Business Incubator Series: Interview With Julia Rosen, Associate Vice-President For Innovation And Entrepreneurship, Arizona State University, Venture Catalyst At ASU — Scottsdale, Arizona (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Are there any tools that help you to accomplish your mission?

Julia: We are, at present, the only U.S. university that is part of the TechStars Network. Being able to access and have a forum in which to talk to other accelerators from around the country and the world is immensely helpful. It is a specialized set of tools which we have already been accessing, that is already adding value.

Irina: How do you engage with TechStars?

Julia: The way the program [works] is once an accelerator is accepted, [TechStars] starts providing a series of webinars and an annual conference.

Perhaps more important, there’s already been a lot of online exchange of ideas. There was a recent post from somebody in Singapore saying, “Here’s my budget. What do you guys think about this? Does that sound reasonable?” It’s already a forum where people feel connected because they’re all part of a specific network. So, people are asking and getting answers to some of their ongoing operational questions.

Irina: What are your metrics for success?

Julia: Our metrics come in a number of different categories. Because our mission is perhaps different from most accelerators, our metrics are a bit more complicated.

We do look at the number of companies we help attract to Arizona. We look at the number of entrepreneurs served. They may or may not create a million jobs, but simply reaching out to the workforce, educating people, helping them, and providing advice, we think, is important.

On the student side – we need to do more work in this area – I think the ultimate metric is to look at long-term career choices. If a student is an entrepreneur in the university setting, does that ultimately affect his career choice? Once they’ve graduated, do students who have had entrepreneurial experience in college end up being entrepreneurs at higher rates than people who did not have the same experience when they were in college?

Irina: Do you have some success stories?

Julia: One success story would be a Turkish company called Adaptive Curriculum. This is a company that came to Phoenix three years ago with one engineer. They’re an education technology company. They had a product they were already selling successfully in Turkey and in other countries in the Middle East and Asia.

[They] had tried to get into the U.S. market 10 years ago in San Jose. For whatever reason, it didn’t work out. We met them again through ASU’s global network. We didn’t even have the facility up and running here at SkySong. We did know we were building this, and we had earlier entrepreneurial programs in place.

So, we took this engineer, and we helped him read his apartment lease, shop in the grocery store, all of these personalized services. He had never lived in the United States, but he was the technical genius behind their product. We worked with him and helped the company build up to a 50% operation located here at SkySong. They were subsequently acquired by Turkish Telecom.

Their U.S. headquarters are here at SkySong, a 13,000 square foot building with 50 employees. This company has won all sorts of awards for their math and science Web-based curricula. We worked with them from the absolute get-go, really developing their market strategy. How do you sell to school districts? How do you gain a national reputation? How do you find strategic alliance partners?

Then, our education college helped them to adapt their product to the U.S. market. As you know, many global entrepreneurs might have one business model outside the United States. When they come to the United States, the business model needs to be refreshed. Each U.S. state has its own curriculum standards. So, we had a team of researchers in the education college who worked with them to make sure their math and science product aligned with all curricular standards in [various] states.

Irina: What year did you start working with them?

Julia: It must have been in 2006. They opened their headquarters last year. So, it was from 2006 to 2010 that they launched.

This segment is part 5 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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