Lesa Mitchell

Commercializing University Innovations: Alternative Approaches

For much of the past century, universities and university-based researchers have played a critical role in driving technological progress, from the fortification of Vitamin D in the 1920s to the creation of Google in the 1990s. In the process, universities have been a strong catalyst for U.S. economic growth. But a perennial challenge related to university-driven innovation has been ensuring that university structures help - not hinder - innovation and the commercialization of innovations. Multiple pathways for university transfer exist and can be codified to provide broader access to innovation, allow a greater volume of deal flow, support standardization, and decrease the redundancy of innovation and the cycle time for commercialization. The proposed changes focus on creating incentives that will maximize social benefit from the existing investments being made in R&D and commercialization on university campuses.

The case for entrepreneurship in R&D in the pharmaceutical industry

A lack of entrepreneurial behaviour has often been highlighted as a contributor to the decline in the research and development (R&D) productivity of the pharmaceutical industry. Here, we present an assessment of entrepreneurship in the industry, based on interviews with 26 former and current leaders of R&D departments at major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Factors are highlighted that could be important in promoting entrepreneurial behaviour, which might serve as a catalyst for revitalizing R&D productivity.

Finding Business 'Idols': A New Model to Accelerate Start-Ups

Just as Simon Cowell is revolutionizing the music business with his American Idol television series, a group of new entrepreneurs is quietly changing the face of the venture capital industry and entrepreneurship. American Idol has proved to be a major success in identifying and establishing entertainment stars. A similar Idol formula is emerging among a new wave of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who are radically transforming the way high-tech entrepreneurs are identified, their businesses are launched, and the growth of their operations accelerated. We believe this is a highly significant development that has important implications for the way many other early stage companies may be launched and financed in the future.

Are Successful Women Entrepreneurs Different from Men

Women are one particularly understudied group of entrepreneurs. We know very little about female entrepreneurs, and our ignorance of this important demographic is a serious blind spot in any effort to increase the total number of entrepreneurs participating in our economy. What little we do know suggests that women are not nearly as active in the entrepreneurial space as they could be.This study attempts to address part of this knowledge gap. This based on data were collected in 2008-2009 from 549 respondents from randomly selected high-tech companies who were invited to participate. It compares the backgrounds, and experiences and motivations of men and women entrepreneurs. Our findings show that successful women and men entrepreneurs are similar in almost every respect. They had equivalent levels of education (slightly less than half earned graduate degrees), early interest in starting their own business (about half had at least some interest), a strong desire to build wealth or capitalize on a business idea, access to funding, and they largely agreed on the top issues and challenges facing any entrepreneur.The data also identify some small but potentially informative gender differences among successful entrepreneurs. For instance, motivations for starting a business differed slightly between men and women. The latter were more likely to cite a business partner’s encouragement as a key incentive to take the plunge. Women also were more likely than men to get early funding from their business partners.

Valuing Health Care: Improving Productivity and Quality

This report addresses a deceptively simple question: How can the productivity of American health care be substantially improved? Productivity, in lay terms, is the ratio of output to inputs. A more colloquial rendition of the question might be: how can we get a lot more bang for our health care buck?By design, we have brought together a varied assortment of ideas and suggestions, illustrating the messy, grab-bag nature that effective changes often need to take. Yet our proposals do fall (albeit with some overlap) into four broad categories, which structure the recommendations section of this report.Harnessing information: how systematically gathering and sharing data can unlock knowledge that produces systematically better choices. The key here is to incentivize a new corps of data entrepreneurs to collect and analyze existing medical data to discover and then disseminate the use of new therapies.Improving research: encouraging more collaboration across institutions and funding more translational research (aimed at “translating” basic scientific discoveries into medicines and therapies). Legal and regulatory reform: modernizing medical malpractice systems, removing counter-productive restrictions on health insurance premiums, and streamlining new drug approvals.Empowering patients: there are large benefits of giving more power to the people who matter most — patients — to make informed decisions about their own care.The ideas here are not new, though many of them are familiar only to the cognoscenti. To the contrary, we have sought ideas that have showed promise in the field, and then attempted to set them in a context that exploits the adjacent possible.If this report can focus more minds in the health policy community and general public on finding and implementing those changes, in everything from clinical practices to regulatory structures, it will have succeeded.From the Kauffman Task Force on Cost-Effective Health Care Innovation.