IC² Institute Blog

Hear the Austin Technology Incubator’s Kyle Cox explain how ATI is helping student entrepreneurs launch companies at Longhorn Startup Camp and 1 Semester Startup.

Longhorn Startup Camp on MyFoxAUSTIN.com

The Austin Technology Incubator’s Landing Pad Program supports early stage technology companies by leveraging ATI’s network and community insight to accelerate that company’s acculturation into the Austin business ecosystem. While the program has been in place loosely in the past, in its first formal year in 2011, ATI supported 13 companies in their moves to Austin, including: Amatra, BlackLocus, Convergence Wireless, Digital Harmony Games, Drivve, DXUp Close, SceneTap, Social Muse, Tactical Information Systems and V-Chain Solutions. Additionally, serial entrepreneur Ben Dyer moved to Austin from Atlanta with TechDrawl, and he has since helped launch and relocate two new startups: NightRaft and BeHome247.

“The Landing Pad Program formalizes a twenty plus year ‘welcoming’ effort, and we couldn’t be more pleased with the 13 companies who became part of the Austin ecosystem in 2011,” said Robert Reeves, ATI’s Director of IT and Wireless.

The Austin Technology Incubator’s Landing Pad Program is designed to assist companies in quickly taking advantage of Austin’s nurturing business climate. It serves companies relocating to Austin or establishing its North American headquarters in the city. Participants tend to be “early stage” high technology companies in the biosciences, clean energy, wireless and IT industries and are not appropriate for the incentive packages targeted for the Fortune 1000.

For more information on how a company can join the Landing Pad Program, see the ATI website or call 512-305-0000.

See also: Austin Business Journal, January 23, 2012

As reported in the January 23, 2012 Austin American-Statesman,
Pecan Street, Inc. is developing a unique facility for researchers from UT and private industry to study how consumers interact with new energy technologies.

The public-private partnership brings together eleven member companies with the UT Schools of Architecture and Engineering and the IC² Institute’s Austin Technology Incubator.

Pecan Street’s new laboratory is to be built at the Mueller redevelopment project, giving researchers ready access to power usage data from 200 homes in the neighborhood.

Researchers will study the interoperation of the grid with such new technologies as smart meters, electric vehicles, and solar panels in a real-world setting.

Said ATI Director Isaac Barchas, “There’s no other place in the world where companies can go and study how human behavior interacts with energy.”

New app puts 2,600 football plays in the hands of coaches.

As reported in the Jan. 4, 2012 Austin American-Statesman, former NFL assistant coach Charlie Coiner turned to John Sibley Butler, Director of the IC² Institute, for advice on how to use his football expertise to found a business.

Coiner had the idea of a digital football playbook which would let coaches view, save, and share plays using a portable device, but he had never started a company. Butler advised him on the basics of startups and introduced him to the professional resources he would need to get going.

“He had a great idea that hadn’t been commercialized, and as a veteran coach, he had the knowledge base,” Butler said. “He was able to do it because we put him in the Austin ecosystem, where so many people are willing to give their knowledge and advice for free. If he had tried it in Houston or Dallas, I don’t know.”

Coiner’s FirstDown Playbook app is now available for iPhone and iPad.

In November 2011 the IC² Institute signed a contract with Ruta N in Medellín, Colombia, to provide technology commercialization training.

With funding from Ruta N, the IC² Institute has launched the Practical Training Program in Commercialization (PTPC) in Medellín. The PTPC has three major components: (1) a three-day investigative visit and short workshop, (2) six weeks of technology commercialization training in Medellín and nine weeks of long-distance assistance training, and (3) a two-week internship at the IC² Institute in Austin for the winning team. Dr. Elsie Echeverri-Carroll is Principal Investigator for the project.

Ruta N is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting science, technology, and innovation to increase the competitiveness of the city of Medellín. It is part of EPM (Empresas Públicas de Medellín), a utility and telecommunications provider and the second-largest Colombian company in terms of income and assets.

Medellín is the first city in Colombia, and probably in Latin America, to have developed a science and technology plan, the Plan CTi. One of the objectives of the Plan CTi is to strengthen technology commercialization in Medellín.

If you read Thomas Friedman’s column in the New York Times on Sunday (Nov. 6, 2011), you might have wondered about its reference to The University of Texas at Austin.

The reference was to a program that the university’s IC² Institute operates to help encourage and train entrepreneurs to develop businesses in India. It’s called the India Innovation Growth Program. The IC² Institute operates similar programs in several countries, including South Korea and Kuwait.

In working with Indian entrepreneurs, the IC² Institute draws on its decades of studying entrepreneurs, business building and business clusters to help business people in developing economies. It provides training and assists in developing contacts for investment, partners and customers.

The goal of the program, which the Institute’s Global Commercialization Group has operated since 2007, is to develop a cadre of Indian entrepreneurs whose products can compete in domestic and global markets.

In the column, Friedman, headlined “India’s Innovation Stimulus,” highlighted three homegrown Indian businesses in India that provide products and services for a broad spectrum of the society from poor to rich.

One of those companies was Forus Health, which supplies a service to screen people for eye problems that could lead to blindness. Friedman reported that about 12 million people in India are blind and that 80 percent of those cases could be prevented by screening.

