I’m Curious…

When people ask me why I do what I do, my answer is pretty simple. It’s not about the money. It’s not about the real potential to be a thought-leader. And it’s certainly not about the long travel days, political gamesmanship or the house wine at a 2–1/2 star hotel off of I-90 in Upstate New York.

Honestly, I’m just curious to see if what we’re trying to do can be done.

After years of operating in a challenging space that few others cared about, people are just now starting to really pay attention. Why? I’m not completely sure. I imagine that most people are just riding the changing political currents and/or chasing a new bucket of federal and local grant dollars designed to tackle this challenge. However, I’m hopeful that this newfound energy will be directed to best serve the needs of the economy, and I’m still curious to understand what the best solution for this space may be. But I honestly hope the ‘noise’ doesn’t interfere with truly impactful efforts.

So, what is this ‘space’ that makes me so curious and so nervous at the same time? What keeps me awake at night? You guessed it — technology commercialization!

Well, not just technology commercialization, but commercializing ‘public’ technologies developed at federal research labs — paid for by your tax dollars — that can make an impact in the private marketplace.

Why do I care about this? Other than strong personal views on making ‘public goods’ available to the public, my story goes back a few years. In 2006, while pursuing a piece of paper called the ‘MBA’, I was recruited into a course at the University of Illinois-Chicago called the Technology Ventures Program. The course paired MBA students with UIC technologies with the goals of educating young entrepreneurs and potentially launching new technology startups. The program had a few successes in previous years, and I was lucky enough to create a medical device startup that outlasted most. I’ve also been able to help mentor Tech Ventures teams every year since, learning quite a bit about commercialization along the way; from licensing and patenting to fundraising and product launch.

In my 8 years of working with UIC, I was able to help companies who licensed technologies from a multitude of federal and university labs, in industries like clean energy, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, industrial processing and on and on. I also began to consult early-stage technology companies outside of the program.

Then came that fateful day in January 2014. Given the changing political environment where a new focus was put on federal technology transfer (more about this in future posts), the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in Rome, NY, came calling and asked if there was a way to create a scalable and sustainable process of spinning out new startup ventures using AFRL intellectual property (IP).

It was an intriguing proposition. A friend and future business partner, Alex Duchak (you’ll learn more about Alex in future posts too), had been discussing the possibility of creating a framework to bring federal technologies from lab-to-market in a more systematic fashion. We reviewed other attempts to tackle this problem, but felt that the efforts were too process-oriented, not people-oriented. We knew that we were pretty good at helping individual companies think about value, stakeholders and commercialization pathways at a very early-stage, but could we create something that was both people-oriented and scalable? We didn’t know, but with the support from the AFRL in Rome, we had an opportunity to find out.

After months of going back-and-forth about taking the leap to Rome, Alex and I decided to leave our fairly lucrative careers to work with… umm… government? Now, I know what you’re thinking and I agree completely. But bear with me here.

In 2014, we camped out in Upstate New York and began with the ‘familiar’. We created the Commercialization Academy, where we paired New York university students with AFRL technologies and, in three months, were able to create 5 new startups with licenses and venture potential.

For the community and the AFRL, this was a big ‘win’, as it sent a signal that the technologies at the lab were accessible and viable, but we knew that in order to create a sustainable effort, we needed to do more both ‘upstream’ to mine new IP, and ‘downstream’ to make sure that each technology could be capitalized by the right partner in the right community.

In 2015, we worked closely and diligently with partners, specifically the Griffiss Institute in Rome, NY, and the Entrepreneurs Center (TEC) in Dayton, OH, to create processes to ‘unlock’ technologies from the labs, find ideal partners to help investigate the potential for each technology, develop deep national networks of corporations, investors, universities and accelerators to help capitalize and accelerate each technology, and, finally, develop relationships with each AFRL lab and their technology transfer office to ensure a smooth licensing process.

The result? We handed off the Commercialization Academy to a Silicon Valley and Boston-based venture firm, Wasabi Ventures. We helped TEC implement the Technology Assessment Program (TAP), a student-based startup accelerator in Dayton. We worked with TEC to setup Application Discovery events, researcher workshops and university courses. We were offered and accepted Advisory Board positions with TechLink, the Department of Defense’s partner organization that helps with licensing. We’ve also seen TEC brilliantly pull in venture capital to the Dayton region, which was showcased at the inaugural Commercialization Catalyst event last week.

Most importantly, we made a significant investment to develop and deploy a powerful commercialization software platform, ArchiTech, which is a huge step in enabling our intensive process to scale to labs across the nation. Thank you, Alex, for talking me into that investment.

In sum, we’ve had our share of wins and losses, developed great partnerships, had interesting interactions, upset the status quo, created cool programs and probably took a few years off of our lives. Moving forward, we’ll continue working with researchers, labs, local and national partners, students, universities and high-ranking government folks to do some epic work in commercialization.

And we’ll capture it all here for your personal entertainment.

After doing this for a few years, do I think we can create a sustainable and scalable process for federal lab technology commercialization? I still don’t know for sure, but I’m curious…