Students in business and engineering team up to help companies make strategic choices in new markets and new technologies.

By Jay Wrolstad

It’s only a short stroll from the Engineering Quad to Sage Hall, home of the Johnson Graduate School of Management, yet until recently they were two distinct educational realms; engineers developing new technologies, and business experts focusing on making money.

The folks on either side of Campus Road are increasingly finding common ground, though, through a program that combines Cornell’s strengths in fostering innovation and putting best business practices to the test.

The Business of Science and Technology Initiative meets an increasing demand for business students who understand technological innovation and engineers who understand how work on the corporate lab bench translates into marketable products. It was founded in the summer of 2006 by the College of Engineering and the Johnson School.

The initiative joins graduate students from each school together in small teams to work on problems and opportunities identified by companies. The teams get hands-on experience under the tutelage of accomplished innovators, entrepreneurs, and faculty. It’s an integrated approach that produces tangible results for businesses while training the next generation of innovators.

“We are establishing a link between engineer-scientists and entrepreneurs, based on a need at global corporations that have traditionally focused on specialization,” says Eugene Fitzgerald, a visiting professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Johnson School and co-founder of the initiative. “Now that focus is changing. The engineer-scientists are becoming business people, and business people are becoming more involved with engineering. These ‘hybrid’ individuals have a great value in the open-innovation environment.”

According to Fitzgerald, who has worked as a scientist at Bell Labs, industry needs more employees knowledgeable in complementary areas. “For the students this is an opportunity to gain the type of experience they need in finding a job at a corporation,” he says.

That’s exactly why applied physics Ph.D. student John Mannion enrolled in BSTI. He says students from both schools benefit by stepping out of the classroom or the lab and working to address a problem of immediate concern in industry.

The BSTI team includes (from left) John Mannion and Grant Meyer, both Ph.D. students in engineering physics; BSTI Faculty Director Gene Fitzgerald; (sitting) Abraham Stroock, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering; BSTI Operations Director Andreas Wankerl; and MBA student Marc Meunier.  Robert Barker/University Photography

“Taking part in this initiative helps graduate research students to see, firsthand, that many new product lines are based directly on the research done in academia,” he says. “I think, having seen this, students will turn to work on their dissertations with a stronger sense of purpose.”

Working with MBA candidates has given Mannion an appreciation of their ability to quickly identify and evaluate markets for technological innovations. “The two disciplines do go hand in hand,” he says. “As our project has progressed, there has been a valuable exchange of knowledge, with us engineers giving the MBAs a choice of technologies for a market, and with them giving us a choice of markets that they have identified as being the most profitable. For our team, identifying opportunities for the client to make money has been a highly iterative process.”

Cornell is ideally suited for this endeavor, according to Michael Spencer, professor of electrical and computer engineering and associate dean for research in the College of Engineering. “Here we have a tradition of multidisciplinary endeavors without boundaries,” he says, “so there is a discussion with multiple points of view on specific technological issues.”

Such collaboration is critical in the long and involved process of moving from that “Eureka!” moment of discovery to bringing a product to market. BSTI director and co-founder Andreas Wankerl explains that innovation does not occur as a linear progression, from research to invention and from invention to commercialization, but rather as a non-linear and complex process between supply and demand.

“Innovation is a complex, iterative learning process—on the market side and on the engineering and science side,” he says. “In order to come up with a very complex solution, you can’t take a linear approach because there are too many pieces of the puzzle.”

And completing that puzzle is a lot easier when engineers and business people like chief technology officers interact at every step along the way. A well trained engineer knows how to conduct research and how to develop practical solutions to practical problems, but may not consider the business parameters of cost and time in developing a product, Wankerl says.

Finding corporations to participate in the program has been a challenge, although most corporations are now more receptive to help from the outside than they have been. “There is a high level of uncertainty, and we have to establish a good working relationship on the business side as well as the science side,” says Wankerl. Typically a BSTI project involves a technology that a company has, or is developing, but needs some help getting to market.

The projects are open-ended, as initially there is no way to know whether a particular technology will pan out, which allows the team to draw on a variety of resources. “Creative people have to continually check against reality, asking ‘Can this work?’” Wankerl says. “We can let the company know that a particular project is not working—and won’t work—and here’s why from an engineering perspective. Ninety percent of experiments fail, but it is the learning process from failures that make the ultimate experiment succeed.”

As an example of this process, Fitzgerald offers a theoretical company that is exploring new biomedical devices. “The traditional approach is to collaborate with a research university, like Cornell, to explore what is being done in the field. With our initiative, we go to the company to help them understand the market for a particular product in the future and to establish a timeline for developing that product and meeting the anticipated demand,” he explains. “We ask them to tell us, ‘What is important to you?’ Then we conduct research on a device they want to sell, as well as the market for that technology.”

Once given the nod, the Cornell BSTI team delves into the project in more detail, perhaps building a prototype device, or suggesting that a company may want to reconsider its plans if the market for a product or technology is not apparent. “The idea is to answer their questions in a timely manner and provide a give-and-take between our team and their people.”

Students have worked on two industry-related projects this year and while the details are confidential, one involves biotechnology research by a well known global corporation, and the other concerns electronics applications.

Every project includes an engineering professor, and possibly a larger number of instructors. Senior technical officers at the client company are also involved in every step of the process, offering their input and providing direction when needed.

Successful companies are always brainstorming new uses, and new markets, for their technologies, winnowing hundreds of possible ideas down to a few viable products. Corporate culture can sometimes stifle the kind of outside-the-box thinking that produces the next big innovation, but Spencer says that’s not a problem for BSTI students.

“Companies are careful not to be too restrictive with us; they see this as an interesting experiment,” he says. “A couple of months into a project, if a student team can tell the company something they have not considered about a market or technology area that the company knows well, that is quite an accomplishment. That creates real value.”

Richard Shafer, associate dean for corporate relations at the Johnson School, suggests that businesses see BSTI as way to improve their standing in a highly competitive atmosphere. “They have to grow fast, and they know their current research and development process is not pumping out enough new products and services fast enough on a global basis,” he says. “So they have to know where the innovation is coming from. The idea of innovating the innovation process is what this is all about. Then we can evaluate which technologies make the most sense for a company.”

That ability to anticipate which products will sell, and how to speed the innovation process, is what makes BSTI particularly valuable. Spencer notes that Cornell students have the talent to “see around corners” and can get from point A to point B when the path is not laid out in front of them.

 “A company may have the wherewithal to invest and make ideas grow, but not know how to do innovation well and consequently miss many opportunities,” he says. “A particular strength of this initiative is that engineers are talking to business school students at an earlier point in their careers, and are learning the terms that are important in the business world. Engineers typically have no sense of market and market urgency.”

Looking ahead, Fitzgerald and Wankerl want to reach beyond the Cornell campus and involve more students at other universities that will initiate additional corporate projects. MIT, which like Cornell has strong business and engineering schools, has been brought into the fold through the efforts of Fitzgerald, a professor in the engineering school there. BSTI would serve as the primary contact point for corporate partners when the model is expanded.

“It’s exciting for me to provide engineering students with this type of path,” Fitzgerald says. “And the connection with MIT will enable us to establish teams that work across educational institutions.”

Ph.D. student Mannion is confident that the experience gained through BSTI will serve him well when he pursues a career in industry. “The program is a model, really.  The goal is to demonstrate that students with knowledge sets based in different disciplines can work together to quickly and efficiently answer questions of commercial relevance,” he says. “In addition, those who plan to go into industry derive benefits through working on a BSTI project. They get a feel for the industrial lab setting, and they develop a more complete picture of the innovation process.”