Patent Reform Legislation Supports USC Innovation

USC focuses on participating in regional innovation clusters, partnering with existing companies to commercialize federally funded research, nurturing startups, attracting and motivating commercialization talent, and educating and training a world-class workforce.

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 16, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In line with the Obama Administration's commitment to cross-sector innovation, The USC Stevens Institute for Innovation, a university-wide resource at the University of Southern California that helps USC innovators make maximum impact with their ideas, underscores the University of Southern California's goal of developing unique relationships with industry, government and nonprofits to spur economic development and encourage innovation across campus and throughout the nation.

Already engaged in many activities that promote innovation, entrepreneurship, and the commercialization of research results, the University of Southern California has initiated several new initiatives in 2011 based on its commitment to working even more closely with industry, private foundations, venture capitalists and local, state and federal governments to enhance our efforts to actively support the university technology transfer function, facilitate university-industry collaboration, encourage faculty innovation and entrepreneurship, promote student innovation and entrepreneurship, and engage with regional and local economic development efforts.

Actively supporting the university technology transfer function
USC Stevens Institute has created new innovative models to enhance the universities technology advancement and licensing function.  The most significant of these is the Ideas Empowered Program that completed its pilot year in 2010 by providing rigorous mentoring and programmatic support along with more than $450,000 in proof of concept funding to seven breakthrough ideas that have the potential to spinout of the university within a year or two.  One of these projects, Cred.FM  - led by USC School of Cinematic Arts professor and Co-founder of the EA Game Innovation Lab at USC, Chris Swain has already completed their proof of concept within a year of participation in the program and will launch a beta of their social networking music sharing game next month.

"USC has a long history of innovation and continues to be a rich source for new technologies, companies and jobs," said Krisztina 'Z' Holly, Vice Provost for Innovation at USC and Executive Director of the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation. "Ideas Empowered matches the most exciting and game-changing ideas at USC together with well targeted funding and top level mentoring in order to advance high impact research to the next stage of development and investment."

Another project, High Performance Fluid Synchrony Drug Micropumps, led by Ellis Meng of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, received significant funding from other sources and attributes the vital presentation training and mentoring support they received during the Ideas Empowered Program.

"The mentoring we received through the Ideas Empowered Program took our proposal to a whole new level," said Professor Ellis Meng of the Viterbi School of Engineering. "My team is now ready to tackle future funding processes and pave the way for adoption of our idea in the market."

The Ideas Empowered Program is now entering its second year and nine projects were chosen to take part in the intense training and mentoring program.

Facilitating university-industry collaboration
Based on the success of the Ideas Empowered model, The USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Keck School of Medicine of USC, the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation, and the Los Angeles Basin Clinical Translational Science Institute (CTSI) have been selected to participate in the exclusive Coulter Translational Research Partnership Program. Announced in April 2011, the prestigious program awards pioneering institutions that are fostering tomorrow's translational technologies and innovations in biomedical health care.

"This program harnesses critical gap funding, expertise, and focus to move USC's breakthrough biomedical engineering ideas into positive societal impact," said Holly. "We are thrilled to be working with the Coulter Foundation; this partnership is a key new piece of our interdisciplinary approach to innovation here at USC."

For its operations, the Program will have $1 million each year for a period of five years, with $667,000 a year from the Coulter Foundation augmented by $333,000 of contributions from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, the CTSI, and the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation.  The Coulter Foundation will form a working partnership with USC to promote translational research.

The ultimate goal of this partnership is to focus on outcomes that will save, extend, and improve patient lives. The Foundation's broad mandate addresses suffering from any disease or condition, in any size market, in any discipline, in any country around the world.

The USC Stevens Institute has also recently partnered with a significant industry partner to drive translational research in health science and medical technology.  Johnson & Johnson and the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation, this week announced the USC – JNJ Translational Innovation Partnership Program, designed to more rapidly develop early stage health science and medical technologies. Johnson & Johnson's Corporate Office of Science and Technology (COSAT) will provide $250,000 over two years.  The program launched this week and USC Stevens Institute will continue to expand the effort to partner with stellar private companies to fund and develop technology translation.

