 My name is Gregory Pogue. I'm the Interim Managing Director and Senior Research Scientist at the IC Squared Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you for joining us today. I'll be your moderator for today's global innovation through science and technology or simply just Tech Connect. This conversation will center on the topic of how universities can support entrepreneurship. Now remember you can join our discussion by sending us your questions and comments through the chat roll next to the video player or simply using Twitter at hashtag just Tech Connect. And if you're hosting a viewing group be sure to send us your questions and a live photo of your group for a chance to be featured on today's program. Let me begin by welcoming our panel of experts. I'm joined by Christina Pelican. She's the Director of Commercialization Programs for the Horn Entrepreneurship Center at the University of Delaware. Christina you may want to say hello. Hi guys this is Christina here from Delaware. Happy to be here today. Fantastic. I'm also joined by Wiley Larson. He is the co-founder and COO of Secadus Incorporated a startup commercializing eye tracking technology for the diagnosis of concussions and dementia. He has recently served as program manager. Sorry about that. Hi everyone. So you know Wiley recently left his position at Arizona State University's venture development program. So he brings both startup as well as commercialization experience from universities. Thanks Gregory. Happy to be here. So guys thanks so much for being with me. As we wait for the viewers to send us their questions I'd like to kick off the discussion by asking you to tell us a little bit about your own experiences with entrepreneurship at the university level. And it's a particular program that you've worked on that was successful. Tell us more about this. So Wiley please start with you. Hey Ben thank you. As Gregory said I have just completed five and a half years at Arizona State University as part of the startup program there and also supporting faculty commercialization at Arizona State. Part of my responsibilities there included supporting our student entrepreneurs as well as our faculty entrepreneurs. At ASU part of our mission statement is it's an eight part mission statement and two of those are directly related to entrepreneurship. Number three is valuing entrepreneurship and number four is doing use inspired research. So at ASU we try to incorporate research as well as entrepreneurship in every aspect of the education that our faculty members are providing and our students are participating in. So over those five and a half years I've had the opportunity and the pleasure of working with over 70 faculty and research based startups out of Arizona State. And as Greg mentioned I recently left Arizona State to work on a startup myself which is using eye tracking technology to help physicians diagnose concussions. So I'm looking forward to sharing with you all a little more about that today. Thanks a lot Wiley. Christina what are your experiences and please tell me tell us what's going on in Delaware. Sure yeah so at the University of Delaware we have a range of programs. The Horn Entrepreneurship Center where I work is the central resource for all the seven colleges across the university. If they're interested in kind of just getting started in figuring out if they should form a company all the way through providing some gap funding some pretty sizable grants to researchers and teams of true entrepreneurs once they're ready to kind of get out of the university ecosystem and go into the broader community as we call it. And so I provide some programs that offer funding training mentorship and we do work with the community entrepreneurs as well so it's not just those within the University of Delaware that we work with we do offer programs for the broader community and at a previous position I was at at the City University of Newark we did that as well. So I love to kind of serve not just the university but also the community around us because that's important. So for those that are listening in that might not be working or studying at a university hopefully we can still provide some some tips and tricks on how to get engaged with the local universities and learn about some programs they might be offering or should be offering that you could recommend. So my experiences have got to run the gamut of you know being the pseudo checkwriter all the way through being the tough the tough guy telling you your idea is probably not any good until you go and talk to customers. So I'm happy to kind of talk about any of those experiences. Fantastic thank you Christina. So just a brief background on myself. So I'm a biochemist who has had six startups involving developing drugs. My latest drug that I've been involved in was producing the Z-Map immunotherapeutic that was used to treat Ebola in the continent of Africa. I've also been had the privilege to work at the University of Texas at Austin for the last six years. Our mission statement is really one phrase what starts here changes the world and the IC squared Institute stands for innovation creativity and capital. It began 40 years ago as a coalescing function to link the university with the community and companies. That sounds a whole lot like the triple helix except that was 20 years beforehand and that actually was what led to the change from Austin being a sleepy little town to now being rated as one of the top innovation centers in the world. IC squared continues to work with students. We have interacted with over 200 students around the world and programs this so far this year. We work in research supporting studies on entrepreneurship and we link as Christina's group also does into the community. We have the Austin technology incubator which has helped build about three billion dollars worth of impact in our community over the last 25 years. Our companies have raised nearly a billion dollars in the last seven years. We also work with normal entrepreneurs with restaurants and services and other approaches adapting methodologies to helping them find growth opportunities and then again we work across our community of universities throughout the Southwest as being the nodes for the Southwest ICOR network. So that gives the background on your panelists. I hope that that will help you see the differences and maybe even direct some of your questions. So what we're going to do is talk a little bit about some of the questions you've introduced to us. I'm going to open this up to the panel each one and we'll be able to just kind of walk through some of these interesting things. So the first