Establishing a Start-up Ecosystem with a Prototype Design Network

Establishing a Start-up Ecosystem with a Prototype Design Network

HOW MIGHT WE FOCUS ON CUSTOMER NEEDS EARLIER IN THE PROCESS OF DEVELOPING TECHNICAL SEEDS?

By Takeshi Kato Faculty Innovation Fellows candidate Tohoku University

When I joined the Faculty Innovation Fellows program, I was assigned to support a start-up education program for both faculty and students. My experience working at technology companies and meeting with hundreds of researchers and faculty members about potential startups primed me for this challenge. I have worked in product marketing at an American high technology company and have experience starting up a software service company with American-Moroccan in the Bay Area in California. Since 2016, I have met over 100 researchers for the promotion to apply for a seed funding application at Tohoku University in the EdgeNext program. Seed funding is monetary support that encourages research activities for commercialization and might be useful for Intellectual Property strength, customer needs qualification with the prototype design, some potential market research activities, team building activities for start-up, etc., before funding by Venture Capital in this case. Tohoku University is opening over 460 seed applications on the official Web site every year. I was lucky to meet 10% to 20% of the faculty members who were interested in this fund to accelerate the commercialization from the seeds. From these meetings, I found that many researchers seem to be eager to complete papers before seeking patents and might not be interested in customers’ requirements or business trends even in the engineering department. I was surprised that many faculty members would not show a significant interest in seed funding money to accelerate the commercialization. Based on this experience, I was thinking about two goals for a change-leader education program with UIF and a sustainable start-up ecosystem.

THE PROBLEM

It seems to be difficult for researchers to qualify customer needs by using a prototype design because they lack knowledge for processes for commercialization from seeds or any chance to design the prototype for customer needs verification.

The objective of many faculty members seems to be to complete research for their papers or submitting to international journals before obtaining patents. There seem to be critical issues not to match the customer needs to accelerate commercialization in the research mindset. I also supposed there was not enough education or information on verifying customer needs in the technology commercialization process.

STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF THE CURRENT SYSTEM

Now Tohoku University is leading a new program, START: Program for creating STart-up from Advanced Research and Technology, supported by the Japanese government. This project is based on the consortium with 10 public universities in the Northeast region in Japan from June 2022. My goal is to establish a sustainable ecosystem to start up business and make a common education platform for start-ups in the consortium and expand our programs into our regions in five years. My observation is that our region has two major strengths. One of them is the synergy effects with usage of many resources in 10 universities for start-up education programs and start-up activities including many labs and technology centers. The other is that Tohoku University has some experience leading entrepreneurship programs such as Edge-Next program in the past five years. On the other hand, the weakness of this

consortium is a lack of communication to share any information with each other. We do not understand what other universities are progressing in start-up education or any activities of commercialization from universities. I also realized that we needed a change-leader education program with UIF to change the mindsets of faculty members, some education programs for commercialization from technology seeds and promotion activities for researchers and faculty.

THE PROPOSED SOLUTION

Considering our strength of a synergy in our consortium, we would try to establish TPCO (Tohoku-Consortium Prototype Coordination Office) as the function of coordination for technical matching with public technology centers or some companies to accelerate the prototype design from technology seeds or regional social issues in some universities. We are also to start the negotiation to make the network, MuNES (Michinoku University Network for Entrepreneurial Support) with 10 universities and 16 technology centers for prototype design. We are expecting to use these networks to design the prototype to verify customer needs in the commercialization process from technology seeds. Our team is starting bi-weekly online lunch meetings with 10 universities to understand each other. Additionally, we have just started the off-site two-days meeting monthly. Each university will take turns to lead this in-person meeting every month so we can understand each university’s characteristics, advanced program, and challenging points in different regions. I have also done the kick-off start meeting including an idea generation and a brainstorming for start-up ecosystem establishment in 10 universities with the City of Sendai and the company to design the prototype this summer.

LOOKING AHEAD

We will start the first trial activities to establish a sustainable start-up ecosystem including education programs for a change-leader program with UIF, prototyping facilities by support of City of Sendai, banks and venture capital companies, and some design companies from next year, 2023. We will start to establish the start-up network or communication networks via MuNES in the regional technology center to accelerate the prototype for the Proof of Concept or to do the matching customer needs with technical seeds in the start-up companies or the labs in the University. We are also planning to execute combination programs of start-up education by design thinking with UIF in our region and start the promotion for students, faculties in universities and entrepreneurs in our region. Our team will make our common start-up education programs in 10 universities and keep biweekly and monthly communications on major topics such as social issue solution, technology start up program, start-up education including technology colleges and a sustainable start-up ecosystem with technology centers. These entire projects will benefit the Tohoku Community network in 10 universities and beyond our region in the future.