[BDC-2010] Full Text: SJ biz Journal: UCSC's new center for entrepreneurship

[Dan Heller]

Everyone -- this is the full text of the SJ Biz Journal article that none of
you could read because it was behind a pay wall.

UCSC wants to keep business talent and ideas in Santa Cruz with
startup lab Premium
content from Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal - by David Goll

Date: Friday, April 29, 2011, 3:00am PDT

The University of California system is known worldwide for its innovative
research. In 2009, the university system received more than $121 million in
revenue for licensing university research. But of the nine UCs in the
system, UC Santa Cruz has benefited little.

UCSC wants to change that by complementing a new academic program with a
startup lab that will generate new companies and patents with market
potential. Among its goals are generating revenue for the university and
spawning startup companies for Santa Cruz.

The university aims to have the program online in the next year, said Dan
Heller, executive director for the UCSC Center for Entrepreneurship.

In 2009, UCSC’s revenue from licensing research was a meager $320,000,
compared to the heavyweights — UC San Francisco at $33 million, UCLA at $29
million and UC San Diego at $27 million. UCSC was the second lowest in the
UC system, just beating out UC Merced.

The expanded UCSC program is being fostered by a combination of more than
$400,000 in federal, local and private funds, including $74,000 Heller
received this spring. It includes contributions from the city of Santa Cruz
Economic Development and Redevelopment Agency, which sees the program as an
incubator for high-tech companies and a job creator.

“This is a coordinated and sustained effort to create a culture of
entrepreneurship at the university,” said Peter Koht, the city’s economic
development coordinator. “We have leveraged public and private funds with
minimal impact to the university’s budget.”

Heller said his program — part of the Baskin School of Engineering — would
place an emphasis on commercializing research in the areas where UCSC
excels. That includes informatics — a broad academic field studying
human-computer interaction, information science, information technology,
algorithms and social science — and computer gaming. UCSC is the only UC in
the system that offers a bachelor’s degree in game design.

This would set the university apart from what he called the “gold standard”
of programs, the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Stanford
University<http://www.bizjournals.com/profiles/company/us/ca/stanford/stanford_university/3287720/>’s
Graduate School of Business. That program generated $64 million in licensing
income for Stanford in 2009.

“Stanford is the four-lane highway of entrepreneurship,” Heller said. “It’s
an established institution in close proximity to Sand Hill Road (venture
capitalists). It has the infrastructure in place. We have to look at what
makes sense for Santa Cruz.”

Heller said it’s too early to estimate how much such a program could
generate in licensing fees for the university.

Rather than creating a program built around a business school — which
doesn’t exist at UCSC — Heller said the program will consider finding
commercial applications in a variety of disciplines at the university.

Cliff Warren, a Santa Cruz consultant who conducted the initial study into
the program creation, urged an emphasis on subject areas where the
university excels: gaming and bioinformatics, a category of informatics that
focuses on the application of statistics and computer science to the field
of molecular biology.

>From a local economic development standpoint, Warren said the small city of
Santa Cruz can expect small- and medium-sized companies to grow out of the
incubator. That means 15 to 50 employees.

But civic officials have a goal of “relocalizing” 10 percent of the area’s
workforce, according to Caleb Baskin, managing partner of the Baskin & Grant
LLP law firm. According to the Santa Cruz County Workforce Investment Board,
36,000 Santa Cruz County commuters leave the county daily, including 27,000
to Santa Clara County.

“We want a formalized tech-transfer program to keep the bright and talented
students at the university right here in Santa Cruz, creating vibrant
business,” said Baskin, co-founder of NextSpace Coworking and Innovation
Inc., which now operates business incubators in Santa Cruz, San Francisco
and Culver City. “The entrepreneurs get to stay in Santa Cruz, the city
retains the talent and fewer people have to drive over Highway 17 to Silicon
Valley.”

Steve Benz, finishing his Ph.D. in bioinformatics at UCSC, is a model for
what Heller would like to multiply many times over. Benz and fellow students
Zack Sanborn and Charlie Vaske formed Five3 Genomics LLC earlier this year.
Their company provides genome analysis, or software that helps investigate a
person’s genetic makeup for the advancement of personalized medicine in
cancer treatment. Benz said he would like to see the fledgling program
accelerate the process he went through to form his company.

“It took us seven months to get our license, which is a long time to wait
around,” Benz said. “There is a lot to be gained by the research being
conducted by the university. This new program should help make things
happen.”
------------------------------

David Goll can be reached at 408.299.1853 or dgoll at bizjournals.com.


-- 
Dan Heller
Executive Director
UCSC Center for Entrepreneurship
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