question comes from Burkina Faso. The question is what can a university do to empower young people to help with development particularly in the agricultural sector? Wally I'm going to probably turn that over to you as someone who I know with Arizona State they have a leadership position in this particular sector of the economy. Yes thank you. One of the parts of the Arizona State entrepreneurship program that we've implemented for ASU is a program where our mascot is the Sun Devils. We live in the Valley of the Sun and so we have started a program called Venture Devils and one of the design aspirations of ASU is inclusiveness and giving everybody an opportunity to participate. So even though we have funded programs specifically for student entrepreneurs we also have a mentorship program where any student or faculty member that self identifies that I want to build a startup we support a mentorship program to help them get launched and get ready for the next funding competition. So over the last school year we had 330 faculty and student startups as part of that program. So to specifically address entrepreneurship and agriculture we are sort of a disconnected campus in that we have a core campus where most of our research takes place but our agricultural research is out at another campus a little further out from on the outskirts of town I'm sure much like many other universities. So in order to support those entrepreneurs we not only find mentors that are geographically diverse around town as well as across the country but we also make sure that anytime we're offering any programming we're also doing it via Skype or via Google Hangouts and we're publicizing not just on the main campus but on all campuses. So those are just a few of the ways that we are trying to support all different types of entrepreneurs. Thank you very much Wally. One thing I'd like to add is that we have an incubator in Andhra Pradesh which is a very rural agriculturally centered state in India and what we have done with this incubator called Accelerate Andhra Pradesh is we've created sort of a centerpiece where the practitioners of agriculture can get together with companies and students from the local universities to discuss applications and this has resulted in several of the companies being able to trial innovative solutions on those particular farms and sometimes the students get actively involved and this has opened up farmers to see how their practice could also be innovative further than simply just you know what would be viewed as a brand new technology tool so this has opened up their eyes and got them more involved in these types of innovations. Another question was brought in and this one I'd like to direct to Christina says from an early stage entrepreneurs point of view what resources can universities offer to help faculty and students in protecting their inventions and doing business with a private sector? Yeah definitely so there's just to kind of give you a sense of the organizations that can be found within the university a lot of times the the more established universities will have not only an entrepreneurship center which is where I work at our university but they also have a technology transfer center or office or technology commercialization office so there's a lot of you know it's either TTO or TCO in most countries depending on the translation but that's the office that deals in particular with intellectual property so when you're at a university either as a faculty member or staff a lot of times in most universities the university actually owns your intellectual property by way of actually providing you that paycheck so if you are an undergraduate student the rules vary within the United States we have the Bidol Act which means that undergraduates most times own their own intellectual property so just keeping that in mind and then to answer the question specifically how can universities support that you know you want to go talk to your technology commercialization officer or whoever might be the analogous person that you're a university if there's not that centric person then sometimes it's the provost or the vice president for research or innovation those kinds of people provide resources as far as you know who you should talk to to protect your intellectual property and a lot of times keep in mind outside of the university there are a lot of resources for you as well that might link directly with the university so at the University of Delaware we have a lot of legal firms that we've worked with and we actually have a program called attorney in residence so every other week we have an attorney that comes in and sits down for free with entrepreneurs that have any kind of question ranging from intellectual property to founders agreements to splitting up equity you know all the whole gamut of questions that might come from a legal perspective so that's something that we provide and others other universities provide that as well it's a free resource to you and so that it's just something to keep in mind just having those conversations as to where I can learn about my rights and responsibilities but then a lot of times depending on your agreement the university will own that intellectual property so they will pay for the upfront costs to at least file the provisional patent and that's the temporary patent for that last 12 12 months and then if you want to go on to file the full utility patent you know you need to have a conversation about the value that you're providing on the intellectual property and whether or not it's worth the university's time and money to to spend on that one piece of intellectual property so there are a lot of resources within the university depending on what that structure of the university that you're working with thanks christina wiley maybe talk a little bit about why it are why protecting innovations is particularly important when you're going to do business with a private sector yeah absolutely great so protecting your invention is something that that most entrepreneurs especially in the states spend a lot of time worrying thinking about and worrying about and just to kind of tag on to christina's answer here in arizona in addition to a student entrepreneurship program that provides some funding we also have a a small fund that helps those students pay for intellectual property protection and filing those patents so that anytime you're filing patents it can get it can get pretty expensive and and as as christina said as well having those attorneys and lawyers that are willing to come in and host office hours is is a great asset for your community and you'll find that most of them are very happy