Tim Sprinkle

Innovation: Come Together

Entrepreneur magazine
June 2006

Ah, college – football games, house parties, and late night study sessions. But the nation's campuses are about more than just entertaining the under-21 set; they're also brimming with new research and cutting-edge innovations. Commercializing these discoveries is a challenging niche, for sure, but one that entrepreneur Carl Gibson calls essential.

"After 2000, with the meltdown of the capital market, large companies by and large nixed their research arms," says the 46-year-old CFO of Ekips Technologies, Inc. in Norman, Oklahoma. "There's just not the kind of funding mechanism in private industry for scientists to be unfettered in their explorations into some of these areas." As a result, he says, universities have stepped in to fill the void.

And Gibson should know, since Ekips itself is the result of a university "spin-out." Founded by University of Oklahoma professor Dr. Patrick McCann in 1997, the company today is one of the world's leading producers of healthcare-related laser equipment, with $750,000 of revenue in 2005. Their "Breathmeter^tm," for example, is a device capable of diagnosing problems ranging from asthma to breast cancer by analyzing the contents of a patient's exhaled breath. McCann developed the technology and then licensed it from OU via technology transfer – the commercialization process for university-owned intellectual property – bringing Gibson on to manage the transition.

It's pretty typical arrangement, Gibson says, and it allows everyone involved to focus on what they do best – the founder handling the science and the entrepreneur managing the business side.

"In a nutshell, both parties – the university and the outside world – they need each other," explains Dr. Richard Cahoon, executive director of Cornell University's Center for Enterprise, Technology, and Commercialization. "If you want commercialization of university innovations, obviously the outside world can't do it alone. They need the university and its resources. But without commercialization partners, university inventors are like one hand clapping."

Of course, spin-outs are nothing new, particularly at large, research-oriented schools like Stanford and M.I.T. But growth in innovation-driven sectors like technology and the life sciences has brought more universities into the game, and these days you can find technology transfer offices on just about every campus in the country.

Says Cahoon, "Universities are becoming much more committed to participating in this whole area. Society, the public in general, and states that fund universities have stepped up their expectations, so there's been a growing expectation that the university will play a role in technological development."