Collaboration fuels Oregon's innovation ecosystem

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Don Gerhart is associate vice president for research and innovation at the University of Oregon.

During times like these, it’s good to remember that strengthening Oregon’s economy is a team effort that involves all of us.

Over the course of the last decade, Oregon began to achieve national recognition for its exceptional ability to foster collaboration at the demanding interface of innovation and entrepreneurship. Entrepreneur magazine, in a 2009 feature on the nation’s leading cities for new venture formation, dubbed Portland “The Cooperator” and summed up Oregon’s collaborative spirit with a quote from venture capitalist Gerry Langeler: “Portland and Oregon are the only places I’ve seen where constituency groups that normally fight come together.”

We owe Oregon’s growing reputation for collaborative innovation to the sustained effort of a host of committed, savvy leaders such as Carolyn Chambers, who died Aug. 8.

Carolyn’s advocacy and philanthropy led to the establishment in 1994 of the Center for Law and Entrepreneurship within the University of Oregon School of Law. Events took an unexpected turn in early 2002, when, with Carolyn’s full support and endorsement, the center embarked on a unique collaboration with the UO’s Charles H. Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship, the UO Office of Research, Innovation, and Graduate Education, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The resulting partnership—the Technology Entrepreneurship Fellows Program — known as TEP for short — is a unique interdisciplinary laboratory that generates our most precious resource: human capital.

TEP’s mission is to train and energize the next generation of entrepreneurial business leaders. Over the course of the last nine years, TEP has provided scores of post-graduate students in business, law, engineering, humanities, and the sciences with experience-based learning focused on a real-world challenge: transforming research into new, innovation-based enterprises.

TEP Fellows began by working in teams over the summer to identify potential new ventures at the intersection of science, technology, and business. This became a year-round endeavor in 2007 when the state legislator created the University Venture Development Fund, a program that provides a 60 percent state income tax credit to qualified donors in return for their gifts supporting entrepreneurship education and technology commercialization by Oregon’s public universities. The most promising concepts from the summer move forward each fall into courses where the student teams plan the structure, financing, and operation of potential new ventures.

The most promising plans then advance national and international intercollegiate competitions. Oregon’s student teams consistently perform strongly in venues across the United States and in Canada, Thailand, and China. The national newsletter of the University Economic Development Association has called TEP “a winning formula for turning-out top notch entrepreneurs who are prepared to meet the demands of their chosen industries and the challenges of getting a start-up profitable.”

Though TEP focuses on preparing graduates who will help ramp up existing Oregon companies, it also has spun off several interesting new ventures. One success story is Perpetua Power Source Technologies Inc., a growing company based on energy-harvesting thermoelectric film technology invented by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Founded by UO MBA student Jon Hofmeister, Perpetua Power won R&D Magazine’s prestigious R&D 100 Award in 2009 and has gone on to raise more than $14 million in equity investment to develop thermoelectric modules that can power remote sensors and extend the lifetime of — and perhaps even eventually replace — batteries. Born in Eugene and incubated in the Corvallis Business Enterprise Center, drawing investment capital from Northwest Technology Ventures in Portland and from the Mith-ih-kwuh Economic Development Corporation of the Coquille Indian Tribe, Perpetua Power is a case study for the power of Oregon’s approach to sustainable economic development.

Perpetua Power’s expansion parallels the growth of Oregon’s innovation ecosystem. All of us who contribute to this effort can proudly — and rightfully — claim Perpetua Power as one of our own, an emerging venture that not only has translated a promising research discovery into a viable product, but also stands as a distinctly Oregonian enterprise that is succeeding through resourcefulness, tough-minded determination, and collaboration.

With your support, we look forward to many more success stories.