to do that at no cost because it gives them a chance not only to give back to the university but it could also be a potential client for them as well so it's it's definitely a great idea to have those patent attorneys as a part of your programs but but secondly we talk a lot about execution in our programs so just because you have a great idea doesn't mean that a patent is going to guarantee your success it also is about having a great team a great plan and and protecting that protecting that innovation as as well so what we also talk about a lot is not just focusing necessarily on patents as part of your intellectual property strategy which is certainly the most expensive part of protecting your company and your business but also utilizing copyrights trademarks and trade secrets uh trade secrets being as most people kind of often forget trade secrets something that you can keep within the the founders group or within the team is the least expensive and also is has no expiration date so if you can have a very tight knit team you have non-disclosure agreements among your among your founding team and your employees protecting protecting those ideas for all four parts of your intellectual property strategy the patents the trademarks the copyrights and trade secrets uh is is a really key and um and thorough way to make sure that your ideas aren't copied and and uh and and taken by another another company thank you very much do you mind if i i have there's a good resource online um just uh not to keep going on this one topic but um i was recently in ireland and there's a great um country-wide program there that's helped to centralize the tech transfers resources and that's called kti or knowledge transfer ireland they have a fantastic website with a lot of resources that are available so some model agreements model templates some best practices so if you are an entrepreneur or if you are at a university as a staff or faculty take a look at that website um and you know use it as much as you can because it's an open source platform that you can kind of not steal from but you know take some some great tips and tricks from from their website and some documents that they have already prepared i think that's really important and thank you christina because you know we often focus in on the mechanisms of intellectual property protection and we do this as a university or as a company because you don't really sell ideas you sell assets you partner assets and you have to basically define an asset by its intellectual property protection strategy and what we find very damaging to commercialization opportunities is when innovators have not protected an asset they've allowed it to move into the public domain and that allows people to copy or buy from other sources and that really truncates the ability of that innovator to build out a strategy for commercialization and i think that really comes down to one of the ideas of understanding where your market is and why you need to protect in that market specifically now as we move from the idea of protecting intellectual property one of the questions that a early stage entrepreneur has asked is what are the tips for universities looking to set up a funding system for newly creating created incubators so how do we take some of these new enterprise ideas that may spin out of the university hold them inside of an incubator and how do we fund that process christina i know you've given a lot of thought to this yeah so there are a couple ways to get started on getting some funding but then there's also a different um strategy on continuing to fund an incubator and we can talk about both of those but to get started um especially within the university it's it's always good to have a bit of money um that and buy in right and support from the university's central system so if they can provide any funding to kind of get that started that's great within the us we have a lot of grant resources at the well for now at the federal government level um that you know from the economic development authority from national science foundation um and so some of those offer some uh some grants and some funding to help you kind of get started on building out an incubator um and incubator is something very specific so you know usually that's a closed maybe two-year program where you're kind of um or less uh you know working towards validating your business model or validating your idea and then moving on to the next thing so uh during that two-year time frame you could be as an entrepreneur in an incubator giving up some equity or paying some fee to be a part of that incubator it depends on the model um but a lot of times that's how an incubator can stay afloat and hopefully scaling their operations so if you do really well the incubator does really well which means everyone wants everyone to do really well and so that's kind of a a bit of a one example of a model for an incubator to not only get launched but then continue sustained funding thanks christina wiley tell us a little bit about arizona i know that the the efforts around asu have resulted in some really interesting models for commercialization within your region yeah thank you uh we have uh we have done a number of things here at asu to to really approach commercialization with uh a sort of to use a hockey reference or a soccer reference shots on goal right so uh there's a number of programs we have run to help encourage our faculty members and and students as well to participate in intellectual property based startups that are spinning out of the university one program we've had here at asu is a program called the furnace program where as a staff we selected patents that we thought were start-upable and then we advertised those patents as uh as available for a business plan competition and so over two years we we were able to launch 14 companies uh based on intellectual property where the team wasn't actually part of of the university so having a very open philosophy towards individuals and startups and giving them some runway to allow them to try to launch ventures from intellectual property has been a philosophy that we have adopted so anytime we have a faculty member or students that want to spin out of technology we try to defer any payments or any licensing fees uh for a minimum of 12 months so that they have a little bit of runway to get started we try to remind our administrators and our staff and our team that in most cases startups don't have a lot of money and so you're better off your chances are better to if possible push those fees down the road a year or two or three uh or or you know setting up sort of a payment plan so that they