Davis Partners with National Labs to Help Researcher Entrepreneurship

UC Davis Graduate School of Management has joined with Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Labs to help researchers to develop their entrepreneurial skills. The partnership is focusing on a joint goal of speeding the transfer of new technologies from the laboratory to the commercial marketplace.

The labs and UC Davis received a $350,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy office. The grant will go towards the launch of the pilot program called Lab-Corps. Christine Hartmann, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Lab-Corps principal investigator said that the idea of the program is to help lab scientists to become better entrepreneurs and to help move new technologies to the marketplace.

Under the program, two teams of researchers from Livermore or Sandia Labs will receive $75,000 each to develop commercialization plans for their technologies. The teams will apply in a competitive process that will be held in late March. The two teams will go to national Lab-Corps hands-on entrepreneur training to be held at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, in July and October.

Professor Andrew Hargadon, founder and faculty director of the UC Davis Child Family Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Charles Soderquist Chair in Entrepreneurship said that the national labs have recognized UC Davis’s unique approach to training in their focus on developing a network of support for researchers within large academic and research institutions.

The Child Family Institute at UC Davis has trained more than 1,200 researchers and academics from UC Davis and around the world to bring their research to the commercial market. More than 50 companies have launched out of, or been supported, by the Institute, and start-ups affiliated with the Institute have raised nearly $100 million in funding.

regions: San Francisco

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