The United States Department of Defense has awarded Arizona State University a $1 million dollar grant to create a new Pracademic Center of Excellence in Technology Transfer (PACE/T2). PACE/T2 will leverage ASU’s proven method and record of success to support technology transfer and commercialization from Department of Defense (DOD) laboratories. The Center is a group effort led by ASU’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group (EIG) in association with Arizona Technology Enterprises (AzTE), ASU’s Security and Defense Systems Initiative (SDSI) and ASU’s W. P. Carey School of Business.
Technology transfer has seen massive growth and is a key objective for federal government agencies, especially the DOD. Technology transfer is the transferring of knowledge and technologies among government agencies to other institutions to enable accessibility to new scientific and technological advancements, which can then be further developed and exploited. PACE/T2 will play an important role in meeting DOD’s strategy, plans, goals and metrics for substantially increasing transfer and commercialization of dual-use technologies developed in defense laboratories to the commercial marketplace.
Gordon McConnell, assistant vice president for the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group at ASU and principal investigator on the grant told AZTB, “The ecosystems that will be in play will be in the ones near to where the DOD labs that are chosen – what it does do for Arizona is to show that innovation that is created here can and is being exported to other places – with ASU leading the way but with plenty of potential for other models being tested in Arizona which can also be replicated in other places.”
ASU has undertaken an evidence-based “learn-by-doing” approach that is focused on practical aspects of stimulating entrepreneurship to enable technology transfer and successful commercialization. This “pracademic” approach has demonstrated enormous success in achieving entrepreneurially driven transfer and commercialization of technologies.
Transfer and commercialization of technologies created at ASU is managed by AzTE, the technology transfer arm for ASU, in part via the Furnace Technology Transfer Accelerator led by EIG. Over the past 10 years, AzTE has supported the launch and development of 67 ASU spinout companies. Spinouts based on ASU-developed technologies raised $68 million in external funding during the 2013 fiscal year. Altogether, companies licensing ASU discoveries have raised nearly $400 million in total venture funding since AzTE’s creation in 2003.
Read more coverage about ASU’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group at AZTB.
