Mission Innovation

BYLINE: Kasey, Pam

MORGANTOWN - When David C. Hardesty Jr. became president of West Virginia University more than a decade ago, one of his earliest actions was to begin building a pipeline that would turn research dollars coming into the university into jobs at the other end.

As he prepares to leave the presidency in September, all the parts of the pipeline finally are in place.

That's how long it takes to get a university commercialization program up and running.

"We're having to put in the infrastructure in order to reach our goals in the economic development arena," said John Weete, WVU vice president for research and economic development. 

It's a decade-long pipeline at the minimum: Bring in money for research; get faculty to report their findings; obtain copyrights, trademarks and patents. Then, finally, commercialize by licensing the protected intellectual property to existing companies or by starting new companies.

Now, though, the pipeline is beginning to flow.

Research Funding

Research is the start of innovation and the basis for a university's role in economic development.

A task force established by Hardesty in 1996 set a goal of doubling research funding, according to Weete.

"We needed to grow our research enterprise before we really could do a lot of the things that we're doing on the economic development side now," he said.

The ambitious goal was quickly met. Through the use of an internal grant program to stimulate competitive research, external funding doubled in just four years, from about $60 million in fiscal 1998 to $133 million in fiscal 2002.

And it continues to grow. The $143 million researchers brought in during fiscal 2006 ranks WVU among universities with much older and better established commercialization programs, according to a survey published this year by the Association of University Technology Managers.

WVU is listed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as a Research University / High Activity based on its research funding, research staff and numbers of doctoral degrees awarded.

Only one category is higher.

"That would be your Harvards, your Caltechs, your Johns Hopkins," Weete said.

"We're in that next group where the peers are many land grant universities," he continued. "We would like to be in the top 100. Right now I think we're 117. So we're not far."

Technology Transfer

"Doubling your research funding, that's good," Weete said, "but you really need the infrastructure to translate that into some economic benefits for the state."

That infrastructure includes an office of technology transfer.

WVU established its technology transfer office in 1999 with a small staff and, in July 2005, brought Bruce Sparks on as its first full-time director.

Sparks' office receives faculty and researcher disclosures of new technologies and seeks copyright, trademark or patent protection for those that have commercial promise.

In Sparks' one full year with technology transfer, "events" reported by that office - disclosures and filings for protection of intellectual property as well as other actions - were up by half, to nearly 150.

Fifty-three U.S. patent applications are outstanding, more than half of them filed in the past 18 months. Another 49 international patent applications are outstanding.

And the university now holds 55 patents, 41 of them obtained since the technology transfer office opened.

Business Incubator

The final piece of the commercialization pipeline is turning protected intellectual property to profit. That includes licensing technologies to existing businesses, an activity the university has undertaken with increasing frequency since 1995 but which often takes the profit outside the state.

For starting new businesses locally, the WVU Business Incubator is crucial.

"Prior to having that ... we were basically constrained to licensing to other companies," said former part-time Director of Technology Transfer Bill Pollock after the incubator opened. "We just didn't have the internal ... capabilities in place."

Established in 2003, the incubator now boasts 15 businesses.

Five are housed within the incubator, according to coordinator Sherry White. The rest, either not yet fully up and running or too large for the existing space, receive incubator services, such as use of office equipment and a conference room.

Six of the 15 are true WVU startups - that is, they were formed based on technology developed at the university, White said. They employ at least 35 so far, and some have the potential to employ dozens and more.

When the long-awaited WVU Research Park is complete currently forecast for December 2008 - the incubator will move into a larger space in the new building.

Speeding the Flow

One more thing could speed the flow through the pipeline: seed capital.

"My goal is to have new companies coming out of here every year with technology that we can commercialize," Sparks said.

"Very few of these companies get started without some very early stage seed funding. I've got to have everything from early stage seed capital to first-round, second-round funding," he said. "There needs to be a committed state strategy in venture capital and the technology-based economy we want to build here."

F. Russell Lorince, director of economic development at WVU, agreed.

"We need money (as a state) for those small businesses that don't look so good to, reaching back, Farmers and Merchants Bank," Lorince said. "It's not a machine shop where the bank's loan can easily be collateralized ... this is intellectual property and software and what have you, so we need a new funding mechanism."

A soon-to-be-released economic development study will show that other states are putting more money into technology-based economic development, he said.

"These are investments that the state needs to make," Lorince said, "and on an ongoing basis forever."

A Matter of Culture

The key to all of this, though, is faculty and researcher disclosure.

"Every scientist and professor here on this campus has one of two philosophies," Sparks said. "'I'm here for the knowledge and learning and sharing that learning with everyone,' or, 'I'm here to research, protect and commercialize."'

A researcher's findings may have the potential to make money for someone, he said. "Why shouldn't it be that researcher and WVU as opposed to some other company?"

Linda Carson, WVU professor and co-founder of incubator start-up Choosy Kids, acknowledged the shift that entrepreneurship has required for her.

"That's what I recognize as the significant contribution that the incubator and technology transfer can do here at WVU," Carson said, "is to ... give us permission to do this - because otherwise I think educators tend to feel naughty."

Disclosures are up from just four in fiscal 1998 to 55 in fiscal 2006.

"New professors today coming along in sciences and engineering and medicine, they're more aware of the economic possibilities," Weete said. "Other faculty who maybe have been here longer and are more senior, they weren't trained that way and that was not part of the university's mission earlier on, so we're really changing a culture."