The USC Stevens Institute will lead a joint USC / JNJ COSAT review committee to identify groundbreaking ideas developed by USC's faculty for funding through this program. The program is structured to create a collaborative environment between academic and industry peers. Johnson & Johnson is USC Stevens' first industry partner to pioneer this collaborative approach for emerging technology advancement.

"We are excited to be able to harness the scientific and operational expertise from Johnson & Johnson for this new approach to technology development. We believe this is an excellent model for engaging industry partners, which is critical to achieve our goal of helping USC innovators turn their breakthrough ideas into real societal impact," said Holly.

Encouraging faculty innovation and entrepreneurship
USC spinouts, or startup companies that are a direct result of breakthrough USC sponsored research, are very high growth and high quality. Unleashing the full potential of startups based on university research is increasingly important to the creation of new industries and sustainable jobs. According to a 2010 Kauffman Foundation study, without startups there would be no job growth in the United States. While existing firms on average shrink their payrolls every year, new businesses add an average of three million new jobs annually. Also, not all startups are created equal. Those resulting from university research are particularly high growth. In his 2004 book Academic Entrepreneurship, Scott Shane concluded that university startups are over 100 times more likely to go public than an average startup.

In 2008 and 2009, USC startups raised more than $150M in financing and USC Stevens Institute is finalizing a full analysis of all 47 active USC startups and the report, which will be released later this year, shows that number increasing substantially after including 2010 financial reporting.

The funding raised by these startups is being invested both directly and indirectly in jobs today, and in product development, marketing, and sales that support sustainable job creation tomorrow.

"We believe that better understanding of the funding sources of our startups will help us in nurturing the growth of companies with potential to stimulate economic expansion," said Karen Kerr, Sr. Director of New Ventures and Alliances for the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation.

Promoting student innovation and entrepreneurship
The University of Southern California is a Mecca for student innovation and entrepreneurship.  A 2008 study of undergraduates at USC concluded that 57% of USC students expect to start a new venture and 47% expect to start a non-profit.

As an example of the entrepreneurialism of USC Students, On Monday September 12th, a pair of undergraduate student innovators, Anna Sergeeva and Fei Xaio, was chosen top 3 out of 80 companies launching at the well-known DEMO conference in Silicon Valley.  Their company, trueRSVP, reduces the stress of planning events by making the RSVP process flake-proof.   By employing their proprietary RSVP algorithm and unique reputation system based on guest-reliability, trueRSVP gives event planners the most accurate possible prediction of future attendance.

USC has developed a wide variety of support for innovation and entrepreneurialism.

USC Student Innovator Showcase
The USC Student Innovator Showcase, a program designed to identify and reward the most innovative and most promising business concept amongst USC graduate and undergraduate students, launched its 2011 competition yesterday and will attract more than 200 students to present the great ideas that will drive future economies.  Past winners have included active startups companies Chewse and That Game Company.  

TEDxUSC
USC was also the pioneer behind the recent global phenomenon TEDx and has announced that the fourth annual TEDxUSC will take place on May 4, 2012. TEDxUSC has been one of the most sought after, inspiring, jaw dropping, and entertaining conferences hosted by the University of Southern California. The presenter line-ups fascinate and delight guests, with mind-blowing technology demos, captivating talks, and stirring musical performances. Since creating TEDxUSC in March of 2009 and distributing the best practices, more than 2000 TEDx events have taken place in more than 90 countries and 37 different languages.

Coursework in Entrepreneurial Studies
In 2010-2011, over two thousand students took an entrepreneurial studies course via the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the Marshall School of Business -- a program which has been educating entrepreneurs for forty years. Today, the Lloyd Greif Center provides over 50 entrepreneurship courses; offers support by way of mentoring students and seed money through competitions, including an annual New Venture Seed Competition, a university-wide New Media Business Plan Challenge through the Young Presidents Organization and U.S. Trust with a 50K award, and an upcoming Startup Weekend to help students develop mobile and web apps, Overall, the program Center helps students build strong connections to the local angel investor community.

