EARLY IN HIS CAREER Ned Weinshenker decided to forego a tenure-track assistant professorship at a land grant university on the East Coast because he didn't want to be confined to one discipline. Having studied with a Nobel Prize winning chemist at Harvard, he understood the value of collaboration, the synergy of it when great ideas spontaneously combust out of conversations among curious specialists. "This professor was very accessible. But when you walked up to him and said, 'I have this idea,' he would challenge you and make you prove it. He was absolutely brilliant and his methodology rubbed off on you."

Weinshenker, a chemist with a PhD from MIT and a postdoc from Harvard, left academia for a research post in the pharmaceutical industry. The opportunity to interact with physicians, engineers and biochemists in an even livelier marketplace of ideas tantalized him. But he didn't abandon academia, which had fostered the creativity and critical thinking skills that helped mold him into a managerial motivator of prolific patent-producing teams and from there to author one venture capitalist success story after another. As his stature grew, Weinshenker taught occasionally at Stanford, advised the College of Science at the University of Utah and mentored MBA students at Westminster College.

The move from altruistic Ivory Tower to corporate bottom line occurred before the passage of a federal act in 1980, which allowed universities to hold patents and commercialize the inventions of their faculty. The Internet was still in its infancy, and the communicating and collaborating across specialties and state and national boundaries had yet to flourish.

Today, as USU's vice president for strategic ventures and economic development, a new position, Weinshenker is back in academia, demonstrating what research can do for an entire state. When he isn't organizing conferences on personalized medicine and fossil fuel and renewable energy, he spends part of his time in downtown Salt Lake City at the Utah Governor's Office of Economic Development, where he used to work, and the bulk of his time on the USU Logan campus, consulting and strategizing.

Two of Weinshenker's campus colleagues are in charge of the university's technology commercialization office. "The process begins with a professor solving a problem in the lab," says director Steven Kubisen, another recent hire with corporate and academic credentials as impressive as Weinshenker's. "Our office evaluates the technology for its technical and commercial feasibility. If the technology passes those two tests, then we file a patent." The university keeps the intellectual property rights, and the royalties, which are shared by the university and its inventors, support further technology research ventures, and undergraduate and graduate student research assistantships.

Sometimes the office licenses the technology to an existing company. Other times the technology seems just right for a startup. "To form a company, you need a commercially viable technology, people with the right skills, and money," says Kubisen. "So we link an interested party with the most logical investors and the appropriate technical specialists on campus. Because these companies have no revenues when they start, we connect the founders to federal grants that fund development of commercial products and private investors in the startup phase."
"We're a bridge between cultures," a translator of "the language of the university researcher and the language of the business entrepreneur" so that they can communicate with each other, says Kubisen's colleague, Henry Nowak.
"Management team, management team, management team," Nowak will say to an aspiring small business owner who seeks his business plan advice. "A great management team with average technology will do well, but an average management team with great technology may fail."

The business of creating new businesses in Utah is just as competitive as it is for young entrepreneurs, USU alumni often, or the occasional graduate student, who want to go into business for themselves. Circling like buzzards are universities with the budgets and corporations with the salaries to pick off the human capital (i.e. the brainpower) that make such ventures possible. That predatory threat rallied Utah business and public university leaders, and elected and hired officials in the Governor's Office and state legislature to the defense with a state-funded economic development initiative. "USTAR (for Utah Science, Technology and Research Initiative) is a whole new ball game for the state," Weinshenker says, "because it's encouraging greater collaboration, which is essential to solving some of the world's problems of today. USTAR is not only interdisciplinary, it is interuniversity. The cooperation between the U and USU goes way beyond anything in the past. Only good can come of that." more