have an opportunity to really go out do some fundraising and uh and increase their chances of success so i think uh those two areas having a very liberal open philosophy to getting getting startups started and then also uh delaying or deferring those fees has been a way that we've been able to uh help a lot of different faculty startups get going thank you very much i'll offer one other example too since that's the you know trying to provide some good models to think about so utec ventures and lima peru they're one of the gist innovation hubs they're fantastic they have a program called utec ventures which is a business accelerator they also have utec garage which is a maker space and they received a small amount of funding from by way of being a gist innovation hub to kind of help their their university be the community central point for entrepreneurs they've leveraged that small funding into look at how great we've done in just a small amount of time with a small amount of money to the peruvian government and then they got a a lot more money from them to help support what they're doing within the university i think it was something like a multi-million dollar grant um from just a small couple thousand dollars from uh being a gist i have so it's you know if you can start to show traction and if you have a good strategy you can probably leverage that into more funding down the road and i would take a look at that website as well so if they're listening in in the chat role go ahead and put your link in there but it's utec ventures and lima peru and they're they've done really well for themselves as far as accelerating businesses out of the university fantastic i'm so glad that they've joined us and can provide that information i think one thing you have to realize is that incubation is a subsidy for small business this is the reality we may want to make money quickly from startups out of universities but even in the united states the average time of exit is around seven years when i'm teaching people about starting companies i ask them what is the average length of a marriage in united states and many people are shocked to find out that it's five years or less so you have to be married to your startup team longer than married often to your spouse and that means that the people who invested in you whether it's your university with their intellectual property the early stage angels or friends and family who put in their money or even more institutional funds have to wait years alas even a decade or more to get their money back from those investments and many times they are not successful now i think it's really important that's what wiley said about the shots on goal strategy this is an important concept that the region and the country has to buy into when the austin technology incubator was begun in 1989 george kosmetzky had to convince the city of austin to put the first money into the austin technology incubator without job proof in other words all the other economic incentives to come to austin or other cities generally come after you've generated job creation but with the startup community it was actually a pretty big chance the mayor had to take to put money in before he had instantiation what's interesting to find out now is that investment results in about 90 million dollars of economic activity every year in central texas it creates about 250 direct jobs and about 650 total jobs in central texas each year these are paybacks that roll into about 67 dollars for every dollar invested by our city in what goes on with this incubator so once incubation works it does create these huge value streams but they have to be viewed in the longer run these companies that are producing the jobs have been incubated in austin for two to four years before they're building to these larger job numbers so one has to be patient and understand that these pieces work and i think one also under has been discussed that there is an opportunity to build accelerators which are more investment tools they're different than incubators and have a different business model their model is to produce value for the investors who help accelerate the companies and you may find some of these groups like tech stars or other groups in your region and they have certainly ways to improve and enhance business models but they're often looking for those earlier term value exits is simply because of what's where their model is so for most of you joining us you're actually watching the just tech connect conversation we're discussing how universities can support entrepreneurship i'm joined by two experts on our panel christina pelican uh pelican from university of delaware and wiley larson who was most recently from arizona state university and has now spun out a company we're taking live questions from the viewers you can submit your questions through the chat box next to your video player or on twitter using hashtag just connect so wanted to ask the next question really which is about christina let's talk a little bit about how universities can set up a framework to commercialize their ideas and their innovations that they've developed on campus sure um so we actually have a kind of a five step process and that's kind of our framework it doesn't have to be linear that you go from step one to two to three etc because that's not the life of an entrepreneur sometimes it's a bit iterative or jumping around but we have resources at each one of those steps along the way that we can provide and that resource could be a program could be an activity it could be a funding source it could be just networking and so we've kind of identified what needs to happen at a very early stage all the way through what needs to happen at a much later stage when the entrepreneurs are ready to get out into the community and what they're lacking and what they could use so at the very early stage we have things on it helps to build the community so that you don't feel like you're alone as an entrepreneur so a lot of times it can be a lot of work you're putting in long hours you're stressing yourself out and so you know we try to get that community started and bring you into our community on day one so we have things like free lunch friday so every friday we bring in a local entrepreneur that has been really successful and they can share their story and we provide free lunch and so that way you get to not only meet that entrepreneur and hear their his or her story but you also get to meet the other entrepreneurs that come to listen in and then we have every wednesday something very similar called workshop wednesday but it's a little bit more of a practical hands-on you know how to