UPstart turns Penn inventions into companies

Since it launched in May 2010, the UPstart program at Penn has helped over 50 faculty members turn their inventions into developing companies.

“The program is focused on trying to build real companies,” Michael Poisel, the program director of UPstart said. “It’s not simply about finding more research dollars; we want to actually commercialize the technology and do so in a fashion that is attractive to our corporate partners who are looking for technologies.”

Whenever a faculty member invents a new technology, they are required to disclose their invention to the Center for Technology Transfer, which then decides if they should file a patent around the invention. If CTT decides to file a patent, then they need “to find a commercial partner that’s going to license that patent. Sometimes that partner is an established company and other times the right license for a given technology is a startup.”

CTT receives close to 400 inventions a year and works on licensing the technologies to corporate partners. UPstart, however, works with faculty members who express an interest in the program “to try to find an alternative path” by creating a company around the new technology., in order to try to “acquire funding to do more applied research,” Poisel said.

“UPstart has played a crucial role in educating me and my partner, Zhengtang Luo, in the many issues associated with lifting a start up venture off the ground,” Penn professor Charlie Johnson wrote in an email. Johnson founded Graphene Frontiers after developing and patenting a method for making cheaper and higher quality graphene films, which “can be transferred to any surface that you would like.”

Johnson explained that it “could enable applications in areas including advanced computer chips, very large flexible touch displays and new families of chemical detectors that could be used to detect dangerous substances in the environment or vapors emitted by the human body that indicate the presence of cancer or other diseases.”

While the company is developing, the licensing process is ongoing, and Poisel works directly with a licensing officer within CTT for every company. “If the company is able to secure funding, then we’ll almost certainly license the technology to the company that we and our researchers started together. Of course, most of our companies will still need partnerships with established companies to successfully commercialize their products,” he said.

“Coming from a purely academic background, we both had a lot to learn about the many hurdles to bringing a new idea to the market place,” Johnson said. UPstart helped introduce Johnson and Luo to “the local investor community as well as to business people who could play a role as GF grows.”

“We want faculty members to feel that they can be entrepreneurial without having to be entrepreneurs. Before the venture begins operation, we find an outside entrepreneur to run the company,” Poisel said.

Through UPstart Johnson met Mike Patterson, who is now the chief executive officer of Graphene Frontiers.

“Commercializing technology not only helps our faculty members in terms of their research, it helps the University and it helps the local community. We’re creating jobs and we’re helping society,” said Poisel said. “We understand that some of these won’t be successful, but we want to give every promising technology a chance.”

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.