Bytemarks

The Hawaii Spinout Summit was held this past Thursday as a half day conference that brought together researchers and scientists with entrepreneurs, investors and business people. The idea was to provide a forum to advance the concept of taking intellectual property developed at the University of Hawaii and explore ways of commercializing it, ie spinning it off into a potential businesses. Invited speakers included Katharine Ku from Stanford University, Office of Technology Licensing and Craig Johnson of Virtual Law Partners in Silicon Valley. The panels primarily revolved around how to identify potential spinout opportunities from the University and turn them into successful businesses. One interesting statistic from the Stanford’s OTL is that amongst the 7740 projects that the office has licensed, only 3 represent the lion share of their revenue. One of those three was Google. Katharine Ku told the story of how Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to get initial funding for their project but could not attract the interest of the investment community. Stanford’s OTL licensed the algorithm for the search engine to Google in return for a small percentage of stock in the company. The rest is history. The point being though that there are only a few companies that will hit home runs and it is more about quantity than trying to find the next Google. At the beginning even Google wasn’t identified as a home run. Key takeaways from the summit:

1. It’s a numbers game. The more companies that get started the better the probability of a success.
2. There needs to be better communication amongst the community of UH researchers, OTTED and the investors and entrepreneurs.
3. The winning idea often comes through a series of iterations, never on the first take.
4. Patience needs to be balanced with the objective of turning a profit.
5. Researchers need to seriously evaluate their role in the company. Researchers don’t necessarily make good managers.

Both Stanford’s OTL and Univ. of Hawaii’s OTTED have a database of technologies that could be licensed for potential commercialization. Both Katharine Ku of Stanford and Jonathan Roberts of UH’s OTTED echoed that they want to find ways to license this technology to companies. They both admit, it doesn’t do any good staying in a database.