Technology and Society Bootcamp Provides Graduate Students Commercialization Experience

A bootcamp offered by the Department of Technology and Societyprovides graduate students the experience needed to turn their research projects into startups. The NSF I-Corp Startup Methods Research Commercialization Bootcamp is made for graduate students engaged in academic research.

Through the interactive hands-on hybrid online course, students learn if there is a market for their research. During the three-week program, students conduct customer discovery interviewsto test the viability of their product.

The course introduces proven scientific, real-world business startup methods to commercialize research done by graduate students. Students in the bootcamp will interview 20 consumers in the first stage to determine if there is a market to sell their product. If they advance to the national level, they will interview 120 people in total.

"What the program does is force them to - we like to use the term - get out of the building," said Kevin Moriarty, a co-faculty lead of the program. "Does this solve a problem? And it helps them determine whether or not what they're working on is, creating value, or is the industry in that market looking for something else?"

Students work together in teams consisting of at least three people. Through collaboration students learn what to look for in order to determine if their startup has the opportunity to become a successful business.

"The biggest value, in my opinion, is that it forces you to interact with real people," said Peter Saenz, a bootcamp student studying for his PhD in the Department of Technology and Society in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "These interactions provide invaluable insights about the technology you want to commercialize-insights you can't gain just by brainstorming or working solely within your team."

The program is open to any graduate students from all departments at Stony Brook University.

"We want to emphasize that it's open to any and all graduate students who have a technology that they feel they want to commercialize throughout Stony Brook," said Moriarty. "So it could be the hospital, it could be one of the science departments, it could even be the business school."

The bootcamp is offered at least twice a year, but program officials want to expand the program to offer it up to five times a year depending upon interest.

- Angelina Livigni

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