Entrepreneurship Minor Now Available for UA Doctoral Students
Optical Sciences doctoral student Pouria Valley (center) with his collaborators Yan An and Jamie YuFang Huang and their prototype for a zoom lens for devices such as cell phones. Valley went through the McGuire Entrepreneurship Program to learn how to market the lens.
The Eller College’s top-ranked McGuire Entrepreneurship Program has created a new pathway for graduate students to bring their research technology to market.
University of Arizona doctoral students in many disciplines are working on some of the most promising research projects on campus. But the rigors of their individual programs generally preclude them from taking part in entrepreneurial education, the vital next step in their ability to shepherd those research projects into the marketplace.
"There is considerable demand to advance scientific discovery into application," said Sherry Hoskinson, director of the McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship. "That is where any discovery reaches its ultimate value, be it social, environmental or commercial."
The one-year McGuire Entrepreneurship Program is open to all UA students, and about 100 of them are enrolled in the program each year.
Most are either undergraduate business majors, MBA students or master's students pursuing scientific or technical degrees. Doctoral students are rare. Hoskinson said finding time to wedge another addition into their academic demands of their own programs is a considerable barrier.
The answer may be a doctoral minor that the McGuire Program has just introduced. By incorporating it into their curriculum, more doctoral students can access entrepreneurial education as part of a formal program of study.
The doctoral minor also opens up new funding possibilities through public and private foundations and other agencies, another incentive in getting graduate students into the program.
Students from different colleges work in teams in the entrepreneurship program, which Hoskinson said increases the sophistication and complexity of their work.
"Doctoral students benefit from the entrepreneurship program in several ways," says Hoskinson. "They can quantify the commercial value of their own cutting edge research, illustrate its environmental or social value, and come to understand the legal framework of business and intellectual property."
The UA Office of Technology Transfer is also offering expertise to students, including help in resolving barriers to intellectual property issues and other hurdles in marketing new technologies.
The McGuire Center is now accepting applications for the doctoral minor for the 2009-10 academic year.
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- Extra Info | Eller College of Management
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