USC ETTC and Marshall School of Business Team on Winning NSF Proposal
USC ETTC and the
USC Marshall School of Business are partners in a newly awarded grant from the National
Science Foundation (NSF) to develop the National Network for Technology Entrepreneurship
and Commercialization (N2TEC). The NSF award, totaling $600,000 over two years, will be
matched by another $600,000 from collaborating N2TEC partners, bringing the total program
cost to $1.2M. NSF made the award to USC under its Partnerships for Innovation Program.
USC will create and implement N2TEC as a national network to coordinate and provide a
variety of resources and knowledge so that network users, particularly under-served
schools and communities, can collaborate and innovate.
The N2TEC network will be made up of academic partners
that supply vital content and structure, private sector partners that supply needed
technology, financial, and legal expertise and national labs and state and local
governments that assist in forming, guiding and evaluating the program. The partnership
will allow the partners and their clients to be successful innovators, sustaining the
partnership in the future. USC will be the lead institution on the creation and
implementation of N2TEC.
USC's partners in N2TEC are California State University
Fresno, Caltech, Claremont Graduate University, University of Arkansas, University of
Nevada-Reno, University of Pittsburgh, NASA Ames Research Center, California Technology
Trade and Commerce Dept., LA Economic Development Corporation, Pricewaterhouse Coopers,
Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, Niagara Broadband and National Collegiate Innovators and
Inventors Alliance.
N2TEC's institutional network will provide a variety of
resources and knowledge to partners, especially under-served schools, that they could not
generate on their own. The partnership will stimulate and support innovation growth by
linking sources of knowledge and expertise with those needing such sources to make their
enterprises prosper, particularly those in under-served areas. The resulting economic
growth and development will generate additional resources to sustain the partnership. The
infrastructure will allow academic institutions to move their intellectual property into
commercialization through partnerships with venture capital, private companies, start-ups
etc. The combined engineering expertise of the partners will provide resources to small
companies that they could not afford otherwise. The business school expertise of the major
academic institutions will be available for small universities and businesses alike.
The award to USC is the result of collaboration between
the USC School of Engineering, USC ETTC and the Marshall School of Business, who together
wrote the winning proposal. This collaboration is a natural outgrowth of the work done by
USC's Technology Commercialization Alliance, a program established in recent years to
create closer ties between USC's Schools of Engineering, Business and Medicine to foster
commercialization of innovative USC technologies. Professor Kathy Allen of the Marshall
School, one of the co-founders of the TCA, is co- Principal Investigator and Program
Manager on the N2TEC project. Allen believes that N2TEC provides "a huge opportunity
for USC to become the center of a national network of universities."
ETTC will be responsible for much of the information
technology infrastructure that will be put into place to support N2TEC. The Marshall
School will provide general program management and coordination among network partners,
content development for the N2TEC website and organization of several conferences and
venture capital financing forums. The remaining partners will contribute various pieces of
content, expertise, guidance, evaluation and oversight to the network. |
