The widening gap between the transition of inventions from the research lab to the marketplace is slowing the development and scaling of new hardware technologies in the United States. This is particularly evident in advances in complex microelectronics, where U.S. leadership has lagged. A recent workshop on Semiconductor Technology Transformation and Hard Technology Startups brought together stakeholders from across the country to analyze this challenge and propose solutions.
Hosted last month by MIT, the State University of New York (SUNY), and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), the virtual event brought together academic researchers, industry members, venture capital firms, state and federal agencies, non-profit There are broad conversations among for-profit organizations, VC accelerators and startups about how to regain America’s leadership.
In his opening remarks, MIT Provost Martin Schmidt asked speakers and attendees to seize the moment. “We need to think boldly, act decisively and be prepared to reinvent our approach and not be held back by old models of engagement,” said Schmidt, who will serve as RPI president in July. “This seminar will discuss an area of work that is already ripe for work, which is the process by which we make work in academia have an impact through commercialization.”
An audience of 632, together with 30 invited speakers, participated in discussions in four breakout sessions: Innovation Ecosystems, Stakeholder Perspectives, Preparation of Prototype Companies and Startups, Startup Experiences and Shared Facilities. It can then become a product that has the potential to reach millions of people. ” said Vladimir Bulovic, the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technologies, Director of the MIT Nano Institute, and workshop co-organizer. “Founding and sustaining more hard technology startups will generate more technologies and more new jobs that will benefit existing industry partners, foster new industries and lead to a resurgence of U.S. leadership in microelectronics. “
An environment built for success
What enables a thriving innovation ecosystem – and how do we create one for hard technology? Fiona Murray, William Porter (1967) Professor of Entrepreneurship and Associate Dean for Innovation and Inclusion at the MIT Sloan School of Management, identifies three key characteristics: strategic focus, Systems where people provide critical resources such as talent and funding, as well as stakeholder connections—communities intentionally built around priority areas.
View a video playlist of technical translation workshop presentations.
This concept of connectivity was echoed throughout the workshop. “Proximity fosters connectivity and fosters collaboration,” said Bob Metcalfe, professor emeritus of innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Texas at Austin. Metcalfe noted that a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem requires seven “species”: funding agencies, research professors, graduates, scale-up entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, strategic partners and early adopters.
To explore the perspectives of numerous stakeholders, the workshop featured presentations by experts in different roles from different geographical locations. Omkaram Nalamasu, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Applied Materials, Sean Doyle, managing director at Intel Capital, and Eileen Tanghal, managing director at In-Q-Tel, spoke from industry and venture capital perspectives on what they look for when investing. Suggested hard techniques. Common themes include proof of concept, shared development facilities for cost and efficiency, talent acquisition, and the ability to attract customers.
“The valley of death for hard technology startups is very wide. They face a lot of challenges in finding the right people, getting funding, and building partnerships,” said Tanghal, who described obstacles faced by startups such as the semiconductor industry workforce Aging, supply chain issues and the difficulty of finding your first customer.
From university to commercialization
Expanding the talent pool has its own obstacles. Julie Lenzer, chief innovation officer at the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute, discusses the challenges universities face in supporting hard technologies—slow academia, risk aversion, intellectual property (IP) ownership, faculty or student entrepreneurial activity The institution does not celebrate this when its mission is misaligned, and the university does not produce a ready-to-market product in question.
“Typically, when we come out of the lab, the level of technology readiness is very low and slow; it’s very early-stage technology,” said Lenzer, former chief innovation officer at the University of Maryland. “This creates a high-tech risk – will this work? We don’t know yet, but it will take a lot of capital to make it happen. Is the market ready? Is it enough for someone to disrupt the way they do things? ? This is not just a question of technology, but also a question of market opportunity.”
To help prepare hard technology startups, support systems are needed. Greentown Labs Senior Director of Memberships Jason Ethier, Activate Executive Managing Director Aimee Rose, and Howard University School of Engineering and Architecture Director of Innovation Grant Warner discuss best practices for preparing founders, emphasizing the importance of articulating business hypotheses and understanding market needs. , open-minded and easy to coach.
A startup perspective
The seminar also called on startup founders to share their experiences and pain points. Mesodyne CEO and co-founder Veronika Stelmakh highlighted the many startup competitions and accelerator programs she and her co-founders participated in to learn customer discovery, how to run a business, and which grants to apply for.
Their main challenge now is reducing costs, she said. “For that we need volume. To get sales, we need to attract customers. To attract customers, you need a product, and you can’t achieve that if your product is expensive,” she said. “This chicken-and-egg problem is why we need programs, especially for hard technology startups, that allow us to build things with limited resources.”
A recurring theme throughout the workshop was the use of shared facilities and toolsets to help reduce costs and facilitate the development of new hard technologies. “Space is at a premium,” said John Iacoponi, vice president of technology strategy at NY CREATES, which operates the Albany Nanotechnology Complex. “We found that startups needed to be able to change materials, have flexible space and tools that no one entity could afford.”
Finally, Bob Karlicek, professor of electrical, computer and systems engineering at RPI and symposium co-organizer, addressed the challenges facing academia. “We need fab technology early in the education process,” Kalicek said. “We need more factories available to students and faculty to drive the creation of talent pools and faster innovation at the university level. We need to think about strategies to protect intellectual property for startups. We need better early-stage funding models, larger early reserve capital pool.”
“Universities need to be viewed as talent generators, not just to educate the next generation of engineers, but to educate the next generation of entrepreneurs,” continued co-organizer Nick Quicks, director of new ventures at the SUNY Research Foundation. “Substantial capital is required at all levels, starting with non-dilutive government funding for technology and multi-institutional hubs and ending with industry investment in start-ups and facilities.”
Workshops on semiconductor technology transfer and hard technology startups demonstrated the high level of focus and interest among stakeholders across the country in improving the process of bringing new hard technologies to market. In order to change, an entire ecosystem is needed.
“It’s not just the idea, it’s the process of scaling that idea, the process of training people, and the process of understanding the stakeholders you’re going to meet,” Bulovic concludes. “We need a national plan to get more start-ups into the scale-up phase. We need more efforts to achieve this, which will lead to more successes and restore national capabilities to regain mastery of microelectronics and many other Dominance in hard technology industries.”