Ohio State University (US) has launched a new initiative connecting STEM researchers with MBA students to bring scientific breakthroughs closer to market. The Future Leaders in Innovation and Entrepreneurship (FLIE) programme pairs graduate students from business and STEM disciplines to assess the commercial potential of university research.
The programme is a partnership between Fisher College of Business, the Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship, and the colleges of Engineering, Medicine, and Arts and Sciences. The semester-long, experiential entrepreneurial development programme completed its first cohort this spring.
“It’s a great experience for our MBA students, but it’s also potentially valuable for the scientists because they have the scientific and technological knowledge, but they don’t necessarily have the business knowledge,” said Andrea Contigiani, Assistant Professor of Management and Human Resources. “They can get help and make progress in bringing their technologies to the market.”
How the programme works
MBA students receive three credit hours for participating in the programme. The technology teams include STEM faculty, trainees, and postdocs.
The researchers start out by completing the NSF I-Corps programme. Through that programme, researchers in fields such as biomedical engineering and medicine participate in intensive, five-week sessions to move inventions from the laboratory to the market.
“I-Corps, or Innovation Corps, was developed by the National Science Foundation specifically for engineers and scientists to explore the market opportunity of their research,” said Caroline Crisafulli, Director of Entrepreneurial Education at the Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship. “By adding business students to the technology team, we’re bringing in a broader set of perspectives early on to potentially accelerate the process.”
Student experiences and outcomes
The FLIE programпе’s first cohort included Fisher MBA students Matheus Fagundes and Chase Gorman. Both students worked on teams that collaborated with researchers who are developing medical technology products.
Fagundes, who also holds a doctorate in engineering from the University of Georgia (US), worked with a researcher who’s developing a product to assist with eye surgeries. Gorman partnered with a researcher who is developing a drug that can potentially treat peripheral neuropathy – damage to the brain and spinal cord that can cause numbness in the limbs.
Fagundes and Gorman said they joined the FLIE programme to pass along their expertise to scientists, helping them to develop business skills and expand their knowledge base. In the process, they expanded their own skill sets.
“I think that’s the main skill that I learned: how to talk to the founders [of entrepreneurial ventures] who are PhDs like me in a way that not only they can understand what I’m trying to say about how they should move towards the market, but also in understanding them,” he said.
Gorman said the FLIE programme enabled him to apply the knowledge he’s acquired while earning his MBA.
“In terms of the market research, that was very quantitative and research-heavy. But then you also had to bring in the people skills because we did 20-plus interviews. … Another group of people we interviewed was nonprofit leaders,” he said. “It definitely changed the way I think across disciplines, not just in the entrepreneurship or business space.”
At the end of the semester, the MBA students gave investor pitch-style presentations that included customer segmentation and market and competitive analyses, as well as commercialisation roadmaps with technical and funding milestones.
“Different founders during the programme are in different stages of the product,” Fagundes said. “For example, for my founder, she’s just now publishing a paper. After that, we need to understand … what are the next steps and how much money is it going to take her to move to achieve that next milestone?”
Gorman said the practical insights shared by Ohio State faculty, staff and industry professionals – including a local biotech CEO – proved especially useful throughout the programme.
Fagundes added that FLIE builds connections not just between researchers and MBA students, but among the business students themselves, with weekly meetings creating a support network as participants worked through shared challenges alongside their peers.
