Scott Jones, professor of accounting at UD, says he poses a basic question whenever an inventor comes to him for business advice.

"Is this invention just a better mousetrap, or is it a generic technology that could be applied to other traps as well?" Jones asks the would-be entrepreneur. "If it's the former, then the best thing to do is sell it to a mousetrap producer, but if it's the latter, it's more likely to sustain a business venture. You always have to ask, 'What's next?'"

Jones has teamed with two professors from the College of Engineering--Gonzalo Arce, from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and John Rabolt, from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering--in launching a new, multidisciplinary course, "Entrepreneurship and Risk-Taking: Meeting the Challenges of a Start-up Enterprise." The course is designed to deal with the critical financial, legal, scientific and engineering issues associated with turning a creative idea into a new business venture.

"There are lots of good ideas coming out of university labs," Jones says. "The inventors certainly understand the technology itself, but they lack knowledge about what will sell it. Business faculty and students can work alongside engineers to help them develop products that are commercially viable."

Rabolt concurs, saying he wants engineering students who take the course "to come out of this knowing the right questions to ask and where to find the answers to those questions."

"They should be asking, 'Is there an actual product in this idea? If so, is there a market for it? Can it be made economically?'" Rabolt says. "At the end, the answer might be that it won't work. We don't expect most of the ideas that are brought to the table to be success stories. The success story here will be that they've learned from the experience."

"We want to get inventors to focus on defining the technology," Jones says. "Does it have a broad engineering application that would warrant developing a business venture? We also want to educate students about the importance of protecting their intellectual property, through not only the patent process but also confidentiality agreements and other avenues of legal protection. Finally, we want them to have realistic expectations about potential channels of distribution and the environment in which they will have to compete to launch a successful venture."

The course is cross-listed and open to students in four majors--master of business administration, computer engineering, electrical engineering and materials science. The students work in teams, each comprising a mix of members from engineering and business and investigating a specific potential business venture.

"The course was great--one of the most unusual courses I had during my four years of part-time work on my MBA," says Suzanne Morris, EG '92, BE 2001M. "It had a technical component that I liked, and the mix of students gave us a combination of creative ideas and more formal business training."

All three faculty members agree that the formation of teams to approach problems is one of the most important aspects of the course. "This is how it works in the real world," says Rabolt, who spent 20 years at IBM before joining the University. "Whether they end up working for a large company or forming a start-up venture, they'll need to understand how to work with other people, often coming from a different disciplinary 'culture.' Engineers may be working with only other engineers as co-inventors at the outset, but they will need to recognize when it's time to enlist outside business capabilities."

While the course is organized around these team projects, the faculty members note that another key element is exposing the students every week to ideas from people in the field.

In planning and organizing the course, Jones, Arce and Rabolt chose topics they wanted to cover and, through their own networks, identified appropriate people to address these themes in a series of weekly lectures. Speakers from finance, marketing, engineering, law and the Delaware Economic Development Office have addressed such topics as e-commerce, product innovation, financial options, government assistance programs, business and professional ethics and employee compensation.

"As faculty members, we're just facilitators," Arce says. "The real instructors are the weekly speakers."

In a lecture last semester, titled "Anatomy of a Start-up: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," invited speaker Russell Foster, EG '88M, co-owner of a small business, confirmed the need for a partnership between the engineering and business worlds. "The ugly part, for us, was engineers trying to run a business," he told the class. "In the beginning, we failed because we didn't ask the right questions. We didn't know that we needed legal and financial assistance. We didn't have a clue that our $1.5 million in start-up funds wouldn't last us two years."

Two inventors who have relied on the course for help in turning an innovative device into a business are John Elias, professor of electrical and computer engineering at UD, and his former graduate student, Wayne Westerman, EG '99PhD, now a visiting professor in the College of Engineering. The two began work about four years ago on an invention they call MultiTouch technology, a multi-hand and multi-finger, gesture-based computer interaction device designed to replace the conventional keyboard and mouse.

Elias and Westerman filed for a patent in 1999, which recently was approved, and founded the privately held company FingerWorks to fabricate and market the devices. To develop their business plan, they turned to "Entrepreneurship and Risk-Taking."

Jones says he was impressed with the potential of the FingerBoard.

"It has all the elements we look for," he says. "It's technically applicable to many market segments, the engineers had the ability to protect their intellectual property, and there were a number of channels of distribution to which they could gain access. We had all the fundamental signals that this could be a good project. What was lacking in the beginning was a business plan."

With help from the course and its guest lecturers, FingerWorks soon may have a plan that will enable the company to put a FingerBoard in front of every computer, its founders say.

Jones sees tremendous benefit in two colleges working together on these kinds of projects. "Not only is it a more realistic way to approach problems, but cross-college collaboration also brings a variety of perspectives to bear on the challenges of launching a new business venture," he says.

Beyond the course, Jones says he would like to create a student organization to help inventors from the University and the larger community. He also would like to initiate a student-run, venture capital fund that would enable inventors to develop their ideas or form companies. "This adds another element of realism to the process," he says.

Above all, the faculty members want to foster an entrepreneurial spirit among students. "Many students plan to join large corporations when they finish their degrees," Arce says. "We'd like them to realize that there are other opportunities and career options for them. It's not unrealistic to expect that if we work this way, students will form teams and launch businesses of their own."

--Diane Kukich, AS '73, '84M