Category: leadership

Move over MIT, here come the Gators

When you think of U.S. universities that excel in creating high-tech startups and spinoffs, which schools come to mind? MIT, perhaps? Cal Tech? How about the University of Florida?

Florida may best be known for its powerhouse NCAA football and basketball programs. But it’s also among the nation’s leading startup incubators, and thanks to a recent Business Week article spotlighting the school’s tech transfer operation, the Gators may one day rival MIT and Cal Tech as a haven for brainiac startups. (Link via University Business.)

The university that didn’t produce a single startup a decade ago had 13 in 2004-2005, according to the latest annual survey by the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM). That total falls short of MIT, Cal Tech and the 10-campus University of California System, but those universities had better watch their back.

As Business Week reports, the U of Florida is serious about creating business.

The rise is the result of a change in strategy, which boils down to treating intellectual property like merchandise and then marketing these products to targeted customers. In a break from conventional wisdom, the university also shuns its own inventors when it comes to running startups, relying instead on hired guns who have proved they can make a go of business. “Our scientists are very good at science, and they’re at a university because they enjoy research,” notes David L. Day, director of the university’s Office of Technology Licensing. “But I wouldn’t go to my barber for an eye exam. What works best is if they stay in the lab and I go and find a been-there-done-that, made-money-for-investors management team.”

Business Week calls the University of Florida example an “out-of-nowhere success” that demonstrates “there are effective ways to attract capital and nurture campus-born technology industries.” But the success wasn’t accidental. It’s the result of a plan that began in 2000.

Unfortunately, too few universities in the U.S. are following Florida’s example. “Much of American higher education is still struggling to transform ideas into cash,” Business Week explains.

It’s not because of a lack of brainpower or funding. As the Business Week report notes, “University-based research spending has jumped nearly 45% since 2000, to $42.3 billion in fiscal 2005. … Yet the pool of university money earned from license fees has risen at half that pace.”

Florida has clearly decided to invest in business incubation. With a tech transfer staff of 19, the Gainesville university is “in the same upper tier as MIT and Hopkins, though way behind the California system.”

“The licensing office also has an annual budget of $5 million. One of the staff’s duties is to keep tabs on university research to assess what breakthroughs might be worth patenting and licensing. That’s no small task: Florida spent $518.8 million on research in the 2005-06 school year and employs some 4,000 faculty members and 8,000 assistants in its labs.”

Will what worked at Florida work elsewhere? Maybe it’s worth a shot.

From the Global Marketing Summit: David Houle on ‘The Shift Age’

Strategist and marketing consultant David Houle (who has a nice futuristic blog called Evolution Shift) pulled double duty at last month’s Global Marketing Summit — as the ringmaster who got to introduce speakers and make housekeeping announcements, and as a last-minute fill-in for one of the scheduled speakers who got waylaid by a snowstorm.

But Houle was up for the task and presented a broad view of the trends that are changing how we all work, play and exist in this current age (which he’s dubbed the Shift Age).

Houle’s presentation was not as focused on marketing as the other presentations, but that was fine with me. I thought his presentation helped to put in place a context for the shifts facing the marketing and communications world, and helped to set the stage for the rest of the conference. Drawing together ideas popularized by Tom Friedman (The World Is Flat), Marshall McLuhan and others, and intermixing PowerPoint graphs and charts to support his points (and a reference to the forecasts of the Mayan calendar to boot), Houle provided a broad but comprehensive overview of this new era. Personally, I’d love to sit down with the guy over a couple of beers or a cup of coffee to talk more about this stuff. But it wasn’t to be at this conference. Maybe another time.

Houle pointed out three fundamental forces of the Shift Age:

  • The flow to global. Economics have led the way to globalization, followed by politics, then culture.
  • The flow to the individual. The nation-state is becoming an anachronism, and other traditional social institutions — “the pillars of society” such as governments, religious organizations and, yes, even educational institutions — are “being diminished in terms of social impact.” People see themselves more as “global citizens.”
  • Accelerated connectedness. “For the first time in human history, we have a self-awareness of what’s going on around the world.” Expanding on Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the global village, Houle discussed the notion of the Internet as a “neurosphere” (which is also the title of a book that ponders similar ideas).

Next, Houle presented the current realities of the Shift Age as they relate to marketing communications:

  • No gatekeepers. Individuals decide when and where they watch, read, listen. The age of mobile communication, iPods, TiVo and the Slingbox have given individuals more control over when, how and where they will get their information and entertainment.
  • Faster and faster. Everything’s speeding up. Nothing is slowing down.
  • Disintermediation. This term has fallen out of vogue, but Houle would like to see it make a comeback. It means the end of the middleman. It’s happened to the insurance industry (witness the rise of Geico, Progressive, Esurance, etc.), and Houle says it’s about to happen to the residential real estate business. [In some sense, it’s happening in education, too. – ed] To thrive in the era of disintermediation, organizations must either 1.) add value or 2.) lower rates.
  • Power to the people.
  • Say goodbye to long-range planning. Given the current pace of change, who can plan three to five years into the future? Even 18 months out seems like an eternity, and so much can change between now and then.

Anyone interested in this kind of stuff should check out Houle’s blog, Evolution Shift. If you read only one post on his site (but I doubt you can read just one), I recommend it be the one titled New and Threatening Becomes Acceptable and Mainstream.