Entrepreneur Advises Researchers to Nurture Ideas More
Summary
The big ideas, and the fire in the belly, are easy to find coming from UW these days (Arzeda and EnerG2 pop to mind), but as any businessperson will tell you, starting companies is hard.Joe Eichinger, one of the savvy entrepreneurs Rhoads is leaning on to advise UW faculty, told me he’s been cautioning researchers to think things through a little more, nurture their ideas a little longer, before taking the leap with a startup.And young faculty members otherwise on the tenure track could see their careers derailed from research and teaching by getting wound up in a misguided venture, Eichinger says.He ticked off a list of intriguing technologies that aren’t quite ready to emerge in the commercial arena: —Imagine contact lenses that could be embedded with tiny electrical circuits, powered by small amounts of sunlight.The technology for such lenses has been brewing in the labs of two promising young UW faculty on the tenure track—Babak Parviz in electrical engineering, and Teung Shen in ophthalmology.