This Partnerships for Innovation (PFI) program--An Interdisciplinary University-Based Education Partnership to Support Biomedical Technology Commercialization in Nebraska--aims to create a self-sustaining university-based program to foster innovation for the commercialization of bioscience technology in Nebraska. Creighton University, including the College of Business Administration, School of Law, School of Medicine, School of Pharmacy and Health Professions, and Office of Technology Transfer, has developed a program to cross train undergraduate and graduate students in business, law, and the biosciences. Upon completion of a one-year concentration, student teams will compete for seed money to fund start-up companies for further conceptualization and marketing of bioscience technologies. The program, involves a strong partnership between the two largest biomedical research centers in the state, Creighton University and the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and a collaboration led by the deans of the business, law, and medical schools, as well as a director of technology transfer and a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship. In addition, numerous local businesses and other organizations have committed services, expertise, scholarship money, and internship opportunities. The Creighton University Partnerships for Innovation will also serve as the core curriculum for a new professional science master's degree, an MBA for scientists and mathematicians. The program will serve as a model for the integration of research, education, and practice to efficiently promote and increase regional high technology transfer.
This university-industry partnership will have broad impact on high technology businesses and employment opportunities. The anticipated avenues to achieve the goals of this program are as follows: 1) Stimulate the transformation of knowledge created through the research and education enterprise into innovations that build strong local, regional and national economies. 2) Broaden the participation of academic institutions and citizens by cross training a professional workforce, providing seed money to develop technologies, and creating facilities for conducting proof of concept and start-up activities. 3) Enhance the infrastructure necessary to foster and sustain innovation in the long-term. 4) Develop a professional science master's degree program, endorsed by the National Innovation Act of 2005 at Creighton University. The program is aimed at enabling future managers to navigate the business of science with ease, going from a meeting about enzymes to another about intellectual property rights, while understanding that the goal is marketable products.
Partners include Creighton University (lead institution); University of Nebraska Medical Center; Kiser Family Foundation; Blackwell, Sander, Peper, Martin, LLP; Stinson Morrison, Hecker, LLP; First National Bank of Omaha; bioNebraska, Life Sciences Association (a consortium of firms); Booz Allen Hamilton.; GR Exypnos, SafeStitch, LLC; Nature Technology Corporation; and Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce.
The primary goal and outcomes of our Partnerships for Innovation grant falls into the area of workforce development, although additional outcomes related to these goals have also been achieved. In terms of workforce development, we focused on interdisciplinary training, interdisciplinary teaming, and curriculum design and innovation because the bioscience industry has identified these capabilities as critically important to successfully translating bioscience research and invention into a commercially-viable business context yet difficult to find in applicants for managerial positions. The first of these required capabilities is the need for managers to be "multi-lingual," in that they understand not only bioscience but also business, law and regulation. Traditionally, universities are organized in silos where these disciplines do not intersect. Thus, by including science, law, business and health science students in our program, we enable students to talk to each other, which results in cross-over vocabulary, skills and tools. A gratifying outcome is that when students begin our bioscience entrepreneurship program, they tend to work on project requirements in their home discipline, but by the end of the program, they are comfortable working outside those areas of disciplinary comfort. After being exposed to a wide range of skills spanning multiple disciplines, students then spend a summer internship working in a bioscience and business context, applying those skills to problems and opportunities faced by real firms and organizations. This allows students to hone their skills in a real-world setting, but also assists small businesses, startups, and other bioscience organizations in the local ecosystem to benefit from well-trained labor at lower than market costs. Secondly, for the most part, law and science students have very little experience working in teams toward a team goal, yet this skill is critical to achieving bioscience commercialization success. In our bioscience entrepreneurship program, students work in the same interdisciplinary teams over the course of a year to write commercialization plans for two bioscience projects. During this process, they are given feedback on the teaming process and most improve dramatically over the course of the program. Thirdly, traditional higher education materials do not address the need to integrate skills across disciplines. One of the best tools for accomplishing this goal is through the use of real-world teaching cases. However, as a recent review in Nature Biotechnology suggests, while several relevant case studies have been written at major universities, most are "written for MBA students and are often difficult to bring into a classroom of PhD’s or engineers ….In addition, many of the published cases are now aging and are not as relevant in the changing context of the biotechnology industry today. Through a collaboration with colleagues from Stanford, Colorado Health Sciences and the bioscience industry, we co-authored a companion case book and article on teaching science and business cases, found in "Building the Case for Biotechnology") to the core text for the program, Building Biotechnology, to use in such interdisciplinary courses. We built our curriculum around these materials; syllabi for the two courses can be found on our program website: www.creighton.edu/business/bep. Related outcomes include leveraging the Bioscience Entrepreneurship Program curriculum to develop a Professional Science Masters degree in Bioscience Management (www.creighton.edu/business/psm). This executive style, weekend program can be taken alone or in conjunction with the MBA degree program. From year one to two, enrollment increased over 50%. We are currently recruiting for the third year cohort, which is experiencing strong demand and may justify expanding the program to two sections. In addition, our PFI partnership with BioNebraska and the technology transfer offices at Creighton and the University of Nebraska Medical Center has resulted in several other programs, including a quarterly speaker series – CU at Lunch, a new NCIIA (National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance) Bioscience Invention to Venture workshop, and a campus business incubator, The Halo Institute.
