Caltech patents as many as 140 inventions every year, making it one of the most active filers in Los Angeles County. But the Pasadena research university has only been helping professors and students commercialize that technology for the past 16 years.
The Office of Technology Transfer was founded in 1995 to give university support to budding entrepreneurs who hadn’t previously found it at Caltech, said Fred Farina, assistant vice president of the office.
“In the early ’90s, there was a culture change from being a very ivory tower research culture that was anti-business,” he said. “A lot of things were happening in Silicon Valley and Boston because of MIT and Stanford and we said, ‘Why can’t we do the same?’”
Today, the office works with professors and students through the entire process of moving their technology from the lab to the marketplace. That includes helping inventors file for patents, license technology and start companies.
To eliminate the stigma that once surrounded entrepreneurship, the office tries to be supportive of professors’ ideas and inventions through an aggressive patent strategy. Instead of filing patents for technologies that would have applications of interest only to tech giants, Caltech files patents for a broad range of technologies.
As a result, the school licenses its technology frequently, but only spins off about eight companies each year. It’s a small number, but it’s in proportion to the small university, which has about 300 faculty members and 2,200 students.
One L.A. company that recently emerged from Caltech is Arges Imaging. The Pasadena company, founded in 2008, uses 3-D imaging to make dental crowns.
A growing number of biomedical companies have spun out of the university in recent years, Farina said, including companies that make medical devices and apply nanotechnology to medical problems.
But the university struggles to keep those companies close to home once they’re spun off. Farina said they leave because Los Angeles lacks a large venture capital community and management talent. As a result, startups flee to technology hubs such as Silicon Valley and Seattle.
For example, one of Caltech’s most promising recent startups, diamond-polishing company Rockoco Inc., left its Pasadena lab last year for Carlsbad.
“It makes it challenging to keep companies,” Farina said. “We have many, many instances of companies moving away. There are a couple that stay, of course.”
