Taken from The Proceedings of The XX ISPIM Conference 2009 Vienna, Austria - 21-24 June 2009 ISBN 978-952-214-767-7.
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http://www.ispim.org/members/proceedings/ISPIM2009/ISPIM/commonfiles/files/12784630_Presentation.ppt
EDUCATION AND TRAINING PROGRAMS FOR ACADEMIC SPIN-OUT LEADERS
Abstract
Although Hungarian researchers has been created good scientific results and achievements in the past, the research exploitation have not been successful, and in most cases, the deals created in university - industry collaborations were really not for the mutual satisfaction of the parties. This was partly due to the fact that university researchers did not know the needs and the expectations of the industry, and had no understanding about business models and could not asses their own technology in the triangle of "technology" "market" and "people". By now, it is also a common knowledge that the lack of having exact knowledge regarding the industry's expectations, regarding the available business and financing models might also be the cause of failure for academic spin-outs. To solve this problem, Eotvos Lorand University in collaboration with ValDeal, the first Hungarian (and Central European) technology accelerator started its educational and training program for selected university researchers taking part in its research exploitation program in 2007 and in 2008. The training program has been set up in collaboration with IC2 Institute of University of Texas at Austin, and the aim of the training program was to educate research exploitation function for those entrepreneurs who participate in ValDeal's training program with the aim of exploiting and commercializing their research results by setting up university spinouts with the help and assistance of ValDeal. Our presentation covers the topics / elements needed to transform a university researcher into an academic spinout CEO / CSO. We also discuss some experience we gained during our six module course in 2007, as well as some elements of our 2008 training program. We will also highlight the changes we adopted to create a program which suits better for the special needs we encountered working with researchers from Central Europe.