UCLA, USC, Caltech receive joint grant to foster tech entrepreneurs

UCLA, USC and Caltech will receive a three-year, $3.5 million joint grant from the National Science Foundation in the coming months to run programs for entrepreneurial education, the foundation announced last week.

The grant comes from Innovation Corps, also called I-Corps, an initiative of the NSF established in 2011. The funding, which the universities will split, will go toward various entrepreneurial programs.

“The focus is on trying to commercialize technology – moving it out of the lab and into the marketplace,” said Schaffer Grimm, manager of strategic business planning at the UCLA Engineering Institute for Technology Advancement.

UCLA, USC and Caltech now comprise a newly formed Southern California I-Corps node, a region with schools funded by the program. The I-Corps program currently comprises seven regional nodes composed of about three schools each. The nodes all receive grants to promote entrepreneurial education in several ways.

Annually, each regional node hosts an intensive, seven-week national training program with about 24 teams of researchers from around the country. The event aims to give researchers knowledge about entrepreneurship as well as funding so they can eventually commercialize their technology.

Event attendees must be part of a team including an entrepreneurial lead, a principal investigator and a mentor who usually specializes in a specific industry, said Nathan Wilson, visiting assistant professor at the Anderson School of Management.

Like other nodes, the Southern California node will host its own regional programs, which will be held at one of the three universities and available to people affiliated with any university in the Southern California region. The node is currently considering holding training sessions two to five times a year, with some sessions tailored to specific industries, such as for start-ups involved in the aerospace industry or the healthcare system.

Grimm said the programs aim to help researchers make connections with potential mentors, learn how to get customer feedback, understand the market and pricing schemes and learn how to get a company up and running.

The programs will bring together people from the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, the Business of Science Center and Anderson School of Management.

“At UCLA, one of the main goals is to strengthen the integration between the engineering school, business school and medical school (and facilitate) technology commercialization,” said Wilson, who will be a program instructor for the upcoming national training session in October.

Brian Bender, a UCLA graduate student of bioengineering, said he thinks the I-Corps programs would have been helpful when he was creating SonoSpecs, a start-up company founded by UCLA graduate students.

While taking a class on bioengineering innovations, Bender and three other students came up with the idea for SonoSpecs, glasses that project an ultrasound during an operation, so that doctors don’t have to turn their heads to view the screen while working on a procedure.

“Because our team only recently added an MBA student, having a mentor that could talk about market strategy or pricing strategy would be extremely helpful, even now,” Bender said.

Because none of the SonoSpecs founders have any prior business training, Bender said he is eager to pursue any opportunity to learn more about entrepreneurship and will apply to the I-Corps program.

“From what I’ve read and seen, the Los Angeles area in general has really been growing in terms of entrepreneurship and start-ups,” Bender said. “Tying it together with these top-notch universities is a good idea.”

USC will host the first Southern California national cohort in October, a joint effort between UCLA, USC and Caltech.