Gainesville Sun - August 19, 2001
By WIN PHILLIPS

Win Phillips is vice president for research and dean of the Graduate School at the University of Florida.

A recent series of seminars at the University of Florida drew standing-room-only crowds and rave reviews.

Yet, the subject was different than education issues, research or politics, the usual big draws at major research universities.

Instead, it was business.

"Entrepreneurship for Scientists & Engineers," six seminars sponsored by a group of UF organizations involved in technology commercialization called the UF Commercialization Council, covered the basics of starting and running a business for an audience of faculty members.

Each of the seminars drew a crowd of around 40 to the conference room at the Evelyn F. & William L. McKnight Brain Institute of UF, with many commenting afterward on the seminars' timeliness and usefulness.

"Those who attended will surely have a greater appreciation for the complexities of starting a business," said one attendee. Said another, "the

seminar series provided valuable insights and contacts."

Teaching entrepreneurship to university faculty? It's just one part of a multi-pronged initiative to pave the way for the transfer of UF-developed technologies from lab to marketplace.

This initiative includes major, well-known efforts such as UF's creation of the Sid Martin Biotechnology Development Institute in Alachua. But our efforts to foster entrepreneurship reach far beyond this first big step.

Among other efforts, we now host visits from venture capitalists, convene roundtable discussions with visiting experts on every aspect of entrepreneurship and are in the midst of establishing a mentoring program for new faculty entrepreneurs.

The idea is to make available guidance and assistance covering every step of the commercialization process, from patenting an idea for a technology to licensing it to a company to attracting venture capitalists to invest in the company.

For the Alachua County community, the result is an increasingly diverse community of small business - no small contribution considering small businesses create the vast majority of new jobs nationally.

For the university, our efforts to foster entrepreneurship help us recruit and retrain top-level faculty and students.

Our success stories begin with the biotechnology institute, which has housed as many as 22 biotechnology startups. Thriving local businesses that got their start at the institute include Ixion Biotechnology, which is developing new treatments for diabetes and kidney stones, and Entomos, which mass produces natural pest control agents.

These biotech-based businesses are steadily being joined by an increasing diversity of other UF-generated companies.

For example, Marcon Global Data Solutions, an information technology company headed by two UF biostatistics professors, recently became the first client of Cenetech.

That's the technology-accelerator company that is the new anchor tenant in the city's new technology incubator, the Gainesville Technology Enterprise Center.

Sigarca Inc. is another UF-generated company. Sigarca markets a clean biotechnology-based system for waste disposal patented through UF

several years ago. Already demonstrated on a small scale, the company's system has generated a significant amount of interest among local

governments nationally and internationally.

Significantly, both biotechnology companies and information technology are among the "target" industries that Alachua County should seek

to nurture and recruit, according to the Council for Economic Outreach.

In a recent study, the organization found that 23.6 percent of Alachua County workers are either not working full time, or not working at a level that reflects their skills or education. The increasing diversity of UF spin-off companies will provide an employment resource.

Research at UF, a $300-million plus annual enterprise, has many direct and indirect benefits for the community, state and nation. We also produce graduates with the education and skills to succeed in today's competitive business environment.

UF's tech-transfer and entrepreneur-nurturing activities are logical extensions of our research and education endeavors. They complete our suite of contributions to the emerging knowledge-based economy.

See August 19, 2001, issue of Gainesville Sun for original article.