discussion but again that community comes in and learns from each other there's time for networking and you can kind of build that community yourself we also have an entrepreneurship club on campus that we don't run but the students themselves run it they use our space to come in here though again trying to keep a very centralized community every wednesday night from i think seven thirty to nine they come in and they meet and they talk about a different topic every week and so again they're kind of building up that community so that's step one and then i won't go through each of the steps but on the last step that's where i focus a lot of my effort on because it's much more commercialization focused so we offer proof of concept funding so if you want to actually build out the prototype that you've validated a business model for we'll provide you grants for up to seventy five thousand u.s. dollars and you can you know get out get out of the building start talking to customers use that funding to build a prototype and then go find somewhere to live and work outside of the university so that's kind of the work that we've set up we put it on our website we put it on our flyers and we provide resources to each one of those steps fantastic wiley could you maybe tell us the story of cicadas tell us how it you know came about as an idea and how you got involved as an entrepreneur and it being launched now out of the university yeah absolutely um the cicadas a story actually um it actually goes right along with what what christina was just talking about and and uh i'll tag along to that for a minute um it is so important in my opinion that that you build this community of entrepreneurs you give them an opportunity to be together um it almost and these things are really hard they're they're difficult and it's great to have them go through these um have events and and uh free lunch fridays i love that give them an opportunity to to just be together because a lot of the problem solving that they're going to be able to do is going to come from learning from each other and so i i'm certainly any program that i've run i've tried to give them an opportunity to just be together almost kind of be a support group for one another and help them problem solve and that's kind of how my company cicadas came to be uh we it was actually a part of the furnace program that i mentioned earlier i was one of the staff members who was screening the patents that we were going to uh enter in and make available for the competition and so i was walking down the i was actually helping upload the technologies to the website and the second year we ran the program i came across this eye tracking technology uh for the second time and i thought you know this is really really interesting and so um i happened to be walking down the hallway a few days later and uh after after the competition had ended and i bumped into a friend of mine who was in the building mentoring and i said hey have you have you seen this technology uh we were just chit chatting about the competition and i said you know i'm really i'm really interested in this eye tracking technology and and he said you know actually that was one that i was looking at as well so uh we said well let's let's take a closer look at this and and uh about another day or two later we knew we didn't have the the technical skills we didn't have that engineer that our team needed and so uh two days later once again just walking through the hallway in our incubator i bumped into a guy that i knew that was very uh very strong on coding and uh i mentioned it to him and he said yeah that's one i was looking at too so we formed a team we talked to the uh talked to the university and they said yeah we'll uh we'll give you a shot at it so uh it's it's really exciting we're getting some of our our first data here this summer on concussions and we actually used the lean startup process if you're familiar with it to to do a pivot very early on we were initially looking at neurological diseases and and in our customer discovery we realized that um we could get data faster and we might have a better chance of success looking at head injuries so that's a little bit about about the story of cicadas fantastic so we're going to talk now a little bit about the for what are free and easily accessible resources want to highlight those that universities can provide new technologies the first i would like to highlight is illustrated in my cup that by providing the power of coffee and the power of beer one gets people together and one of the most important things new ventures need is other people you need people who honestly with more experience than you to come together and help you have deeper insight more linkages to market and how to process that information in a more effective way and at the University of Texas we provide lots of free coffee for people to get together near campus on campus to put mentors in the community in front of students successful business people in front of faculty and that that allows the ideas faculty and students develop to be pressure tested to find out whether they are able to support commercialization in the mind of business experts so i'm going to ask Christina and Wiley briefly to talk about ways they use free resources and offer and their campuses sure so i can get that started i mean i mentioned free lunch Friday and we actually have a nice donor that's providing the funding for the free lunches so that's one way to you know if you want to provide actual lunches try to talk to some local partners that you can just throw their logo up and say supported by x and then that way you might be able to get some funding for that workshop Wednesdays are free and open to the public we have a lot of meetups that we do so we have a maker space or maker network really that is a network of all the maker spaces on campus and we're having a happy hour every third Thursday so it's a third thirsty Thursday with the maker network so you know people who want to build or or tinker with things or find out where they can go to build things they're welcome to come to that we have i'll do you one better we actually have competitions that provide funding so not only is it free to join but you can even win some funding from the the resources that we have so we have a competition every end called hen hatch anyone from the community and or within the university can submit their business idea and more or less pitch it and then they get up to it depends on the year but usually around 100 000 in prizes or in kind awards and then we have another one that those the younger entrepreneurs can actually access in countries around the