Center to link academic research, markets
Are the state's colleges and universities leaving marketable research and technologies sitting on shelves gathering dust?
Kenan Sahin, one of the serial entrepreneurs who have enriched Massachusetts, thinks so. At his latest company, Tiax LLC in Cambridge, he has been focusing not simply on innovations but on the implementation of innovations -- whether they come from Tiax's laboratories or from the labs of its commercial and academic partners.
Now he wants to get educational institutions thinking along the same lines. So next month Tiax will open an Innovation Implementation Center at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst to introduce a culture of ''upstream implementation" in academic research labs.
Sahin defines upstream implementation as a process in which innovators and market strategists identify the highest value applications for new technologies and build prototypes of products. He sees this as the most promising and viable future model for the state's technology businesses, supplanting the old mass production model.
''Upstream is high-value added and requires lots of cerebral power," he said, suggesting products could be designed and developed here and then licensed to low-cost producers elsewhere. ''Academics are superb at starting things, lousy in finishing them. Our contention is that if Massachusetts focused on creating this upstream implementation, we could create new industries and keep a lot of value in the state."
One of the goals of the new center, to be co-chaired by Sahin and Mike Malone, dean of the UMass College of Engineering, will be grooming a corps of ''implementation engineers" expert in finding commercial applications for the innovations Sahin believes are being generated at unprecedented rates.
Toward that end, the UMass center will be developing implementation textbooks, running clinics, and offering the services of Tiax consultants skilled at matching ideas and markets.
Sahin, a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who founded and ran billing software firm Kenan Systems before selling it to Lucent Technologies, isn't the only area technologist working to bring more university research into the marketplace. MIT's 3-year-old Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, which funds early-stage research and connects MIT innovators with ''catalysts," was started by another serial entrepreneur, Gururaj ''Desh" Deshpande, cofounder and chairman of optical networking firm Sycamore Networks. Deshpande, like Sahin, is concerned about high-potential ideas being bottled up in labs.
Malone, who has been talking with Sahin about the UMass project since late last year, sees its mission as improving the ''handoff" from university research labs to the marketplace. With the Amherst campus doing more than $100 million of research last year, Malone thinks there is a potential to commercialize a much higher volume of research in fields such as electronics, biology, and nanotechnology.
''US corporations are looking more to universities for research and development," Malone said. ''Research done at university labs is going to be an engine that will drive the economy in the future."
Sahin, who sits on the executive committee of the Council on Competitiveness, a consortium of American industrial, university, and labor leaders, warns of an ''innovation backlog" -- of promising research projects that don't enter the market -- slowing expansion of the nation's high-tech economy. He is also concerned about research ideas ''leaking" out of schools in Massachusetts and other states and being implemented overseas. Tiax, which he formed in 2002 to acquire the assets of Arthur D. Little's technology and innovation business in 2002, is dedicated to enhancing and finding markets for new technologies.
''While innovation is so important, it's the implementation of innovation that creates value," Sahin said. ''We have a huge backlog of innovation, and we keep adding to it. But implementation has slowed. You can put it on the shelf, but its shelf life is not too long."
Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com. 