The Annenberg Innovation Lab
The Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism is an active player in the digital media revolution across many fronts. The school has been the pioneer in research in social networks and online communities. The new Annenberg Innovation Lab, whose doors opened this year, is a vehicle for an ongoing knowledge exchange with public institutions and private sector firms that are on the front lines of technological change in communications. In consultation with a consortium of sponsors the Lab develops projects designed for practical application and social impact, and it offers its sponsors the opportunity to bring those projects to market. The Lab's output includes not only technological innovations but also analytical work on a variety of topics such as new business models, organizational and societal incentives, institutional design, and the social, economic and political impact of social networking. The Lab is known as much for its ideas as for the gadgets it develops

The Maseeh Entrepreneurship Prize
Through a generous gift from Fariborz Maseeh, the USC Viterbi School of Engineering has established the MEPC, a yearly business plan competition to help inspire USC Viterbi School of Engineering innovators to be at the forefront of these solutions. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) identified the following fourteen Grand Challenges. One of the principle hurdles to solving these problems is the well-recognized "funding gap" of seed-stage investing that makes it difficult for university students and faculty innovators to bridge the gap between ideas and the marketplace. Understanding this hurdle, the MEPC is designed to support both the idea and the innovator through a combination of mentoring by seasoned investors and business professionals, entrepreneurial educational sessions developed in conjunction with the Lloyd Grief Center for Entrepreneurship at USC, and a $50K grand prize. The MEPC's goal is to both make engineering innovators more business-savvy while at the same time to empower them with refined business plans that define an effective go-to-market strategy for their ideas and inventions.

Engaging with regional and local economic development efforts
On June 1, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) Board approved a resolution approving the Smart Grid Demonstration Cooperative Project Agreement with National Aeronautics and Space Administration, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Southern California, and the Smart Grid Regional Demonstration Project Intellectual Property Agreement with the Cal Tech, UCLA, and USC. The total cost will be approximately $43M and each agreement has a term of five years.

The vision was to have three of the largest energy users in Southern California – USC, UCLA, and JPL — collaborate with the energy supplier to understand demand and user behavior and to devise methods to conserve energy while making the system secure.

USC has also signed a memorandum of understanding with the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI) a non-profit entity launched by the Community Redevelopment Agency and the Department of Water and Power for the city of Los Angeles.

The Incubator is creating a permanent home on LADWP's La Kretz Clean Innovation Campus, located in the Arts District and Cleantech Corridor of downtown Los Angeles. The Incubator will feature office space, meeting rooms, common areas and prototype manufacturing workspace, and will share space with LADWP's clean technology R&D center and Cleantech LA, a coalition of business, government and academic partners building Los Angeles as a cleantech capital.

With three of the nation's premier research universities, Los Angeles has the opportunity to develop a strong industry cluster that attracts and retains entrepreneurs, improves their chances for success, creates high-paying and sustainable jobs, and accelerates cleantech commercialization.

USC will display its most promising research and clean technology at the LACI launch event on October 11, 2011.

USC greatly appreciates this administration's recognition of the continued need to invest in research and education through its support of strong budgets for the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Department of Defense Research and Engineering Organizations, and other such agencies.

About USC Stevens Institute for Innovation
The USC Stevens Institute for Innovation (http://stevens.usc.edu) is a university-wide resource in the Office of the Provost at the University of Southern California that helps identify, nurture, protect, and transfer to the market the most exciting innovations from USC.  It also provides a central connection for industry seeking cutting-edge innovations in which to invest. As part of this role, the USC Stevens Institute manages the university's intellectual property portfolio stemming from its $560M annual research program. Furthermore, the USC Stevens Institute develops the innovator as well as innovations, through educational programs, community-building events, and showcase opportunities.

Media Contacts:
Ian Murphy, USC Stevens Institute
310-689-6397
[email protected]

SOURCE USC Stevens Institute for Innovation

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