Today, most graduate students appreciate the fact that narrow scientific expertise and the ability to perform an experiment, even a great experiment, is no longer enough. Competition for faculty positions is tough, and many employers outside of academia want more from their scientists than just specialized knowledge.

Business Opportunities for Scientists

Fortunately, while students are becoming aware that they have to broaden their skills, employers are realizing that Ph.D.s are an untapped resource. As these two groups, Ph.D.s and eager employers, reach across a historical vacuum and connect, commercial opportunities are popping up that benefit both academia and corporations.

The Merrill Lynch Innovation Grants Competition is one bridge between freshly minted Ph.D.s and the commercial world. As stated on its Web site, "The goal [of the competition] is to encourage 'entrepreneurial literacy' among the academic research community - fostering greater awareness of market opportunities and highlighting the wealth of intellectual capital being created at the world's institutions of higher learning. At the same time, the Innovation Grants Competition will seek to make academic research more accessible and relevant to the public at large."

Doctoral Thesis: An Undervalued Asset

Michael Schrage, executive director of the Merrill Lynch Innovation Grants Competition, says that the contest was founded on a very simple premise, "A doctorate thesis is an intrinsically undervalued asset." The Innovation Grant Competition seeks to change that, and it intends to begin the process with a cash prize. The program awards a total of $150,000 (with a $50,000 top prize) to recent Ph.D. graduates who best explain commercial applications of their dissertation topics. The winners of the 1999 competition were announced on January 21, 2000. Only one of the 1999 winners originated in the life sciences.

In 1998, the first year of the competition, over 200 scientists entered. Jan Mark Noworolski, an electrical engineer from the University of California at Berkeley, won the top prize. Two life scientists were also winners that year. Jay T. Groves, a biophysicist from Stanford University, won second place and $20,000 for his research on a technology that enables biological membranes to be incorporated into computer chips. Bruce Lahn, a biologist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won third place and $10,000 for his discovery of the role of a gene critical for sperm production and the implications of this discovery for male contraception.

This collection of winners points to some noteworthy differences between scientists in different fields and in different institutions. Steven Boxer, one of Groves' thesis advisors, explains, "Many, many graduate students in engineering and biotechnology are thinking all of the time about the marketability of their research." Boxer and Groves credit Groves' collaboration with engineers as a key factor in seeing the marketability of his research and prompting his decision to enter the Innovation Grants Competition.

Certain Regions Are Better at Marketing

In contrast to engineers, who are trained to be sensitive to marketability, life scientists generally focus on pure research and shy away from any discussions of application. Even within the life science community, however, some students are more sensitized to commercial possibilities than others. Boxer believes that schools clustered around a biotech community, such as those schools in the San Francisco and Boston areas, seem to have a culture of exploring the marketability of research. Students trained in these environments profit not only from the academic quality, but also from an opportunity to see research translated into product.

Universities associated with biotech companies may also have an increased awareness of the skills needed to communicate research to this market. While most advisors want their students to focus on the research, some advisors value and cultivate these other critical skills in their graduate students. Stanford professor Boxer explains, "Thinking about how one's research results relate to business opportunities or dealing with the press seems more closely related to research than many other things."

Schrage sees evidence of the different environments in the applications he has reviewed for the competition. Although all applications were reviewed without the name of the individual or institution attached, the winners have come from engineering fields or universities with a history of commercial collaborations. Schrage hopes that the Innovation Grant Competition will slowly change this trend, and goes so far as to state that one of the primary purposes of the grant is an experiment in culture. He hopes that the grant will provoke creativity, applicability, and broad communication in fields and institutions that traditionally do not emphasize such things.

Communicating research to the business community is quite different from communicating research within the scientific community and may not come naturally to Ph.D. students. Groves, currently a research fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, explains the difference, "People spend their time trying to impress faculty members with the details of their research and involved scientific explanations, but a business proposal is more trivial scientifically." He explains that his strategy in writing the proposal was to study the background of the individuals on the judging panel. The Innovation Grants Web site lists those individuals on the panel, and an examination of their backgrounds reveals that it is unlikely that any of them have the specialized scientific background required to analyze detailed research reports from numerous specialized fields. These judges are seeking something other than scientific details when they review the applications.

What the Research Will Enable

The judging panel assumes that the research is well done and require a letter of support from the applicant's advisor to support this assumption. Groves saw their emphasis to be unique from what he had experienced before, "They weren't interested in how. They are more interested in what it would enable." The resulting evaluation was different from what Groves had experienced before in graduate school, and he saw it as an opportunity to learn how to communicate successfully the implications of his research to a diverse audience. He also realized that to a nonspecialized audience, the implications of his research were more interesting than the details of his research.

Lahn agrees that communication to a diverse audience was key to his success, and the result of the application process was that "I understand the game not just from the perspective of pure researchers." He brings that understanding to his new role as an assistant professor in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago likely appreciates that expanded perspective as it joins other universities in the search for nontraditional funding sources.

Lahn's new position at the University of Chicago and Groves' current position as a research fellow underscore another point Schrage makes, that the Innovation Grant Competition is not attempting to take the best minds away from academics and turn them into entrepreneurs. Rather, its purpose is to give recent graduates incentives to look at their research from a different perspective and become more articulate in presenting their work. These skills are valuable for a new professor as well as for the CEO of a start-up biotech company.