The University as a Center of Innovation

In this article, Villgro Fellow Jeanne Chen explores the role that universities play in social enterprise and innovation.

Innovators are everywhere – from slum dwellers who find new uses for waste materials to technology developers. However, not all innovations can be commercialized, and at the same time, many great innovations are left uncapitalized. It remains a difficult task for social investors and innovators to find each other.

One innovation ecosystem which has drawn a lot of attention is Silicon Valley’s university-driven model. Academic research centers are the perfect, fertile ground for incubating potential great ideas and turn them into viable innovations. The only question is how do we replicate the Silicon Valley model elsewhere. As the New York Times article “The Idea Incubator Goes to Campus” reports, a number of university campuses are establishing “proof-of-concept” centers to help test and develop great ideas. While certain top research-heavy universities (e.g., Harvard, MIT, Stanford) already have strong technology transfer support systems for their innovators, many other universities around the country are beginning to adopt the model. Most recently, the US government has allocated $12 million to funding this proof-of-concept model.

These proof-of-concept centers are a bottoms-up approach to funding innovations. Directly at the source of where many great ideas are born, the incubator centers in universities help innovators realize ideas that may not have been carried forward otherwise. The NY Times article provides a number of great examples of innovations which have flourished with the help of tech transfer and incubating experts. Lantos Technologies (www.lantostechnologies.com), which makes a 3-D scanner was the brainchild of an MIT professor, who might not have commercialized the idea if not for the support of MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation.   The Deshpande Center is just one of many across the US, which provides consulting advice for innovators on how to commercialize their idea from providing support for technology transfers to raising capital.

It seems to me that there are few key advantages to this university innovation model:

1. Universities are the nature breeding ground for great ideas – the free flow of information between students, faculty, and visiting lecturers is more likely to spawn innovative thinking than anywhere else
2. Academic centers offer a ready support network for development – academic centers tend to be a microcosm of expertise that exist in the real world, condensed onto a small parcel of land
3. Participants of university life have more time to dedicate to innovations – one of the challenges of following through with an innovative idea is balancing that work with the quotidian job that is your sustainable livelihood

Therefore, the logical thing to do, as the US has begun to do is:

1. 1. Establish support centers to help develop and test ideas – employ experts in technology transfer or venture fundraising to guide likely innovators and entrepreneurs
2. 2. Create capacity building programs to encourage more innovative thinking – have classes on innovative design, entrepreneurship, and venture creation
3. 3. Create an ecosystem of innovation exchange between universities – allow for the collaboration between innovators at multiple universities, who have different realms of technological expertise

While the academic innovation hub concept is starting to grow in the US, this concept is still relatively foreign in India. Although social enterprise has bloomed within the last 5 years on college campuses, with many of the new innovations coming out of IITs and IIMs, there still remains a large gap between the innovators and social investors. Some campuses are luckier than others, like IIT Madras that has the support of Rural Technology & Business Incubator (RTBI), which has incubated a number of successful social enterprises. Yet, the majority of India’s campuses remain an untapped wealth of bright ideas.

Enter Villgro’s My Idea Program and capacity building program. I was immediately reminded of these more under the radar programs that Villgro operates when I read the article. The My Idea Program hosts capacity building workshops at regional technology universities, helping young entrepreneurs understand how to get started on their own ideas. Villgro is also piloting a social entrepreneurship minor with IIT Madras, which allows some of the brightest engineering minds in the country to think about their ideas within the context of social entrepreneurship. While, these initiatives are still nascent, an expansion of such programs across India would certainly help to diminish some of the gap between great ideas and commercially viable innovations.