Finding the right fit: inventive Duke students get crash course in commercializing their technologies
What does it take to move an innovative technology from the lab and into the real world?
In the middle of February, several dozen graduate and professional students gathered from across disciplines – budding engineers, businesspeople, doctors, chemists, and more – to tackle just that question.
In the two-day Duke Technology Commercialization Bootcamp, organizers from Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship (I&E), the Office for Translation & Commercialization (OTC), and the Christensen Family Center for Innovation (CFCI) grouped selected applicants into teams based around actual technology developed by participants.
Based on feedback from the inaugural event last year, the organizers tweaked this year’s offering to have fewer participants per team and include a virtual prep session to help the groups gel and hit the ground running.
The technologies selected to build these teams around were also more varied this year. Five teams centered around Duke inventions from a high-performance rubber formulation to digital twins for planning orthopedic surgeries.
“The research we are working on is quite relevant to the society,” said PhD student Yash Shah, who – along with postdoc Andrey Rubin – led a team around a water filtration technology they have been developing in the environmental engineering lab of Associate Professor Leanne Gilbertson. They both want the project to have a real impact, but recognized that they needed help figuring out how to make that a reality.
Talking tech outside the lab
“Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone,” said I&E’s Abby Grubbs to chuckles from the audience as she kicked off the bootcamp. In a way, matchmaking is a crucial component of the program – interacting around a project brings new energy and ideas.
“I’m really excited to bring students from across Duke together to work on these projects,” said Grubbs. “They may have not come together otherwise.”
Presenters led the teams through a crash course of early-stage entrepreneurial questions and considerations, encouraging discussion in the context of their specific innovations.
“When we have a new technology, how do we figure out who will it benefit and who will pay for it?” asked Claire Aldridge, PhD ’96 from Duke Immunology and Genetics and CSO at Form Bio, during her presentation about identifying customer segments and decision making units.
She was back to lecture and support for a second time, having seen the value the students got the previous year. “It was really rewarding to see that click,” Aldridge said.
Interspersed with these expert presentations were various workshop exercise for the teams, leading up to the big one: doing actual customer interviews. The organizers tapped into their global networks of mostly Duke alumni to line up relevant, high-level professionals for the student teams to call.
“There’s really no substitute for getting out there and talking to people,” said CFCI’s Ibrahim Mohedas after his lecture outlining the process of customer discovery calls. “You can do a lot of science without ever speaking to anyone outside the lab.”
Teams returned from their calls with lots of new considerations, especially about how to communicate their technologies.
“I overengineered the pitch,” said Greg Hernandez, an ECE PhD candidate who led the team formed around his metamaterial speaker technology. The team spoke with a Duke alum who is an executive at a large audio equipment manufacturer. “They don’t care about the math, they just want me to solve the problem.”
Building into the future
“Pitching is like defending your PhD: people are just trying to poke holes in your pitch all the time,” said presenter Hunter Newman, CEO of OsteoCure, a healthcare tech spinout from his time as a PhD and postdoc at Duke.
Newman was last up on the first day of the bootcamp, prepping participants for the focus of the second half-day: pitch presentations. The next morning, teams buckled down to put together a short deck building on all the learnings they had received. After each team pitched, fellow participants lobbed questions and experts provided feedback.
In the audience was Andrew Busey, BA ‘93 from Duke Computer Science and co-founder of biotech startups Colossal Biosciences and Form Bio. Busey, who then gave a presentation about these companies, was pleased to see these students being challenged in a way he was not in his time as computer science student at Duke.
“Forcing people to get out of their shells is an important part of growing, and it’s going to matter a lot for pretty much any career, not just entrepreneurship,” said Busey.
Not only did the participants learn a lot about applying entrepreneurial thinking to research they are conducting at Duke, they made strong connections with peers that will last beyond the event.
“The synergy of the group was really good,” said Rubin as the Saturday lunch wrapped up. The filtration team huddled together to create a WhatsApp group to take the project forward and explore other opportunities.
Beyond the Technology Commercialization Bootcamp, the organizers also provide entrepreneurial programming for Duke students and professional trainees, including:
- OTC Fellows, DNV Fellows, and DCP Associates, providing hands-on involvement with real-life Duke technologies and affiliated startups
- The I&E Graduate and Professional Certificate, featuring experiential entrepreneurship coursework
- CFCI PhD Startup Accelerator, guiding students through an evaluation of the commercial potential of their own PhD research
These kinds of experiences will be useful no matter which direction a graduate or professional student chooses to go after graduation.
“You can adapt and leverage the entrepreneurial mindset throughout your academic career, your scientific career, your business career,” said OTC’s Nadine Wong.
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Interested in the next Duke Technology Commercialization Bootcamp? Contact Abby Grubbs at abigail.grubbs@duke.edu.