Faculty, graduate students and staff at the University of Houston Cullen College of Engineering spend thousands of hours each year researching and developing new technologies. The work isn’t done when they meet success in the lab, though. These innovations still need to find a way to the people and businesses that can benefit from them.
That’s why the college has scheduled its first “Entrepreneur Boot Camp.” Set for Sept. 21, the boot camp will provide researchers at the college with practical information on how to form a business based on their innovations.
The event will open with talks by University of Houston President Renu Khator and Cullen College Dean Joseph W. Tedesco. Following will be presentations by intellectual property experts, venture capitalists, and leaders from Houston’s business community, who will speak on a range of topics researchers must understand in order to succeed as entrepreneurs. These include:
- The process of technology transfer
- Working with Houston’s venture capital community
- Intellectual property, patents and trademarks
- Technology licensing and licensing “traps”
- The practical aspects of starting a company, including officially establishing a business, creating a business plan, and raising funds.
The boot camp is just one part of the “innovation ecosystem” being developed at the Cullen College. An idea developed and backed by the National Science Foundation, innovation ecosystems are environments that support the commercialization of new technologies through education, research that addresses industry needs, partnerships with industry throughout the innovation process, and a focus on translational research that smoothes the transfer of technology from academia to businesses.
Such environments are increasingly important to major funding agencies like the NSF, which see them as essential to bringing technological innovation into the real world as quickly as possible.