December 11, 1995

University Program Helps Grad Students Plan High-Tech Companies

Engineering, science and business students are collaborating to develop their own companies through a unique effort that marries the College of Management and the College of Engineering at N.C. State University. The Technology, Education and Commercialization Program (TEC), the only one of its kind in the country, guides graduate students and postdocs through the sequence of isolating high-tech research with market potential and developing a business plan.

The program, which is funded by a $600,000 National Science Foundation grant, over a three-year period, and by university funds, focuses on developing the marketability of research projects and patented discoveries.

"TEC is not merely an academic exercise. It's the real thing," said Dr. Stephen Markham, associate professor of business management. "At the end of the complex product development process, some students may be involved with a real start-up business."

Dr. Angus I. Kingon, professor of materials science and engineering, pointed out that students who don't start businesses will benefit from the program as well. Kingon said that most Ph.D. graduates go into industry after graduation and encounter an unfamiliar business-oriented, product development environment compared to the university, where the focus was on pure research. In industry, they will work more in teams with finance and marketing specialists and will need to justify their research in those terms.

"We want to add options for the students and provide exposure to broader contexts in which they can view their science--exposure to the entrepreneurial process, to identifying the importance of technologies, defining products and processes which will be based on those broad technologies, evaluating them in a market context, in a new business context, in a new product context," Kingon said. "So it's broadening their view and allowing them later to do research and development in the context of the world of business."

The students gain the exposure by working in teams to actively search for promising technologies, evaluate and screen them by the criteria they are developing, and draw up a business plan or commercialization strategy. They also must consider market information, manufacturing requirements and intellectual property issues.

One of the challenges faced by those involved in the program is devising a step-by-step decision-making procedure for starting a high-tech business. According to Kingon, that process has not been documented, and the TEC program is breaking ground by reducing all the information available to a usable plan so people inexperienced in business can apply it.

TEC organizers foresee the program having a positive impact in several areas: new businesses started with roots to the campus, research and technology transferred to other companies, an increasing demand for N.C. State's graduates, a more entrepreneurial culture and a stronger relationship between the university and the business community.

So far, four teams have been involved with the program and have developed and evaluated start-up procedures, identified two research ideas for commercialization and evaluated technologies for local companies.

After participating in the yearlong program, science and engineering graduate students receive nine academic credits, postdocs earn a certificate, and students pursuing the Master of Science in Management (MSM) can choose TEC as part of the technology management degree option.

"The students can actually get involved in the new business start-up process and explore whether they have both the aptitude and the interest," Kingon said. "They're doing it in a secure environment, getting a feeling for the process and what's involved without actually having to put their parents' life savings on the line."

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