,000 and eight for $25,000.

It doesn't seem like such a huge amount of money, but it does get people's attention. As David Allen, CU's associate vice president for technology transfer, told the Chronicle in December, "the hardest thing is finding that early money."

Colorado has high ambitions for its biotech future at the new Health Sciences campus at the former Fitzsimons Army Medical Center, so it isn't surprising that some awards went to ideas in therapeutics (cancer and metabolic disorders) and medical devices.

But three grants were for mechanical devices, "a no-moving-parts pump, a novel means of energy production and an unmanned aircraft," according to the office's most recent newsletter, and to software applications, including "a Web audio content analysis and search engine, wireless network middleware, and network security."

The "early money" grants are only part of what Colorado describes as "the virtuous research cycle," in which top researchers get grants to do more research so they can train more students in better equipped facilities and publish high-quality papers that help them get more grants. Technology transfer aims "to aggressively pursue, protect, package and license to business" the intellectual property developed within the university.

If that doesn't sound very ivory-towerish, well, it's not intended to be. A few universities have always fostered commercial development of faculty work, which is why places like Silicon Valley grew up around Stanford University and so much high-tech industry is located near Cambridge, Mass. But Colorado's program, and others like it, indicate the widespread acceptance of the idea that Silicon Valley is not merely a fortunate accident, but something that can be deliberately replicated. The university reported nine start-up companies founded in 2004-2005, and hopes the number will grow.

Not every such attempt will succeed, but enough will to deliver a huge boost to the American economy.

It's all so different from the ever more centralized, ever more statist future that was in most people's crystal balls 30 and 40 years ago -- and a very good thing, too. Most of the most dynamic parts of the economy are sectors that didn't even exist then, and instead of every last little company being swallowed up by industry giants as people like John Kenneth Galbraith predicted, we have industry giants being gulped down by nimble upstarts with better ideas.

And giants in other industries trying very hard to figure out how to become nimble.

A culture of entrepreneurship finds economic niches where nobody would have planned for them. My husband and I started an improbable little business in 1972, dedicated to supplying parts books and shop manuals for Studebakers and Packards. Our "early money" came from a medical insurance payment reimbursing us for the costs of having a baby in a Swiss hospital.

It's not a very large market niche, worldwide, but the beauty part was that nobody else on Earth was trying to fill it. We incorporated the business in 1976 (if I remember correctly, we had to fill out a one-page form and pay the Minnesota secretary of state $1) and sold it about 10 years later because we were moving to China for a year. Somebody is still filling that niche, in fact, adding the equivalent of about one full-time job a year to the American economy for more than 30 years now.

A job here, a job there, and pretty soon you're talking about real employment.

Countries where law and custom make it easy and natural to start a business will thrive at the expense of countries that don't. People not only know that it is possible to go into business for themselves, but they're more likely to know people who have done it, and can show them the ropes. CU's technology transfer program is showing professors the ropes.