Business Incubator Series: Interview With Julia Rosen, Associate Vice-President For Innovation And Entrepreneurship, Arizona State University, Venture Catalyst At ASU — Scottsdale, Arizona (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Julia: Maybe I should give you a bit of context about to why we’re doing this and why our programs are, perhaps, a little different from the others you’ve presented in your interviews. Of course, we are a public university. We are the largest public university in the United States. We are the only public research university in the greater Phoenix area, which is an area of four million people.

Our current president, [Michael M. Crow], who has been at ASU for about eight years, has the idea that universities themselves are not correctly designed for today’s competitive economic realities and for all of our social and cultural realities. So, he has redesigned the university.

We’re building what we call the new American university, one that has three primary values associated with it. The first is excellence. That means ASU is looking to transform itself into one of the finest public universities in the country.

We have, for example, three Nobel laureates now. We have, I don’t know how many, National Academy members. Our research enterprise has doubled in the past eight years. We are now one of the top 20 U.S. universities without a medical school or a graduate school. We have a phenomenal number of National Merit scholars. This first notion of excellence is that we will continue to advance on all traditional criteria associated with universities.

Access is the second value. As we’re the only university in this region, we cannot choose to exclude large numbers of students. So, we are large, not necessarily by design, but because it’s part of our mission to serve this large and fast-growing area.

The third value of the university is impact. This is really where we play. I would imagine that your readers know that universities are fundamental to any knowledge-based economy. Greater Phoenix, like most regions in the world, is looking to diversify its economic base and increase the amount of economic output that originates from indigenous enterprises.

The role we play in economic development and taking responsibility for the social and economic well-being for our region, we would argue, is perhaps a little more emphatic than in other universities, again because we are the only public research university in our region.

Our suite of services goes beyond a traditional accelerator. It includes attracting new businesses to the region. It includes connecting larger companies not only to ASU, but also to an entire network of corporations that we can introduce our entrepreneurs to. It includes working with global companies.

One of our key principles at ASU is that we seek to be globally engaged whenever we can. Physically, it’s SkySong, which is, again, our innovation center here in Scottsdale, Arizona. There are 43 companies from eight countries located here. It’s important for us to showcase or be the effective world trade center for the greater Phoenix area.

When it comes to the university itself, and, of course, the people in the greater Phoenix area, we also help people to launch new ventures, whether they just have an idea or have some sort of raw technology.

[We] try to think about the Venture Catalyst as a place that provides a continuum of services. As I mentioned, we started our first program in 2004. We’ve served 1,300 entrepreneurs through that program. That is mostly through training services. Since the Venture Catalyst launched in July 2010, we’ve engaged 140 new ventures and signed up 80 new mentors to be part of what we call our mentor marketplace.

Irina: How many entrepreneurs do you have on site?

Julia: In total, there are 43 companies here at the SkySong site. Our student entrepreneur program serves 15 companies a year.

Irina: How many companies have you incubated on-site in the past 12 months?

Julia: One hundred and thirty companies over the past year.

Irina: What are the core benefits you provide for entrepreneurs?

Julia: The core benefit is that being a university, we are able to connect entrepreneurs and help facilitate their links to the innumerable intellectual and knowledge assets of the university. If an entrepreneur needs, for example, market research services, we can and do connect them to professionals.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Interview With Julia Rosen, Associate Vice-President For Innovation And Entrepreneurship, Arizona State University, Venture Catalyst At ASU — Scottsdale, Arizona
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