Engineering Grad Students Help Faculty Entrepreneurs

New venture has high goals for technology-based business

Later this spring, a University of Arkansas graduate class of 29 business, science and electrical engineering students is making a unique offer to entrepreneurs on the faculty.

If the entrepreneurs are willing and qualify (their businesses must be technology-based), the grad students will select one. The winner then gets help from the students in trying to make his or her idea a commercial success on a fast-track basis.

Ken Vickers and John Todd, a UA professor in the Sam M. Walton College of Business Administration, are teaching the course, Entrepreneurship of Technology. Vickers said they don’t know whether any faculty members — or students — will be interested. It’s an ambitious goal for a class that’s part of a bigger program, one that leads to a degree in microelectronics-photonics.

Vickers is a UA grad himself, having earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics in Fayetteville. Upon graduation in 1977, he went to Texas Instruments, where he worked in integrated circuit development and production engineering. The last eight years of his TI career were spent as engineering manager in Sherman, Texas, where Vickers was responsible for hiring young engineers.

A challenge from a long-time friend, Greg Salamo, persuaded Vickers to return to Fayetteville and the university, he said.

Salamo, who is a UA professor of physics, “told me to either get back up to the hills and help him make the type of graduate program I had been asking for as a TI hiring manager, or just quit bugging him about it.”

Not coincidentally, Salamo had also just landed a small grant from EPSCoR and the Arkansas Science & Technology Authority to start that program.

Taking up the challenge — it was the “mid-life crisis career change thing,” Vickers said — Vickers and his family packed up, left Texas and moved to Fayetteville in 1998. Vickers is now director of the microelectronics-photonics degree program.

The microelectronics-photonics program is a professional development program for students with bachelor’s or master’s degrees from traditional scientific subject areas like engineering and physics. But the Entrepreneurship of Technology class was also opened to students studying for MBAs.

Of the 34 students who enrolled initially, 29 are still in the class, which consists of 15 Americans and 14 foreign students. That’s roughly the same ratio of Americans to foreign students as the graduate program, Vickers noted.

Vickers and Todd have landed additional grants to help with the course.

The National Collegiate Innovators and Inventors Alliance has kicked in some money, which Vickers said will be “key to the rapid evaluation of market opportunities and intellectual property positions that will be necessary for the students to have any hope of seeing commercialization of research within the short 12-month course sequence.”

The National Science Foundation EPSCoR program has also helped as has the National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training program. The latter kicked in $2.1 million, which will be paid over a five-year period.

Vickers also credits the UA for putting resources into the program.

“These resources could have gone instead to established departmental programs, so the university management team in [the] Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Engineering and the graduate school should be recognized as being very supportive of the microEP program.

Scott Hancock, director of technology transfer at the UA, will also be involved in the commercialization project.

Vickers isn’t certain the proposal will succeed.

“We may fall flat on our face,” he said, noting that the class must first find a suitable proposal from a faculty member who wants to accelerate launching his or her product. On top of that, there must be enough interested students — at least four or five, he believes — to participate.

If that’s not enough, there’s the aggressive timetable.

“It’s a fast-track, especially for a university environment,” Vickers said.