Building business from technology: the Sandia experience

The paper describes New Ventures, a new initiative at Sandia National Laboratories that encourages the creation of new businesses based on laboratory technology as a timely, efficient means of technology transfer. Sandia´s New Ventures program has shown that a dedicated effort can produce significant results. In the three years prior to this program´s launch, just two ventures per year on average were created based on laboratory technology. By comparison, the New Ventures program has enabled 20 new ventures in its first nine months of full operation. Our experience has yielded several lessons: most ventures result from Sandia entrepreneurs, from technologies that are well matched to market needs, and from laboratory projects that are ready for production; entrepreneurship issues are tremendously complex, requiring policy changes to reduce risk, manage intellectual property and licensing determinations, plan for potential conflicts of interest, and tailor other strategies; a new ventures program must advocate these policy changes, assist entrepreneurs, put significant effort into matching outside companies to inside technologies, and identify lab projects ready for manufacture; connection to the local business community is vital to good commercialization matches and to the development of Sandia entrepreneurs; lab employees are far more interested in pursuing Technology Transfer Leaves of Absence than anticipated