world now called diamond challenge so if you are a high school or anyone less than 18 years old really and you have a great idea go to diamondchallenge.org that's another one of our programs that we provide up to a hundred thousand dollars in funding to several different split up to a couple different companies that win but it's a hundred thousand dollars in prizes and that is you just present your business idea online and then we have judges come in and review that so you can even not only come to free things but we'll actually give you some money too. Those are all the ones I can think of right now but definitely keep an eye out for the meetups and the meetings that are happening that are sponsored or provided by your university one that I really found to be highly engaging and really opened up my network was at Bangkok University so last year I went to Thailand and they have the Asian symposium on creativity and innovation management and that brings together innovators from all of the southeast Asia countries so in a couple of days you get to meet a ton of people from you know a large portion of the world that those people are living in and so you know it's those kinds of things where there are regional meetups or UTEC actually also has something that's available for I think everyone in South America seems like they came they sent us a picture and it was a massive crowd it was open to the community there's a lot of fun so just get connected with the university if you're not already and find out what free programming they have that you can tie into. Great we have a really interesting question from the American Corner in Burundi this question is fascinating panels so listen universities often are seen as job or basically creating job seekers but what role can universities play in creating job creators? Wiley? Yes. Jump on that one please. Yes well I I think that's a fantastic question and we actually because entrepreneurship is such an integral part of our curriculum and our and our mission statement I think that that we really try to serve both areas of job seekers and job creators so one of one of the the terms that's really come out in the last few years is entrepreneurial mindset and so even if we have we have lots of lots of programs that help startups people who are really starting to really want to create those companies and be their own boss and do something new that's never been done before but we also have a lot of focus more recently on creating that design thinking problem solving type of of employee that the corporate sector and the manufacturing sector and other the types of workers that other people are looking for so even even if you're an entrepreneur who says hey you know I'm not quite ready to go out and start my own company I still want to take these entrepreneurship classes and and learn how entrepreneurs approach problem solving and so that's that's one way is to make sure that we're also serving our corporate community for job seekers and in addition to opening up our programs for all people who want to do a startup so as I mentioned earlier we had 330 different startups we were working with over the past school year we we want to open that up to as many people as we can in in creating a mentorship program around that now some some startups they come to us because they know we have a little bit of money that we can give them and they think if I just have the money I'll be fine and what we've what we've tried to tell them is yes we can incentivize you by participating in our program and giving you some funding but also it's it's really competitive it's very competitive for that funding within our university as well as you know once you get out into into the real world so to speak so having a mentorship program that supports anybody who raises their hand and and self-identifies I think is a great way to to create job creators on the academic side at our university we have about 83 different entrepreneurship classes across all disciplines at the university so offering those electives that are in different departments that have to do with entrepreneurship I think is another great way that the university can support job creators as well as job seekers that's a great question fantastic so we've got a another question coming in from the resource center in Monrovia the question is how can innovators and inventors reach out and gain support from universities Christina you hit on several important ways at the University of Delaware this is being done and how your center is engaged could you maybe describe those again yeah I think just you know being brave and showing up at any of the like if they have an entrepreneurship center or if there is an entrepreneurship club or if there's a hackathon over the weekend or a startup weekend things like that you know get connected with them and and show up physically so that they know who you are or send an email if nothing else or pick up the phone and and find out like how do I get connected so at University of Delaware we have at the Horn entrepreneurship center specifically we have a weekly announcement email so what's happening here every week gets sent out in an email so you can come in and to any one of those things that interest you and and get engaged with what we're doing so the best way to do that is just get in front of those individuals at the university that are doing these cool things right and then staying connected with them so getting tapped into that community is probably that you know just by way of showing up is the easiest way to get started and if you have anyone else you know it's always good to start to provide not just take resources but also provide value back so bring your friends in or suggest topics that you know you really want to hear about or experts that you want to hear from so that the university can can cater to what you need as well and so if any of the things that we're suggesting today are things that don't exist at the university near you start a conversation don't tell them you know why aren't you doing this but say you know I heard about this great idea you know is there any possibility that this can happen at this university and is there any way I can support you guys as you try to build that program out so you know and that way you're you're being engaged with the community in more ways than just absorbing resources which is fine too thank you so the binational center in our media is asking what advice can you give to administrators looking to find mentors for their student entrepreneurs um I'll start this with what goes what has happened in Austin and maybe get another comment the power of the reputation of