Here’s the column’s quote from Forus Health’s chief executive, K. Chandrasekhar.
“We work with a Dutch company on optics, and the University of Texas supports us in business development,” Chandrasekhar adds. “We are talking to a Brazilian company that is interested in manufacturing our technology and selling in Latin America.”

Forus is one of about 160 Indian companies that the IC² Institute has helped find investors, business partners, collaborators, and even paying customers.

Indian businesses in the Innovation Growth Program go through several steps beginning with introductory workshops, to screenings of services and products, to market research and business development. The number of companies is reduced at each step.

Valerie Hase, the Institute’s program manager for the India project, said that more than 2,700 people have attended the workshops in India; more than 2,000 technologies have been screened; and market research reports have been prepared for about 180 companies.

The number of people seeking to participate in the program has increased each year, said Sid Burback, Director of the Global Commercialization Group at the IC² Institute.

The Innovation Growth Program is funded by Lockheed-Martin in partnership with the Indian Department of Science and Technology (DST). The IC² Institute administers the program with the Federation of India Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI).

The program fits with a new Indian initiative, which is called the “Decade of Innovation,” said Arabinda Mitra, the executive director of the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum. The Indian government has budgeted $250 million to promote innovation over the next decade.

Mitra, who visited The University of Texas at Austin campus in the summer, said India seeks “grass root innovation or affordable innovation that is going to touch the life of people at the village and rural area.”

Read more: “India’s Innovation Stimulus” by Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times, November 6, 2011

The IC² Institute has paired with Espacio de Vinculación A.C. (EVAC) and Univision to organize a two-day workshop for college students from both sides of the Mexico-US border to examine the issues of immigration, security, and employment and to discuss innovative solutions in terms of entrepreneurship.

Download the workshop agenda

A select group of graduate as well as undergraduate level college students from a variety of majors will be chosen from the states of California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas, as well as from the bordering states of Baja California, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Sonora and Tamaulipas to participate in this event. The participants will include approximately 40 students from the United States and 40 from Mexico.

The Border Workshop 2011 will be held Friday, November 11th and Saturday, November 12th at the Student Activity Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

These students will participate in a series of panel discussions with policy leaders who are involved with the Mexico-US border, and will have the opportunity to work together in small groups to discuss alternative solutions. In addition, members of the IC2 Institute will present the outcomes of their regional development programs in Chile, Mexico and Portugal.

The objective of the Border Workshop is to inspire students from both sides of the Mexico-US border to engage in entrepreneurial activities as a means of improving border relations through economic growth and job creation.

Useful links for attendees:

• Student Activity Center location
• Parking: Brazos Garage

For more information, please contact Rosemary French (rfrench@ic2.utexas.edu) of the IC² Institute.

The IC² Global Commercialization Group has been supporting Mexican entrepreneurs since 2005 through TechBA Austin, the Technology Business Accelerator.

At the 2011 TechBA Expo on July 14, members of the Austin technology community had the opportunity to make connections with these international entrepreneurs as well as to hear keynote speaker Gary Hoover.

Learn about their technologies and the program on the TechBA Austin YouTube channel.

Global Perspectives on Technology Transfer and Commercialization: Building Innovative Ecosystems is the latest book by the IC² community of Research Fellows and associated scholars.

Edited by John Sibley Butler and David V. Gibson of the Institute and growing out of a recent gathering of IC² Global Fellows, the book brings together papers on the state of technology transfer and commercialization in 13 countries as varied as China, Portugal, Kenya and the United States.

From the publisher’s description:

Technology transfer is a dynamic area of study that examines traditional topics such as intellectual property management, the management of risk, market identification, the role of public and private labs, and the role of universities. This volume reflects on how government, business and academia influence technology transfer in different countries and how the infrastructure of a country enhances technology and contributes to each country’s overall economy. Interpreting and adopting the processes of technology transfer and commercialization – or, building innovative ecosystems – is critical to seeing success in this digital age. Those leading the surge toward building innovative ecosystems for technology transfer are the fellows of the Institute for Innovation Creativity and Capital (IC2 Institute) at The University of Texas at Austin. Global in its scope of solving market economy problems, for this volume the Institute has focused its lens on accelerated knowledge-based development. Here, scholars from 13 countries come together to critique technology transfer from each of their respective nations. The results of their contributions lend innovative insight to exactly how different nations are working to maximize technology transfer and commercialization in uncertain times.

Publication information

Global Perspectives on Technology Transfer and Commercialization: Building Innovative Ecosystems ed. by John Sibley Butler and David V. Gibson.
Edward Elgar Publishing, May 2011, 432 pp., ISBN 978 1 84980 977 1
Find the book: at Edward Elgar – at Amazon.com – in WorldCat libraries – in Google Books.

Book reception on April 27

To celebrate the publication, please plan to attend a reception hosted by the IC² Institute from 4:00 to 5:30 PM on Wednesday, April 27, 2011. The event will be held at the Connally Banquet Hall at the UT Alumni Center. Please RSVP to Coral Franke (512-475-8947 or coral@ic2.utexas.edu).

Isaac Barchas, Director of the IC² Institute’s Austin Technology Incubator, was featured in a January 7 CBS report on job creation in Austin.

In the report (“Austin, Texas Leads the Nation in Job Growth“), Barchas explains ATI’s role in assisting tech startups: “It’s really like taking shots on goal. You want to have as many shots as you can, because you never know which one’s going to put the ball in the back of the net. When you score the benefit can be another Dell or another Google or another Intel.”