Technology Transfer: A 21st Century Model for Engineering Education (cont.)

What do you think the state of commercialization education and training is today?

It’s fairly poor or nonexistent. Many engineers in industry know how to build a widget, but they have no idea how to build a company. I have a widget that I built in my garage. Now what do I do with it? How do I sell it? How do I market it? Who’s going to build it for me? How do I file my patents so I can protect my invention? Engineers learn this by accident or by osmosis or just on their own. The learning’s not very structured or formalized – and that’s why we’re doing SITeC.

How did you come up with the idea for SITeC?

For many of the big, successful companies Sequoia has financed over the years, the genesis has been faculty or graduate students at major universities. I thought, what can we do to make USC a bastion where a lot of startups get started? Look around USC – you’ve got leadership capabilities in multimedia technology and in biomedical technology, you have a great medical school, you’ve got a great cinema school and connections to the entertainment industry.  

No other place in the country has a technology commercialization institute. SITeC will be a unique resource – not just for the Viterbi School of Engineering, but for the medical school, the business school, the cinema school and anybody on the USC campus who wants to commercialize a technology.

Can you describe the educational component of SITeC?

Especially for graduate students, we feel we must have courses available that give them exposure about filing patents and IP (intellectual property) protection, the basics of how to start a company, insights into how companies rollout over time. How did Yahoo! become Yahoo! and Intel become Intel? We’re not trying to replace an MBA program. We’re trying to give engineering students some added insight, based on experience.

Aren’t there also people in business who don’t understand the realities of academia? How will SITeC address that?

A lot of business people fail to see the potential of fundamental research and how it can help their company down the road. They’re thinking about the next quarter when they should be thinking about five years out. Some executives view university research as a farm team, as a way to hire students. They sometimes don’t appreciate the work that’s been done [in the lab]. I envision a scenario where we have seminars or sessions for CEOs or for other business people to come in and learn about how USC does research and how things get from the laboratory out into the marketplace. So, there’s an energetic exchange going on at all times.

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