innovation coming from your university campus is very important because it draws in larger corporations who want to be associated with this and it draws in those innovative minded individuals such as entrepreneurs or experienced business leaders to be around new ideas and the energy coming from that campus in terms of innovations that's really important I think administrators can also use their connections into the community whether it be with the net the government within the city those business leaders and ask them to give back one of the most important things UT does is it asks people in Austin to join it in the enterprise of innovation sometimes people don't do anything because they're not asked and sometimes they want to be paid and the university has to set up basically expectations that what we're asking for is for your volunteer effort we may give you some coffee we may give you some time and you may get an early look but this is an opportunity to benefit students and we find that people are very anxious to participate panelists your experiences in these areas yeah this is Wiley again one of the things where we find that we anytime we get sort of an influx of mentors it's usually as the result of a news article or something that's appeared in the Phoenix business journal about one of our startups we're certainly if we've if our ranking has come out and we've we've um had a story about uh our entrepreneurship program so uh one of the things that I would I would really say that that offers positive results in all ways is any media attention that you can get for your startups specifically but but also for your program as well because it seems like whenever that happens people are like wow that is really that is really a cool team or I really like that my local university is supporting startups I want to get involved how can I help and and mentorship is a is a great way to do that so any really really pushing um the stories of your entrepreneurs out into the media I think is really really helpful thank you I think that idea of stories we listen to stories we promote around stories and we are activated it's important so I love the good use of Twitter uh Carmen Lucy from Guatemala asks how can universities promote young entrepreneurs in developing countries where there's a tendency to have monopolistic industry sectors Christina you have been recently in other countries working with entrepreneurs maybe talk to that that topic so to clarify the question is how can universities support entrepreneurs rather than supporting the big uh industries that are around is that how do how do these young entrepreneurs fit in to an economy that favors national monopolies okay yeah so it's always there's always cycles in uh in any economy um and ours kind of reset in in 08 and so what we're looking at here is kind of a way to create as we answered before how do you create your own jobs or how can we as an entrepreneurship center create innovators that shake up the big corporations because Delaware so I came from New York before that's where I was working for the past few years a lot of big industries a lot of great entrepreneurs a lot of diversity a lot of resources and coming down to Delaware it's a different environment and so what Delaware kind of grew up on was um poultry banks um and chemicals so we have DuPont and Dow and Gore in headquarters all in Delaware and so those are big chemical companies and we had a lot of poultry farms uh in southern Delaware and so um I guess the you know even in Delaware we had those big corporations right that um take up a lot of their resources and they get a lot of the government support um they get a lot of the attention and so what what we've done recently is try to bring in mentors a so from those big companies those big companies so that we can kind of cross pollinate ideas um but also train the entrepreneurs on how to be um entrepreneurs within those big companies as well as entrepreneurs that create jobs and can you know down the road maybe compete with those big companies down the road being 20 years down the road um you know as as they build value for their business so universities I think really love good stories as we just talked about so if you are an entrepreneur and you're creating jobs and you're creating an economic impact by way of getting grant funding or revenue from sales that's a great story that the university loves to tell about and the local government will love that too and you will get support if you um if you can create that economic impact and can create the value for your business that is that really speaks for itself so I think universities want those success stories because they rely on that to show how well they're doing as a way of supporting the new and emerging innovators and entrepreneurs in their community rather than you know they don't care so much about supporting the big corporations they can do that on their own I think thank you very much and I think that another way that universities can assist is actually helping with internationalization of business and this happens through developing collaborations often with other countries through university university relationships and this allows the entrepreneurial ideas and companies to find new vistas new opportunities we find this happening in Korea where the chevils manage about 80 percent of the economy but only higher five percent of the people and it's very difficult to make a very profitable business only selling to Korean companies but if one is a small SME in Korea and can build a business outside of Korea that changes the pricing structure to the chevils within Korea and allows for a much faster and more scalable growth strategy so university university relationships can give you identity in other places there's another question by Laura Ocampo from Columbia who says do universities have a role in helping entrepreneurs find seed capital and then there's a secondary question is there a way to follow up to make sure this capital has been properly invested Wiley what are your thoughts on this yeah I agree I think that I think that universities definitely have a role in helping teams find and startups find seed capital I think that that is even kind of what I would consider one of our main roles to be so my overall strategy and one of the metrics one of the the statistics that we look for is how much seed capital have we helped our companies raise and and quite honestly there's not an overabundance by any stretch of of capital here in Arizona that's that is allocated or that's invested in startups so it's also very competitive what I think our role is as a university is to try to help those startups