 |
 |
It Could Be Contagious...
Click here for a printer friendly version
of this article (56k)
Perhaps Virginia Tech's Fiber & Electro-Optics Research
Center (FEORC) is an example
of contagious entrepreneurship. Since its establishment in 1985,
17 companies have spun off from the research group - the largest
number of any single group in the university.
The very first company, Fiber Techniques, was started by a staff
member to install optical fiber networks in business parks. The
next, a group effort called Fiber Micro Optical Devices, was
started by students who had industrial experience before starting
graduate school.
 The largest, and
as of now the most successful spin-off, Fiber & Sensor Technologies,
was also begun as a group effort, involving students, staff members,
and faculty members. The firm recently changed its name to Luna
Innovations and is active in the areas of advanced instrumentation
and materials technologies. Luna's products range from highly
sensitive biosensors for discovering new pharmaceuticals, to
novel materials. The firm has been selected as one of Virginia's
fastest growing private high technology companies, and has made
it to the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies.
More recently, companies have been formed by students and alumni
- some who worked for F&S - and were exposed to the thrills
and challenges of start-up firms.
One of the most recent start-ups, ACT Microdevices, Inc., is
a micromachining technology company that was established in 1996
by four students who met in the FEORC laboratories. The firm
was located near the university to allow two of the partners
to complete their graduate education. ACT currently offers services
and products to Fortune 500 companies in volume silicon micromachining,
thin film coatings and metallization, semiconductor wafer processing,
waveguide, and fiber alignment, and MEMS research and development.
According to FEORC director Rick Claus, the spin-off firms have
been started for many reasons: desperation, boredom, anger, scientific
interest, the desire to earn big money, even just wanting a job.
"We haven't encouraged this," he said. "All of
these companies were serendipitous. We had people in FEORC with
certain personalities and many different motives.
"I don't know why we've had so many start-ups," he
continued. "I do not think it is because we are geniuses.
There is nothing special in the water. Our technical area is
not even that hot," he said.
One possibility he offered is the way in which students at Virginia
Tech learn the field. "We don't have a whole lot of courses
in optics in electrical engineering," he said. "What
that has meant is that we teach optics to our students at night
or on Sunday afternoons. We have a meeting with the students
and wind up lecturing. Sometimes the post docs snicker, but the
undergraduate and grad students soak it up. Perhaps since we
as a department and college were not able to spoon-feed the students,
they had to learn it themselves. They learned it by working with
optics in our laboratories. This gave them self confidence."
Effect of Start-ups on Students
 Enough FEORC students
have been involved in start-ups as founders or employees, that
some patterns have become noticeable. "I think it makes
them look at their degrees in a different way," Claus said.
"The students working for companies are not graduate research
assistants. They are paying to go to class and want to get something
out of each meeting. They can get frustrated that we do not teach
what they want to know... They have a higher sense of immediacy
that we do not see in other students."
Students at start-up firms also tend to take longer obtaining
their degree, he said. "There is a limit to how many classes
they can take; how much they can stuff into their lives and still
be effective in their jobs."
Faculty Involvement
About half of FEORC's spin-offs have involved faculty members,
and during the Center's 15 years, the extent of faculty involvement
has changed along with the university's and state's changing
attitudes toward start-up firms.
Prior to about a decade ago, faculty members, as state employees,
were discouraged from owning more than 3 percent of a company,
Claus said. During that time, when faculty members were involved
in start-up firms, it was more often in larger groups, where
the shares were minimal.
In 1985, however, when FEORC was founded by the Center for Innovative
Technology (CIT), "we were told
that one of our jobs as a Technology Development Center was to
create new companies," Claus said. "So, we were being
told by the state community to start companies."
In 1990, Virginia clarified the conflict of interest law. "To
us as state employees, that change in the law looked like a green
flag signal - the state was saying, 'look, we are removing this
barrier.' Between the CIT and the law, we felt we were being
pushed into entrepreneurship," he said.
"Now the $64,000 question is, how do we optimize the involvement
of faculty members in companies and at the same time optimize
their involvement in the university system? We as faculty are
supposed to be evaluated on teaching, research, and extension.
You can only put entrepreneurship into one category and you need
to do your work to cover the other areas. You cannot replace
all three. That's where the conflict comes from."
|
