TEI to teach students, foster new companies

By Bob Roseth
News & Information

The UW is developing a new institute for nurturing the creation of companies that will take UW-developed technologies to market, at the same time providing a real-world laboratory for students and faculty to study the process of business formation.

Provost Lee Huntsman has described the role of the Technology Enterprise Institute (TEI) as analogous to a teaching hospital and a medical school. “Research that improves human health takes place in the medical school and is applied through the associated medical center. A private technology park is like a hospital without a medical school. What we intend to build is an institute that not only helps to create new technology enterprises, which are the cornerstone of the 21st century economy, but also seeks to understand them. We believe that innovative collaborations between the UW and industry, accompanied by new approaches to education, can extend our research, enhance our instructional mission, and significantly contribute to regional economic development.”

As part of the institute, the UW will create a technology facility and commercialization center, or “incubator,” to assist start-up companies in bringing UW technologies to the marketplace. The incubator will house fledgling companies, joint UW-industry projects and TEI programs and services. The incubator will provide a framework for the technology transfer process and a place for venture capitalists and “angels” to interact with entrepreneurs; it also will provide a range of business services and policy analysis. Student internships will thus provide undergraduates and graduate students with real-world learning experiences.

The institute is structured to provide a learning and research environment for students and faculty from across the UW, who will both facilitate and study the commercialization process itself. Among others schools and colleges, the School of Law, the Business School, the College of Engineering, and UW Educational Outreach will be particularly involved in this effort, as the institute becomes a laboratory for students and faculty studying the commercialization process. Students will be involved in performing market analyses, developing business plans, and researching intellectual property issues.

Recently the Board of Regents authorized the creation of the Technology Enterprise Foundation. This is a new legal entity, separate from the UW, which will be valuable in facilitating institute activities. It will be able to receive intellectual property from the UW for the purpose of starting very early-stage companies; to make small investments in the start-ups to develop early-stage technologies; and to own the facility. The provost, as delegated by the UW Board of Regents, will appoint a majority of the Board of Directors of the Foundation on an annual basis.

“Nearly a dozen companies are created each year from discoveries and inventions originating in UW laboratories,” says Bob Miller, Vice Provost for Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer. “An important challenge is to help them succeed faster and better. This is one goal of TEI. Another goal is to help create a vibrant community of entrepreneurs, inventors and investors who are working together, learning from each other, and teaching others the principles of building a strong knowledge-based economy. Only a strong research institution like the UW has all the elements necessary to unite these elements creatively.”

The institute is intended to be an integral part of the UW’s academic mission, notes Huntsman. “We believe that well-educated students in engineering, business, law, the sciences, and health sciences, at a minimum, should have direct access to experiences involving issues of intellectual property and the formation of new companies. To meet the expected demand for this kind of training, we need to have a facility in which this can occur, which is integrated with existing campus programs and units. We also believe that the Institute can perform pathbreaking research on start-up companies discovering the factors that enable them to succeed.”

Editor’s note: This is the last in a series of stories about techology initiatives at the UW.