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360 BYRD ET AL.

valuable, as the skills and knowledge they learn allows program managers spend a significant amount of time
them to succeed on future projects as well. With this doing fairly routine, repetitive administrative duties,
model, the university would still be able to generate such as tracking and communicating with mentors,
positive press for supporting entrepreneurship and maintaining a web and social media presence, hir-
foster cultural change in the academic community ing external service providers to support the teams,
toward a focus on commercialization. Nonetheless, managing sponsored project paperwork, and collating
removing the project funding would likely have a metrics for sponsors (Figure 2). At Columbia, we are
severe impact on application volume and engaged exploring the creation of a shared core facility (the
participation by busy faculty and students. Columbia Accelator Network) to provide many of
these administrative functions across the multiple
Awardee Team Leadership accelerators while retaining industry-experienced
Even with educational offerings and mentorship, program managers within each separate program.
accelerator teams often struggle due to a lack of Our hope is that the accelerator core will allow for
full-time business leadership with relevant industry greater efficiency and effectiveness; coordinated
experience. While graduate students theoretically can scheduling to leverage physical presence of judges,
make the transition into the CEO role, they also have advisors, and vendors; and increased branding for
STEM degrees from top universities, leading them the university. We also hope that the core facility will
to frequently get recruited by the very companies allow us to more quickly and effectively launch new
that they meet through the accelerator. While this accelerators in more industries (such as Columbia’s
is a good outcome from an ecosystem perspective, new therapeutics accelerator) when such oppor-
it can leave the technology stranded without a path tunities arise. Any input from our peers would be
to market. appreciated.
This is not evidence that the programs in their
current incarnations are ineffective. There have been CONCLUSIONS: ADVICE FOR THOSE SEEKING
many technologies that have exited the university TO START THEIR OWN PROGRAMS
and are being sold on the market today, including Collectively, our medical technology, clean tech-
some by start-ups led by former graduate students. nology, and media technology accelerator programs
However, with additional team-building support, have discovered a core model and evolved it to fit their
there would likely be even more success stories. needs, resulting in more university-based technol-
To address this, the Columbia programs try to ogy being developed and ultimately commercialized.
pair serial entrepreneurs and/or MBA students with Over the past five years, participants of the three
participating teams. MBA students can be a great programs have earned $51.2 million in grant fund-
resource while they are in school, but, with their busy ing, including SBIR/STTRs, and $18.2 million in
schedules and lucrative internships and job offers, venture investment, with two of those companies
it can be difficult to secure enough of their time. already generating revenue. In addition to the ten IP
Experienced serial entrepreneurs are clearly ideal agreements signed with the university spin-outs, five
but can be hard to find depending on your region. So more technologies have been licensed to industry.
far, our programs have not found a perfect solution We conclude that, by employing a few key lessons,
to the CEO challenge. a viable commercialization program that includes
entrepreneurship training in tandem with project
Leveraging Scale support has great potential to accelerate inventions to
As mentioned, one of the benefits of running con- market and can be established for various technology
current accelerator programs in multiple industries sectors.
is that each program can learn from the experiences 1) Use other programs as templates and custom-
of the others. Now that our programs are relatively ize where needed to reduce start-up time and cost.
stable, we are exploring ways to gain further efficien- Universities looking to create a program would not
cies from scale across the programs. For instance, the need to copy the exact models presented in this article.