• The Advisory Board
• How to Get Involved

The purpose of the Center for Technology Commercialization is to identify, encourage, and support entrepreneurial activities among the faculty, students, and staff of the University of Southern California. CTC assists inventors and companies with IP issues, business feasibility analysis, business plan development, start-up financing, management team acquisition, and related issues.

This Web site provides a community portal and clearinghouse for information on the technology commercialization process and to facilitate the process of matching scientists, researchers, and engineers to the business expertise they might require and business faculty and students to the technical expertise they need.

The Origin of the CTC

In the spring of 1996, the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies began offering the first undergraduate course in the Marshall School designed to serve the needs of engineering students who wanted to substitute an entrepreneurship course for the required engineering economics. This was the first time a business course had been approved as part of a degree program in electrical engineering and computer science. In October of 1998, the Greif Center was contacted by Martin Gundersen, Chair of the Electrophysics Department, as a result of information about the technology commercialization work being done in the Greif Center that appeared in the LA Times. He wanted to create awareness for the School of Engineering's new technology initiative and the institute made possible by the Mann endowment, and he was seeking the Greif Center's collaboration in those efforts. That contact precipitated a six-year effort on the part of Kathleen Allen (Business),George Bekey (Engineering) and others to establish what was recognized by the university and the Deans of the three schools as the USC Technology Commercialization Alliance (TCA). But what started as simply a collaboration of the Marshall School, the School of Engineering, and the Keck School of Medicine to discover mutual interests has grown to include the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences and to become the central source for faculty, researchers, and students of information, research, education, and services related to the commercialization of USC technology.

In 2004, the TCA became the USC Marshall Center for Technology Commercialization (CTC), and it expanded its offerings to include a technology inventory, an internship program, and a partnership with the Los Angeles County Business Technology Center to offer incubator space for USC start-ups. CTC now works with small and large companies in the Los Angeles area to provide research and commercialization support in the form of market and business feasibility analysis, business planning, and preparation for securing funding.

CTC Director

Kathleen Allen Ph.D. Marshall School of Business Director/Founder

Dr Allen is a professor in the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies in the Marshall School of Business where she coordinates the graduate Certificate in Technology Commercialization program. She is co-founder of the USC Technology Commercialization Alliance, which is now the USC Marshall Center for Technology Commercialization. Allen co-founded and is Executive Director of the N2TEC Institute (National Network for Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization) with 22 university and industry partners across the U.S. N2TEC is bringing the wealth creation process to underserved areas of the U.S. Its current project is a technology corridor around an underground scientific laboratory in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Dr. Allen is the author of Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management 3rd Ed., Launching New Ventures, 4th Edition, Bringing New Technology to Market, and Growing and Managing an Entrepreneurial Business, as well as several trade books. As an entrepreneur, Allen was active in commercial real estate development for 10 years, owning two businesses, is cofounder of two technology ventures, and is a director of a NYSE company. She is fluent in Spanish. Additional bio information

George Bekey Ph.D. Viterbi School of Engineering Co-Founder Emeritus

Dr. George A. Bekey is the Gordon Marshall Professor of Computer Science at USC. He received the B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the UC, Berkeley and the M.S. and Ph.D. in Engineering from UCLA. His research interests are focused on intelligent robotic systems and their applications. He served as Chairman of the USC Electrical Engineering Department from 1978-82 and as Chairman of the Computer Science Department from 1984-89. In addition to his teaching and university research, Dr. Bekey's professional experience includes three years as a Computer Applications Engineer at Beckman Instruments and four years as Head of the Simulation Section and Senior Staff Engineer at TRW Systems in Los Angeles. At TRW he worked on simulation and control of space vehicles. Dr. Bekey has published over 200 papers in the areas of simulation, biomedical engineering, control systems and robotics. He is co-author (with W.J. Karplus) of the text Hybrid Computation (Wiley, 1968) and co-editor of several books, the most recent being Neural Networks and Robotics (with K. Goldberg, Kluwer, 1993). He is Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Autonomous Robots and Founding Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of several professional societies.