Wayne Franklin cued me into the Business Innovation Accelerator event at the new Rhode Island Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. My initial reaction was skeptical. "How many of these things do we need?" But that was just my ignorance talking.

The operative phrase is "technology transfer", as in from a research university (hmmmmm) to private companies. Angus Kingon, a Brown prof with more titles than I care to type, just gets right to the point: technology commercialization. That is, the transformation of research innovation into wildly popular - and profitable - commercial products.

One of the factors that has made the North Carolina Reseach Triangle work so well is that the universities have crafted policies and institutions to move research innovations into the commercial space in a fairly thoughtful way. There are lots and lots of dynamics to the process:

• How should faculty who drive the original innovations be remunerated? For how long?
• Licenses or buy-outs? 
• Start-ups or established players?

So it is into this arena that Brown and the EDC want to take Rhode Island. Building on the university's research strength, it appears that the Bio/Med shows the most promise. Or at least that's what I concluded from the mix of people in the room. More after the jump.

I should add that none of the three speakers was from the bio/med field. Don Siegel is dean of the SUNY Albany B-school, Allan Tear is an entrepreneur and founder of Providence Geeks, and Rich Bendis runs Innovation America, a group that helps city-regions develop innovation capacity. But, as I said, the room had a bio/med tilt. And that's what got me excited. 

Here is a whole new wing of the innovation economy that is only just beginning. Where we geeks have had several years head start, the direct university-to-commerce channel is functionally only in the planning stages. In fact, the whole purpose of the Business Innovation Accelerator event was to bring stakeholders together to discuss what RI-CIE can and should (and can't and shouldn't) do. Put another way, the event was trying to innovate ways to accelerate the business of setting up a technology transfer/commercialization center.

The process - he writes with some admiration - was a tightly managed facilitation where breakout groups clustered around pre-determined area: 

• Sector Analysis
• Women Entrepreneurs
• Issues of Technology Transfer (research perspective)
• Issues of Technology Transfer (commercial perspective)
• Gap Analysis: Innovation Businesses vs Main Street Businesses
• Local Conditions Analysis

We ran two rounds of breakouts - the first on obstacles and challenges and the second on workable solutions. In between each round, the large group reassembled and reported back. (Sound familiar?)

Sadly, I had to run out before the second report-back in order to set up for the Providence Foundation's Next Generation project. (More on that as it develops.) 

Regardless, my take-aways are all to the good. Where the geeks leverage RISD indirectly (arts/culture attracting high-knowledge workers), RI-CIE can directly leverage Brown, URI, RI Hospital and any research institution that wants to play. The availability of an innovation pipeline is sure to draw out RI's hidden venture capital and attract out-of-state capital as well.

I understand there's quite a lot of money in this health care thing.

I hope to keep up with this effort and will blog on it from time to time. I have very high expectations for RI-CIE, and with the crew running it and the crew they attract, I think those expectations will be fulfilled.

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