Innovation to
Commercialization
Using Government
Funding to Kick Start
Your Start-Up
Wednesday,
June 4, 2008
Live from MIT's
Kresge Auditorium
Small Business Innovation Research grants (SBIR)
can be key to a company's growth. In ways much greater than
just the bottom line.
At the next MIT Enterprise Forum Global Broadcast,
learn:
- How entrepreneurs used SBIR funding
to go from "great
idea" to "great product"
- Why SBIR money is a stepping stone to VC, angel and other
investor money
- What
government agencies, like the NSF, DoD and NIH, look for
when awarding SBIR grants.
Entrepreneurial
success stories and tips for winning grants at the next Enterprise
Forum Global Broadcast.
Panelists:
Thomas Allnut
Program Director
National Science
Foundation
Dr. F. C. Thomas Allnutt is a program director and Biotechnology
Cluster leader in the SBIR/STTR
Program (Small Business Innovative
Research/Small Business Technology Transfer) at the National
Science Foundation. The SBIR/STTR program provides grant
funding to small businesses on commercially relevant projects
in Information Technology, Biotechnology, Electronics, Chemical
Technology, and Advanced Materials research.
Allnutt comes out
of the small business community where he spent over seventeen
years. He was an early employee of Martek Biosciences
Corporation where he was a research director for twelve years. He
later moved to a start up
company, Advanced BioNutrition Corporation, as the third employee
and vice president of Research & Development. Allnutt
joined the National Science Foundation in 2006 with his
area of expertise in algal biotechnology, but he has acquired
broad knowledge of related areas and the business of science
as he worked to commercialize algal products in a variety of
fields. He is the inventor on over 17 patents filed or
pending and has published over 25 papers in peer reviewed journals.
Milton
Chen
CEO
VSee
Dr. Milton Chen is the CEO of VSee, an NSF
and In-Q-Tel (investment arm of the CIA) funded startup. Chen ’s
pioneering PhD research at Stanford University has shown why
videoconferencing has failed to become ubiquitous despite billions
in investments since 1927. His insight into how to make
visual collaboration an everyday experience has led to more
than 50 invited talks in countries ranging from Iceland to
Nigeria to Brazil to Saudi Arabia. This insight is built
on vsee deployment experiences in places such as Darfur, Rwanda,
Beruit, Israel, Afghanistan, and Iraq, as well as major enterprises
such as NASA, Shell, and the US Congress. Chen received
a bachelor’s in computer science from UC Berkeley
and a PhD from Stanford University. He also received
the DEMO God award at the DEMO 06 conference, and is the co-author
of XMPP video standard.
Bruce
Gellerman
Moderator
Public Radio International
Bruce Gellerman hosts “Living
on Earth”, Public Radio International’s environmental
program, heard weekly on more than 300 public
radio stations nationwide. Gellerman has worked at NPR as
a science reporter, at WBUR-FM as business correspondent and
executive producer, and was senior Washington correspondent
for The Center for Investigative Journalism. He has consulted
for the US State Department, Voice of America, and Internews
and has taught journalism in more than a dozen countries. His
work has appeared in The New York Times, The
Boston Globe,
The Scientist, BBC-Radio, "20/20"
and "60 Minutes." He has received more than
40 national awards for journalism and is a three-time recipient
of the AAAS award for broadcast science journalism, most recently
for a documentary he produced about MIT’s Fusion Energy
Research Laboratory. Gellerman has been accepted
for two Fulbright Fellowships and is the author of “Massachusetts
Curiosities”. He is also founder of the new company SoundTreks
LLC which provides location-aware, mobile media content.
Christopher
Loose PhD '07
Founder, CTO
SteriCoat
Christopher Loose is the founder and chief technology officer
of SteriCoat Corp, a biotechnology start-up developing long-lasting
anti-infective coating for medical devices. Loose graduated
summa cum laude from Princeton's chemical engineering department
before working in ChemE R&D at Merck Research Labs. Loose
earned a PhD in chemical engineering at MIT under Professors
Greg Stephanopoulos and Bob Langer as a Hertz Fellow. His
PhD work formed the basis for SteriCoat, which won entrepreneurship
competitions at MIT, Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge. SteriCoat
is venture-backed with 8 full-time employees in Cambridge,
MA. He
was recently selected as a member of the Technology
Review 35, representing the 35 innovators under 35 years old most
likely to change the future of technology.
Bill
Townsend SM '84, PhD
'88
Founder, CEO
Barrett Technology
Bill Townsend founded Barrett Technology in 1988, credited
as maker of the world’s “most advanced robotic
arm” in the special Millennium Edition of the Guinness
Book of World Records. Barrett’s WAM arm and
BarrettHand products operate in 15 countries around the globe
today; and the WAM is the only arm approved by the FDA for
force-controlled (haptic) surgery, having performed 100s of
successful knee-implant surgeries across the US.
Bill holds engineering PhD and MS degrees from MIT and a BS
from Northeastern. He has been awarded 8 US patents and
won several professional awards including The Robotic Industries
Association’s Joseph Engelberger Award in 2003
for pioneering the first haptic robot in the 1980s and best-paper-of-the-year
award from UK-journal Industrial Robot in 2005.
