Boston University graduate student Jonathan Scherer spent the fall semester developing a business plan for new optical cancer detection techniques that will someday allow doctors to use light to identify potentially cancerous cells.
Scherer, a School of Management student, worked on the entrepreneurial side of cutting-edge technology developed by BU researchers in the inaugural semester of eSPRIT – the Entrepreneurial Students Participating in Innovative Technologies. Unlike other business simulations, eSPRIT students and professors said the program gives them the chance to evaluate real-world biomedical technologies and decide where they fit into the economy and how to effectively incorporate them.
“The opportunity to work on a live potential company was an interesting process,” Scherer said. “It wasn’t just working on something that was fabricated.”
Three SMG courses provided students with the option to work in commercialization, creating business plans, performing marketing analysis and handling other technology-related problems for a particular innovation.
Scherer was one of the 17 SMG, College of Engineering and School of Law students to participate in the Institute for Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization program launched this fall, ITEC director Jonathan Rosen said.
Office of Technology Director of Corporate Business Development Michael Pratt and his colleague ENG Director of Biomedical Engineering Jennifer Marron worked with the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation Translational Research Partnership to determine which projects would be best suited for the class work, Pratt said.
The seven biomedical technologies eSPRIT teams worked with last fall were funded by Coulter, which sets highly competitive standards for its beneficiaries, ENG Dean Kenneth Lutchen said.
“It really provided a great win-win scenario; the students get trained in really emerging technologies and some of the best projects for potential innovation,” Lutchen said.
SMG professor Peter Russo, who taught two eSPRIT students in his class last fall, said the opportunity for students to benefit to the university while learning is “as close a simulation as you’re going to find in a business school.”
“This program represents something that can be uniquely Boston University,” Russo said. “There are very few schools that are coordinated the way we are to be able to offer this kind of opportunity to the student.”
Office of Technology Transfer director Ashley Stevens has been teaching a commercialization course for the past several years, but said eSPRIT gives his students the opportunity to continue with their respective projects for more than one semester, working on multiple aspects of necessary research and analysis. Four of the seven eSPRIT projects were completed in his fall semester class, he said.
“It’s one thing to read books about successful technology development projects,” Stevens said. “When you lay it out and you see all the steps, it all looks so logical and obvious. But when we give them a project that is just ready to start emerging from the laboratory . . . I think they get a much more realistic picture of what it’s like to take an early stage technology and get it out of the lab and into the market place.”
ENG senior Jason Debasitis said he was a student in Stevens’s class. He said he and his team compiled a technology assessment and a venture assessment.
“We all really brought in our own expertise and our own experience,” Debasitis said. “We had people with Ph.D. backgrounds and extensive business backgrounds and stuff like that. It really helped us work on different objectives for our project.”
The future of eSPRIT will include projects outside biomedical research as well as ventures abroad, Rosen said.
