Session IV. The Academic and the Entrepreneur: the Building Blocks of Future BusinessCo-chair: Muhammad Hussain, VP for Global Business Development, IBM Presenter: John Butler, Director, The IC² Institute, University of Texas at Austin (John.Butler@mccombs.utexas.edu; Sheri.Gonzalez@mccombs.utexas.edu) Presenter: Ricardo Romo, President UT, San Antonio U.S. Department of State (DehganAO@State.gov ) Note taker: Jane Dennison, AAAS Science Policy Fellow, U.S. Department of State (DennisonJE@State.gov ) SUMMARY The building blocks of future business between academics and entrepreneurs are based on wealth creation, although this may occur in different ways and even at different scales. The basic needs, however, are the same. They require academics to better understand how to be entrepreneurs in order to create wealth. This requires counseling, mentorship, and professional assistance to learn how to be entrepreneurs, coupled with connections to capital, either through private investors, capital markets, or businesses. To achieve these goals, academics must learn to understand market economies, technology transfer, and entrepreneurship, and develop the methodologies to combine these skills and translate them into wealth creation. The benefits are tremendous since for the first time, universities, businesses, and governments are combining to create wealth based on the resources that are in large supply in academia – innovation and human capital – and in large supply in business – entrepreneurship. We are already starting to see this pairing process in key countries in the developing world – such as China and India – where such collaborations have helped jump start their economies. Although we must identify best practices around the world in developing partnerships between the academic and the entrepreneur, we must ensure that they are narrowly tailored to local contexts. This also invites the input of those who are experienced in business in these markets as mentors. NARRATIVE OF SESSION How do we engage academia in entrepreneurship, small business development, and wealth creation within the developing world? What are the requirements to achieve this mission, and what lessons may we taken from existing attempts to engage the academic and the entrepreneur. IC2 (http://www.ic2.utexas.edu ) One such example is the Institute for Innovation and Creativity (IC2) at the University of Texas Austin, a strategic center for technology commercialization. IC2 is a catalyst organization that studies wealth creation and capital, with a mission to engage in cutting-edge research that will enhance solving of problems related to market economies, growth and prosperity, with the essential goal of creating wealth around the world. Its mission is to link innovation, creativity and capital found in academia, business, and government. In essence, IC2 is a “think and do tank.” The theories and hypotheses developed at IC² are “tested in life-scale” through several world-recognized programs: the Austin Technology Incubator, the Bureau of Business Research, to provide Texas leaders with research data to strengthen the state’s economy, the Global Commercialization Group, to catalyze emerging knowledge-based economies throughout the world, and a Master of Science in Science & Technology Commercializationdegree program to equip students to transfer technologies from the lab to the marketplace. The methods that IC2 uses bring together entrepreneurs with academics, but also erase traditional disciplinary lines within academia. The focus instead is to organize academics around specific entrepreneurial problem-solving. At UT Austin, IC2 brings together the colleges of communication, education, engineering, liberal arts, the Graduate School of Business, the Institute of Latin American Studies, the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the School of Social Work, and information services. Such interdisciplinary approaches are important to bring a multidimensional approach to challenges that frequently require complex solutions. Moreover, Austin Technology Incubator, located on the campus, complements the activities of the Institute’s academic strengths by bringing two additional elements – capital and experience. IC2 has also sought to internationalize. The IC² Global Commercialization Group designs and delivers technology commercialization programs based on proven methodologies for wealth creation and access to global markets with the goal of generating early results with sustainable outcomes. Projects are fine-tuned through technology assessment, company screening, training programs, access to markets, advisory networks, and partners to generate the required strategic outcomes in a region - rather than individual countries - to minimize risk to investors, governments, and entrepreneurs, and to determine, for each environment, the best mechanisms of wealth creation. Project adaptation to specific local economic strategies and needs is very important in the incubator. For example, why did a $6.5 million grant in Poland result in no profit? It turned out that the notion of “profit” was not understood in Poland. The problem was resolved after training in basic capitalism. Another example is the Jordanian Science and Technology Incubator (JSTI). JSTI is a privately funded, for-profit technology and research and development platform. JSTI selects technologies that have already been preliminarily developed, and brings them in-house for commercialization and launch. Technologies are identified from a number of sources, including the elite Jordanian and American Universities. JSTI was developed through a partnership with IC2 and the Jordanian Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation. A similar incubator has been created in Kazakhstan. IC2 and lessons learned Through its practices, IC2 has identified the following strategies for successful partnerships with academics and entrepreneurs in developing countries. (1) Take a transdisciplinary approach to education and in your outlook. (2) Constantly seek out and involve local input. (3) Create wealth based on technology transfer (4) Build regional projects, rather than national projects to minimize risks, and expand markets. (5) Worry less about intellectual property rights, than about bringing investors to the University. (6) Support property rights and the rule of law. (7) Build relationships and trust, particularly between new ideas, wealth, and governments. University of Texas at San Antonio Small Business Center Another example is the Small Business Development Center at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The Center was originally created to build endemic entrepreneurship and self-reliance for small businesses in southwest Texas. However, in 2001, it exported this model abroad to Mexico by participating in USAID’s Training, Internships, Exchanges, and Scholarships (TIES) Program. TIES, which started in 2001, links U.S. and Mexican universities in finding innovative solutions to development challenges. This has provided linkages between the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Small Business Development Center and the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara. The TIES programs allows UTSA to export its entrepreneurship model to Mexico with the goal of helping stem the loss of Mexico’s talented workforce to the United States through job creation. Unlike IC2, The SBDC operates at a smaller, but equally important scale.The Center focuses on training in how to set up and run a business and be competitive, and it provides business counseling and mentorship. It also helps by connecting students/entrepreneurs to banks, since capital is essential to business start-ups and expansions. The university interacts with the private sector through an organized capital network of wealthy people who are willing to take risks in order to help create new companies. The Center is more focused on smaller and less technical companies, understanding that the knowledge needed for more technology-intensive companies like those using biotechnology is completely different. Key Concepts Both, IC2 and the UT San Antonio Small Business Development Center, although considerably different in approach, scale, and goals, share a few elements. They both find that connecting academic with capital markets is a necessary threshold for success. IC2 looks for wealthy individuals in developing countries who can serve as investors and mentors. The UT San Antonio Small Business Center seeks to connect academics with banks. Both institutions use connections of wealthy people to help create greater entrepreneurship and provide mentorship and are dependent on the combination of innovation and entrepreneurship. Finally, both institutions are focused around creativity and innovation as the key to solving economic challenges in the developing world. |
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