Over the summer of 2010, faculty and executive administrators from Stevens delivered a workshop in Malaysia on innovation and transforming academic research into startup companies at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM).
"Present day Malaysia is a relatively new country with a long, rich cultural history, and it is aggressively seeking to expand its economy, create jobs, build prosperity and promote social advances," explains Dr. Lex McCusker, Associate Dean of the Wesley J. Howe School of Technology Management at Stevens.
"It is looking to all its research universities and especially to its national educational institution, UKM, to usher in the next-generation of research and development that will grow its economy and develop the technologies of the future."
Funded by the Malaysian Ministry of Education to help accelerate the commercialization of Malaysian university technology, Stevens offered its Workshop in Capacity Building in Innovation Technology Transfer and University Start-Ups in Malaysia in the summer of 2010. The workshop included customized lectures, case studies, hands-on exercises and personal coaching for 120 professors, researchers, university staff, business professionals, and government officials in Malaysia.
"The workshop is designed for university researchers, faculty and administrators as well as government officials, entrepreneurs and investors with an interest in university-based technology commercialization," says Malcolm Kahn, Vice President of Enterprise Development and Licensing at Stevens.
"We provide an interactive experience with state-of-the-art collaboration tools such as ID8 Systems (http://www.id8systems.com), a revolutionary concept for tapping into organizational talent and ideas, and we mentored participants through the entire process from idea generation to a final presentation of the plan for a start-up company to investors and government and university officials."
The workshop was delivered in three phases.
- one week of on-site seminars and exercises using 15 Malaysian technologies where participants were taught how to build businesses and create business plans,
- a six-week interim session where Stevens personnel virtually mentored each of the groups while they performed market research and refined their business plans, and
- on-site coaching where each of the 15 teams worked with the team of Stevens mentors over a three-day period in further developing their business plans.
The workshop used a practical, hands-on, experiential style of pedagogy that is commonly used at Stevens.
Stevens Institute of Technology has been at the forefront of innovation and entrepreneurship since its founding by the 19th century entrepreneur Edwin A. Stevens. The Office of Academic Entrepreneurship (OAE) seeks to redefine the traditional university-industry technology transfer process by creating an unconventional entrepreneurial solution: the Academic-Innovation-Transfer process. OEA seeks to establish an open system in which diverse partners combine their complementary expertise to create technological innovations that lead to successful market ventures.
The mission of the OAE is to initiate academic entrepreneurship at the faculty level and achieve support for such activities at the administrative level. Education, outreach, and events hosted by the OAE encourage entrepreneurial behavior through fostering and nurturing an entrepreneurial culture throughout academic communities.
Visit OAE online: http://www.stevens.edu/entrepreneurship/