Building a bridge from the laboratory to the marketplace, the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science is launching technology firms and aggressively mining industry expertise to help shape research.
Through the school of engineering’s Institute for Technology Advancement (ITA), professors have incorporated eight companies and placed eight more in the pipeline. The firms are attracting investor interest and research funds, while at the same time contributing to the engineering school’s financial health. The Institute for Technology Advancement also works to identify multi-disciplinary research projects attractive to granting agencies and healthcare, electronics and other firms.
“We’re reaching out to the private sector and key agencies, and we’re getting investment in return,” said Dwight Streit, director of the institute and a former executive with Northrop Grumman and TRW Space & Electronics. “We can provide speed and flexibility for organizations interested in getting into new areas of research. And the companies created by faculty or students donate equity to the school.”
Streit, who holds more than 30 U.S. and international patents and is a professor with appointments in UCLA’s departments of Electrical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering, has gathered a team of interdisciplinary experts — from federal agencies including NASA and the Department of Energy and companies including Alcoa and Boeing — to support UCLA Engineering faculty. As a result, ITA has become a one-stop shop for professors looking to launch a start-up, license a product or win a grant.
“A lot of the time, professors are happy to stay in the academic world and publish research,” said Marla Sanchez, a member of ITA’s industrial advisory board and a Silicon Valley consultant for technology firms. “But the research they are coming up with is potentially very beneficial for the world, and there is a big transition to getting it out there.”
Sanchez, a former chief financial officer at the fiber optics firm Avanex Corp. who co-founded Cupertino-based InSite Partners, said ITA advisory board members work to find backers for promising projects and advise researchers on optimizing the commercial potential of their work.
Founded in 2007 with a grant from the Samueli Foundation and bolstered in 2009 with a gift from the Easton Sports Development Foundation, ITA has launched three firms that already have attracted outside investment and paid dividends to the school.
• WaveConnex — Based on the work of Frank Chang, the Wintek Chair in Electrical Engineering at UCLA and chair of the department, the company is developing a silicon chip about the size of a grain of rice that could dramatically improve Internet connectivity and data transfer on wireless devices.
• Holomic — Founded on the biophotonics work of Aydogan Ozcan, an associate professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering, Holomic inventions include portable microscopes and lightweight diagnostic tools that can perform sophisticated blood, water quality and other analyses, transmitting information from the field to labs and hospitals via a standard smartphone.
• Easel Biotechnologies — Easel is pioneering methods of biosynthesizing harmful pollutants and developing low-emission biofuels based on the work of Ralph M. Parsons Foundation Professor James C. Liao, chair of UCLA’s chemical and bioengineering department.
In each case, the companies have donated equity to the UCLA School of Engineering, ensuring that the school will see long-term benefits should the firms prove successful.
ITA also encourages students to think big through an annual entrepreneur competition. Teams — which must include at least one student each from the School of Engineering and the UCLA Anderson School of Management — compete to develop a new piece of technology and a viable business strategy for launching it. With Kay Family Foundation support, the top teams in 2013 will share a $50,000 prize.
William Ouchi, Sanford and Betty Sigiloff chair in Corporate Renewal at the Anderson School, said ITA is helping overcome years of academic reluctance to go entrepreneurial — a hangover from the days when federal funding agencies controlled intellectual property and universities had not seen the upside to working with the private sector.
Now, Ouchi said, “There is very broad agreement across campus and across disciplines that our three missions — teaching, research and serving the community — are greatly enhanced if we have everyone take the fruits of their scholarship all the way to the outside world.”
Streit noted that high-performing university labs increasingly have caught the interest of companies attempting to break new ground.
“We have outstanding faculty with brilliant ideas,” Streit said. “The door is open to partner with UCLA, and the bottom line is it is very good for the school.”
