USC: Focus on Most Marketable Technologies

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When USC Stevens Institute for Innovation was created five years ago, it represented a change in the university’s approach to turning inventions into companies. Its role is to give students and professors more resources for developing new technologies and forming companies.

The institute has created a number of programs that help entrepreneurs through the early stages of starting a company – everything from developing ideas to finding mentors to raising startup funding.

For example, last year the institute completed a two-year mentoring program called Ideas Empowered that funded nine projects in a variety of fields.

One of the companies that emerged from the program is Cred.fm, a social networking game designed to help people discover new music that will launch next month.

USC’s tech transfer office dates back to the 1970s. But in 2006 Mark Stevens, an alumnus and partner at Menlo Park venture firm Sequoia Capital, donated $22 million to start the Stevens Institute.

Krisztina Holly, executive director of the institute, said it was created to expand the role of the tech transfer office beyond filing for patents and licensing technology to other companies.

“The administration felt that there was a good opportunity to provide more support,” she said. “And do it in a way that was not just focused on tech transfer.”

Last year, eight companies spun out of USC and the school was awarded 52 patents. The university also signs about 25 licensing deals a year.

Holly said the USC Stevens Institute helps patent about half of the technologies that professors bring to its office each year. The institute focuses on technologies that are most marketable.

“We won’t patent something just for the sake of patenting it,” she said. “But we’re pretty generous about our patenting.”

Because of USC’s strong cinematic arts and computer science programs, many of the Stevens Institute’s technologies involve digital media and video games. For example, Ninja Metrics, which spun out of USC last year, will soon begin selling analytical tools to measure the influence people have when they participate in social networks.

Like its cross-town counterparts, USC also has a number of biomedical startups. The school is currently developing a technology that it hopes to patent involving a vest that blind people can wear to help them navigate as they walk.

Holly said that biomedical research was a “secret gem” of L.A.’s cutting-edge.

“It’s something that’s not always recognized as a strength of Los Angeles.”

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