Professors blend academics, business

When ORFE professor Warren Powell started his first company in the 1980s, he was met with some surprised reactions.

"But Warren, Princeton doesn't do anything useful!" he recalled his colleague, Jean Mahoney of the University's Office of Research and Project Administration, saying.

Powell, who directs the Program in Engineering and Management Systems and has been a part of two startup companies, said he founded the company "despite the University."

He is not the only person, though, to cross the boundary between academia and industry.

In the 2004 fiscal year, 462 new companies based on "academic discovery" were started up, according to a report released this month by the Association of University Technology Managers. For U.S. educational institutions, the amount of invention disclosures, research funding and licensing to companies are all up.

The University, however, was not among the top 22 schools that drew more than $10 million from licensing its discoveries.

"Princeton's philosophy has never been to go after the income," said Joseph Montemarano, who directs industrial liaison and government outreach at the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials. "[The focus is on] working creatively with companies."

Powell agreed that the University takes a different approach to business. "Other schools need to spend a lot of time raising money," Powell said, because the "vast majority of schools don't enjoy Princeton's endowment."

But, he added, since patents and commercial income are "becoming a measure of the quality of an engineering school, we have to start allowing ourselves to be measured the way other schools are."

Until about 10 years ago, the technology transfer office, which deals with licensing University inventions to companies, "was nothing like the office at MIT and Stanford, where they truly understood university-industry interaction," Montemarano said. "The arrival of John Ritter marked a serious upgrading."

Ritter, director of the Office of Technology Licensing, said that the University is generally "very supportive" of faculty working with the commercial sector.

"Just to maintain our rankings and prestige, we can't say, 'Oh, we're Princeton, and we don't do that,' " Powell said.

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Since then, the University has become more aggressive about getting faculty and student inventions out into the market, Powell said.

But you "can't change faculty culture with a flick of the wrist," which finds commercial activity "dirty [and] messy" and arouses a lot of suspicion, Powell added.

Engineering school dean Maria Klawe encouraged the collaboration when she came to the University in 2001, Powell said.

People who want to work with industry "can be high-energy, high-output people," he explained, and if they are not allowed to work with companies "all it means is that they leave Princeton."

On the other end, people get suspicious when a faculty member starts "looking like the research arm of a company," Powell said.

There are conflict-of-interest safeguards set up to prevent faculty commercial activities from interfering with University duties, including a policy that a professor cannot have another full-time job, like being the CEO of a company.

Powell is concerned, however, by the fact that, "[i]f a faculty member wants to do something out of the ordinary, we have to discuss it with our chair," because faculty are then subject to the biases of other faculty members. "Chairs tend to form policy based on their own personal experiences," he said. Powell said he feels that these issues should be handled by a faculty committee familiar with both university policies and faculty practices.

Montemarano said he feels that what originally "caught the University's attention was that the Ph.D. theses [done inside industry] didn't look any different or were of higher quality." That made people ask, "why not go in a direction that also can have a societal impact?" he said.

When Montemarano first came to the University, the University was working mostly with Fortune 500 companies. He worked as an "interface" between the University and smaller companies making sure that "University bureaucracy" didn't negatively impact these companies, while still putting them through a rigorous "screening and building process."

Partnerships between University and industry may be growing, but they are by no means simple to develop.

Montemarano said that one of the major trials of moving into the commercial sector was that "we weren't particularly good at communicating value" to possible partners. They rely on small companies to help "transition a technology to make others predisposed to adopt it."

For example, a small company he has partnered with took some complex technology created at the University and put it in a cell phone to make a full-color display finally. This idea sparked the interest of a company that Montemarano had been pursuing for years interested.