KGI Students Learn the Ropes of Entrepreneurship
Keck Graduate Institute

Classroom theory is all well and good, but in the Applied Entrepreneurship course at Keck Graduate Institute, students take a hands-on approach to creating business plans for “real world” emerging technology companies.

Guided by KGI professor and entrepreneur-in-residence Dr. Molly Schmid and adjunct professor Dr. David Margolese, 35 students recently completed the latest class, culminating with presentations to an evaluation panel that included local entrepreneurs and investors. 

According to Schmid and Margolese, the course teaches students how to evaluate a technology for the purpose of founding a company, by looking at comparable technologies, intellectual property and regulatory issues, and collecting and analyzing primary and secondary market research data.  The students learn to work in teams,negotiate a financing round, prepare a credible business plan and an investor-quality presentation, and then deliver it.

The class participants—who this year included students from the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University—were divided into teams; each team worked with a “client” that was interested in taking a newly developing technology to an entrepreneurial level. The clients included University of California at Riverside; The Morrow Institute; Washington University; RiboSight Technology; and KPCC Southern California Public Radio.

The teams’ “company names”—complete with logo!—and projects included: AdiCell Technologies (the commercialization of adipose tissue for cosmetic surgery procedures); Aprocyte (a novel method for treating sepsis); Digested Solids Unlimited (the production of biogas from dairy cattle waste as a means of developing advanced renewable energy); ChiMark (the development of technology that allows for the expression of RNA in specific tissues); Zeolite Technologies (the prevention of titanium toxicity from implant devices); BioInclusion Technologies (the development of a gene to be used to create more usable land); and Sidewalk Stories (an intrapreneurship program of Southern California Public Radio to create a larger presence in online media).

According to Ben Pavlik, a team member of Digested Solids Unlimited, the Applied Entrepreneurship class is “quite challenging” from a scientist's perspective because there is no one "right" answer to a problem.  “The projects allow students to be creative and explore the multi-faceted challenges that are presented to entrepreneurs,” says Pavlik.  “Integrating a technology into society is not an easy task, and does not necessarily rely upon the ultimate utility of the technology.  Students learn that a new future paradigm must be laid out in a business plan and presented to others in a logical, concise manner which can convince investors.”

Panel evaluator member Jon Lasch, director and COO of the University of Southern California’s Alfred E. Mann Institute, believes the Applied Entrepreneurship class is valuable to students like Pavlik because they are able to apply both their previous scientific and business course work to an integrated, practical, real-world process. 

“Learning how to source and filter technologies, in order to find suitable ones for commercialization, is valuable whether they decide to start a company or work in a large company,” he says.  “Understanding market analysis, management issues, intellectual property issues, and many other aspects of running a company is key to their success in bridging many disciplines, no matter where they work.  Being able to construct business/strategic plans and then communicate them to investors or management are critically important skills.”

The value to the “client,” Lasch continues, is that the final plans and recommendations are usually very worthwhile because the clients have the benefit of independent analysis that has been methodically developed over time, increasing the probability of finding a successful way forward.

The recently completed entrepreneurship presentations were “outstanding,” says John Tillquist, also an evaluation panel member and vice president of Tech Coast Angels. “The students clearly got value from preparing and defending practical business plans,” says Tillquist. “And the companies they represented got a valuable lesson in the commercialization of technologies.”

Tillquist says that as an angel investor he sees a lot of companies looking for money.  “Many are founded and run by academics, physicians, scientists, engineers, and other technically oriented careers,” he remarks. “It is the rare individual who has both the interest and training for technical sciences as well as the background and experience forsuccessfully running a company.”

In coming up with business plans for their clients, says Tillquist, students must have the training, ability, and experience it takes to define a successful company, and they must be able to speak the language of the inventor to both craft the appropriate business around the technology and translate innovation into commercial application.

"The KGI students did a wonderful job doing both,” says Tillquist.  “I encourage all of the groups to continue developing their plans and, hopefully, get to the point where they would pitch their companies to the Tech Coast Angels.”  

That’s just what Ben Pavlik has in mind, and is hoping that Digested Solids Unlimited  will eventually reach the investment stage.  To that end, he and his teammates  will be entering this year’s Clean Tech Open  to compete against other new "green" technologies.

“My drive to see this technology employed at dairy farms is to create a positive environmental influence in a market-driven way,” says Pavlik.  “At our current regulatory and philosophical stage in society, this seems to me to be one of the only ways to create environmental change on a large scale.  By tying the interests of the environment to those of investors, we can enact positive change in the currently available avenues of business.”