develop the best business model that they can to help them find great technologies or or find the right customer segments for those technologies and and and also then following up with the companies even after their term in the incubator or in the accelerator is is after it's over still following up with them still continuing to mentor them still checking in with them and and making sure that they're on the right track so when I mentioned at the beginning of the call I'd worked with 70 companies helped form 70 companies over the last five and a half years I do the best that I can to try to continue to engage those companies and and touch base with them once a quarter or once every six months and see how they're doing to the second part of the question how much oversight and how much can we make sure that that does funding that funding is spent appropriately and prudently it sort of depends on where the funding comes from so if it's a a program that we are intimately involved with or we help form a seed fund for example that's that's sponsored by the university or that's managed by the university yeah we definitely have some oversight on that but but in most cases once the funding is awarded it's it's awarded and you don't have a lot of control over that so just trying to do the best job of selecting those teams and getting them as well prepared as we can is is is where we see our role okay thank you very much I'd like to just have some two quick comments on some two last questions the University of Jesus of Nazareth in San Pedro Sula Honduras asks what strategies are available to engage undergraduates effectively in entrepreneurship Christina what's going on with your center at the University of Delaware yeah so very quickly we I haven't really talked to all about our academic programs we have a lot of courses a lot of electives and we have a major and a minor as well so if you are an apparel fashion student but have an interest in innovation and entrepreneurship you can add on a minor for example and get get some additional training on that and so an undergraduate can get involved in our academic programs all the way we're starting at you know just taking one class as an elective all the way through majoring in entrepreneurship in addition we have all of our co-curricular programs which is really what I've been talking a lot about all those the workshops and the free lunches all that kind of stuff a lot of the people that come to those events are undergraduates and that's because we have a massive undergraduate population so we try to serve them as best we can so that's the the way that we support the undergrads fantastic I think that one of the key factors is you ask your administrators to set aside a centralizing point where students can aggregate to find experts of entrepreneurs mentors and other groups these types of centralizing functions that involve coffee and humans to interact with them are very very important to draw people together entrepreneurship is a team sport final question Libro Vivo asks are there any university affiliated incubator programs that work with potential entrepreneurs in a remote or virtual fashion I'm gonna throw that one up to the team well one of the things I would mention at Arizona State we do the best we can to to reach out we've got a lot of partnerships in other countries I think some of that was mentioned by the rest of the panel as well and so trying to provide as much outreach as we can virtually over the internet programs like this anytime we have an opportunity to participate we love it but it can be difficult and so just we encourage working with local governments working with you know our government as well to support programs like this is is one of the great ways I think we can we can help do that thank you I'd like to make a comment on one of the things we've done at the IC squared Institute at UT as we've had a program called converting technology to wealth we've had over 35 countries from six continents involved in that program and that's really transformed the learnings of how you build incubation and how you build collaborations between incubators it's exciting seeing Pakistani entrepreneurs working with Norwegian incubators to find capital it's exciting to see what goes on with Malaysian innovators as they work with Swedish entrepreneurs and Swedish incubators so I think there are networking opportunities that exist and I think plugging in to the organizations that are collaborating with just is a very important piece you know we're almost out of time I would like to thank each one of our panelists with Wiley and Christina for your time your university your university's activities and your insights you've shared thank you both for everything you've done I would like to thank uh specifically those coming to view today around the world we have just an amazing array of folks I'd like to acknowledge a few of those individuals and thank them for attending we have the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa Canada the U.S. Embassy in Tunis Tunisia we have the U.S. Embassy in Bacau, Azerbaijan if I mispronounce your name I'm sorry I am really trying the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia Liberia American Corner in Susie Tunisia American Space in San Pedro Sula Honduras the BNC Colombo Americano and Medellin Colombia the BNC Colombo Americano in Armenia Colombia the American Corner in Kano, Nigeria the American Corner in Kigali, Rwanda the American Corner in Kamingi, Burundi the John F. Kennedy Library in Manizales, Colombia and the Youth Network for Reform in the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia Liberia we also want to thank local organizations for hosting viewing parties Utec and Lima Peru you've heard Utec's name several times the Edea group in Kampawa, Uganda, Sitsi in Dakar, Senegal I think at CTIC and Goldilocks State formerly the Newen's Business Accelerator in Skopalia, Macedonia I may have really botched that name and then Rain Energy in Azerbaijan we are thrilled that you were able to join us we hope this was useful and feel free to reach out to just if you have further questions please look for our next Tech Connect it'll be a live chat on October 10th please continue to send questions in the chat and on Twitter using the hashtag just tech connect and our panelists will stick around and we'll be able to answer some questions thank you again for joining us I thank the panelists I think just for inviting myself and Christina and Wiley to participate it's our honor to join with you as you want to build new businesses and let the power of entrepreneurship change your world thank you very much and goodbye