The School of Business provides many hands-on experiences for its students, and a new one has just opened.
The Lassonde New Venture Development Center plans to let business, engineering and science students test the waters of starting a company without drowning.
“The students take technologies coming out of U labs and figure out how to market them,” said Jack Brittain, dean of the business school. “It’s a learning opportunity to find out how companies are started.”
The center works with the on-campus technologies, and provides the support needed to create a business. Students sign up for a year-long course and spend that time applying their knowledge to a real-world situation.
Although the center started operating this semester, five master’s of business students and two technology and science students are already working with Visual Influence, a visualizing and modeling software from the computer technology department.
The students serve numerous tasks from assessing the market potential to raising funds. The students also work with community partners who help with legal aid and accounting.
“It’s a lab?We aren’t mixing chemical test tubes, but we are experimenting with creating new businesses,” said Scott Holley, the center’s student director.
The team working with Visual Influence is at the final level of a four-step program the center uses to find businesses. Three other teams at the center are still at the first stage?identifying campus technologies. After a student team has found technologies, it evaluates the commercial potential of each technology, then selects one to develop.
“Soon we’ll have two or three technologies we’re working on at a time,” Holley said.
The students use the Technology Transfer Office at the U to find the technologies. The office licenses the technologies, and students use the office to help assess them, Holley said.
“Right now, we have about six or seven [technologies] we’ll evaluate,” he said. “Then, in a couple of months, we’ll invite one into the center.”
About 20 students currently work in the center, and they are helping set up the center’s programs.
“We have an incredible group of students, they’ve been handpicked by their departments,” Holley said. “This is a huge resource for the campus, and it’s of great value for the campus.”
The new resource was created by U graduate Pierre Lassonde, who started the center in memory of his late wife, also a U graduate, who died of ovarian cancer in 2000. He attended the business school while she studied nuclear engineering. She had a distinguished career, according to Brittain.
“He wanted to donate money to the U to remember his wife,” Brittain said. “The center brings both science and business together.”