Eye on entrepreneurs
KCSourcelink, the Innovation Center’s business hotline that offers resources and support for small businesses, regularly received calls from people who had ideas for business and wanted advice on how to take it forward. This prompted a new idea with staff members at the Innovation Center.
“What would happen if you started with the idea instead of the entrepreneur with the idea? Is there any way we could match the entrepreneur out into the community to the idea that sits in a research lab and actually begin the whole process a lot earlier?” asks Maria Meyers, director of the UMKC Innovation Center.
In 2009, and in conjunction with three other groups, a Partnership for Innovation grant from the National Science Foundation provided funding to take a look at the issue of getting ideas into the hands of entrepreneurs.
This was the birth of Whiteboard to Boardroom (W2B), a bi-state commercialization program developed by the UMKC Innovation Center to push technology into the hands of entrepreneurs. It began with four higher education institutions —UMKC, University of Kansas, William Jewel College and Johnson County Community College — and has since grown to include 21 institutions, including universities and hospitals in the region.
When the W2B program launched in 2010, the technology transfer office suggested Derakhshani’s conjunctiva scanner as a great candidate to match with an entrepreneur. It had undergone a market assessment already and had been patented, and a business plan existed from one of the Henry W. Bloch School’s New Venture Challenge Business Plan competitions. Of all of the technologies available from the four founding institutions, it was the one that appeared closest to market.
“So the Innovation Center took up this technology with the plan to interest a business person in the technology,” Meyers says. “We thought, what we really need is a CEO want ad — a CEO who would want to take this forward.”
From there, a CEO want ad was created, which examined the market, the technology and the need for a business manager.
Looking for validation from the marketplace, they turned to a local entrepreneur to offer feedback on the technology. He examined the technology, but was busy transitioning out of his company, so he sent a friend over to look it over.
The next entrepreneur reviewed the technology and mentioned the idea to another friend, who was also interested. These networked CEOs served as the first seed for the Innovation Center’s CEO Bullpen — a group of experienced CEO-level entrepreneurs poised to run new businesses.
“So we had three of our entrepreneurs out in the community talking about this, and things got quiet for a couple months,” Meyers says. “Then Toby Rush, CEO of Rush Tracking Systems, called.
And he said, ‘Hey, I’m exiting my company, and I hear you’ve got the next best thing.’”
Testing the technology
“One of the challenges with the conjunctiva scanner was that it was still a little bit of a premature technology at that time. It didn’t always work right in the lab,” says James Brazeal, director of Technology Commercialization Licensing and Marketing Intellectual Property Management at UMKC and the technology transfer officer.
“We needed some investment in it now, not just to license it, but also an investment to transform it from the software platform that was in that lab into a true consumer product.”
The difficulty, Derakhshani says, is the leap that has to happen after the researcher has done the research and produced the proof of concept to transition the idea into something that consumers want to buy.
“People wait until something is mature enough until they fund it,” Derakhshani says. “How do you get to that place to begin with?”
This was the critical stage where W2B helped create a transition. From the networking opportunities, interest began to grow around Derakhshani’s technology. The buzz attracted Rush, who visited Derakhshani’s lab and looked at the technology. His question: Could they take the technology and make it work on a cell phone?
“I was looking for a software solution that had global scale and solved a real pain point, and ideally protected by intellectual property,” Rush says.
Based on his review and the evaluations from other entrepreneurs, Rush agreed to license the technology, and he became the first CEO through the CEO Bullpen network.
“He had this vision of, ‘How about we squeeze this into a cell phone and use this as a way to identify yourself to your cell phone and its apps?’ That was the first of EyeVerify, that connection, that idea, which turned into a full-fledged company,” Derakhshani says.