by Tim Akin
FEATURE
The Ventures of
Students Reach out
to Spur Commercialization
At the Big Bang! Business Plan Competition finals on May 19, second-year MBA
student Paul Yu-Yang, who is also pursuing a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering,
presents the technology behind Glycometrix, a
T
here’s a sea change happening at
biotech venture developing a more accurate and
UC Davis. The campus is becoming
cost-effective test to detect ovarian and other cancers.
more proactive in commercializing
research and MBA students at the Graduate
School of Management are diving into the
waters to help bring to shore the most
promising discoveries.
The start-up, which is based on research being done
at the UC Davis Cancer Center and the Department
of Chemistry, won the competition's People's Choice
award as voted by the audience at the event.
With one of the fastest-growing and largest
university research budgets in the nation,
UC Davis manages a portfolio of 324 active
UC Davis is ripe with intellectual property
U.S. patents that generate $44.4 million
and potentially profitable innovations.
annually in royalties and licensing revenues.
Poised to take a bite are venture capitalists,
There’s a concerted effort underway to increase
angel investors and companies looking to
these numbers.
license new technologies.
“The Big Bang! has really helped move forward the commer-
“We see UC Davis as the crown jewel in the region and we
cialization of some UC Davis technologies, and it has played
think the campus is the most incredible untapped resource
a huge role in uniting diverse units on campus that are all
around,” said Scott Lenet, managing director of DFJ Frontier
converging fairly quickly into a powerful breeding ground for
in Sacramento, who is teaching a soup-to-nuts course on
entrepreneurs,” said second-year MBA student Tracy Twist,
venture capital at the GSM.
who recently completed the Sacramento Entrepreneurship
“UC Davis innovates at a level comparable to Stanford,” he
said. “What it doesn’t do is churn out anywhere close to the
number of commercializable technologies.”
Working to help change that, GSM students are priming the
pump at several levels—from organizing and entering new
ventures in the Big Bang! Business Plan Competition, to drafting
a comprehensive strategic plan for the life sciences industry in
the Sacramento region, to partnering with UC Davis inventors
to analyze the market potential of their breakthroughs.
Spinning out university-born research into the marketplace is
a big and growing business. Since 1980, 4,320 new companies
have been formed based on licenses from academic institutions
in North America, 450 of which were created in 2002 alone.
Running royalties on product sales were $1.005 billion, a 19
percent increase over fiscal year 2001, according to statistics
from the 2002 Licensing Survey conducted by the Association
of University Technology Managers.
Academy, which teaches students how to take an idea from
concept to creation of a business.
“The MBA students who ran the competition this year did a great
job of pulling together the different parts of the university,”
said Lenet, who helped judge the finalists and was a sponsor
of the competition. “Research projects on campus are being
explored for commercial value, and venture capitalists are getting to see these as potential investment opportunities—both
of which are goals of the competition.”
At the campus level, the UC Davis Office of Research has
established a new Office of Technology and Industry Alliances,
which has brought under one umbrella several research outreach initiatives, the Technology Transfer Center, UC Davis
CONNECT and a Technology Business Development Program.
The new unit will make it easier for private sector companies
to collaborate with the University. The campus also plans to
open a 38-acre research park in Davis next year to provide
incubator space for start-ups.
Continued on next page
2 • U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I F O R N I A , D AV I S
“We think entrepreneurs are like heroes because they go out in the face of failure
and drive toward success despite the fact that the odds are stacked against them.”
- Scott Lenet, managing director, DFJ Frontier
Across the causeway in Sacramento, the UC Davis Medical
To kick start more entrepreneurial thinking, the UC Davis Office
Center has formed a technology committee to help cultivate
of Research financed a new course at the GSM on evaluating
companies to capitalize on research being done there.
business opportunities. Associate Professor Andrew Hargadon
The Med Center recently hired 2004 GSM graduate Tod Stoltz
co-taught the class with Lenet and the late Charley Soderquist.
to manage technology business development. He’s been making
In the course, students put through the ringer about 100
the rounds. “I’m working with researchers to identify hurdles
innovative ideas—many combed from university intellectual
and to make it so their technology is more interesting to ven-
property databases—to find the diamonds in the rough. Five
ture capitalists or to companies interested in licensing the
student teams each vetted 20 ideas, some of which they brought
technology,” he said.
to class, and boiled them down to the most fundable.
Meanwhile, second-year MBA student Randy Fawcett has been
The result: GSM students are writing comprehensive business
working in the Industrial Partnership and Commercialization
plans for their own ideas and for research being done on cam-
Division at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Using
pus. Several of these were entered in the Big Bang!, including
skills learned in the GSM’s venture capital course, Fawcett is
Glycometrix, which is working on a non-invasive and more
valuing research with strong commercial potential. His data
cost-effective screening test for ovarian cancer.
are giving government intellectual property attorneys an edge
in negotiating deal terms for licensing rights.
Dean Nicole Woolsey Biggart has been building bridges to
create more opportunities for MBA students to help researchers
All this is good news for angel investors and venture capitalists.
develop creative business strategies that can make the social
Financiers are actively looking to back hard-charging risk-takers
and economic benefits of their work a reality.
in the region who have a solid business plan, compelling
technology and a quality management team.
“We’re prophesizing about commercialization,” she recently told the School’s
“The truth is a lot of them will fail,” said Lenet. “But some will
Dean’s Advisory Council. “We have
hit home runs and the Sacramento-Davis region absolutely
the science and engineering prowess.
needs a home run to make people stand up and take notice.”
We need to boost the entrepreneurial
“It won’t happen overnight,” he added. “To do it, we need a
culture.”
bunch of companies to get funded.”
G R A D U AT E S C H O O L O F M A N A G E M E N T • 3