Early Stage Innovation

Thomas Zurbuchen, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship, describes his students as race cars who rarely get the chance to run anything other than first gear. The Centre for Entrepreneurship grew out of a course designed to give students a chance to get beyond first gear by pursuing entrepreneurial activities in the field of aerospace. For the course, Thomas recruits companies that have problems that combine technology and business with a strong potential for commercialization.

In one example project sponsored by Google:

• Students worked to establish satellite-based Internet cafes in Africa.
• The issues ranged from aerospace to socioeconomic.
• Feasibility was established with three pilot cafes.
• After a study to assess sustainability over 10 to 15 years, and a consortium of which Google is a member is investing to move the project forward.

IP is a thorny and difficult to understand topic. In this segment, Kelly Burris,  attorney at Brinks, Hofer, Gilson, and Lione provides us an overview of the four broad categories of intellectual property:

• Patents — there are three types: utility, design, and plant. In a future segment, Kelly will describe the difference between these types of patents and the process involved in obtaining them.
• Trademarks — These protect brand identification. Again, in a future episode, Kelly will further elaborate on the value of trademarks and the value of obtaining them.
• Copyrights — These are perhaps the easiest type of IP to claim in that it only requires attaching a copyright notice.
• Trade secrtes — As Kelly will explain further in a future segment, trade secrets are information that has value if kept secret. A key point is that reasonable efforts must be extended in maintaining the secrets.

This overview gives a good idea of the types of intellectual property one should consider protecting while bringing an innovative product or service to market. We look forward to future segments for some of the details and practical considerations involved.

Thomas cites two programs that have been critical in fostering connections between the academic and entrepreneurial communities in the first year:

•  The entrepreneurial student group, MPowered Entrepreneurship. It is essentially a self-sustaining network of students that provides energy and direction to the center's activities.
• The entrepreneurship seminar that has connected students to entrepreneurs at both the national and the local level.

As we have noted elsewhere, another component critical to fostering entrepreneurship and innovation is funding. Thomas notes three levels of funding and how they are achieved in the center:

• Initial exploration of the concept. Typically on the order of $10,000. The center has facilities for providing this funding, often in combination with the Zell-Lurie Institute.
• Further development of the concept toward achieving first customers. Typically on the order of $30,000 to $40,000. This past summer the center ran a program with the Detroit Chamber of Commerce where twenty students were paid to work in their own companies. We recently interviewed one of these students, Yue Fan.
• Investment funding in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is the point where the external community can play a strong role.

The idea of the pattern clock is that you have to be awake enough to repeat back a pattern it displays to you, thereby ensuring (hopefully) that you will not fall back asleep.

Fast forward four years, and Yue is a junior at University of Michigan's College of Engineering. He has developed fully working prototypes and has 1000 pre-orders with a potential price of $40. In order to contract the clock out for manufacture at $13/unit, he will need 5000 orders. Finally, he is considering the tradeoffs between selling direct and using retail channels.

Much of this development occurred with the aid of University of Michigan's More Program, a program we hope to cover more in depth in the future.