The Lundquist College of Business is already known for facilitating successful venture launches and helping to uncover the market potential of new innovations. Now, thanks to a $435,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant awarded to the University of Oregon, the college is at the center of a collaborative effort to stimulate Oregon's economy with cutting-edge technologies, start-up companies, and a pipeline of university-trained entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers.

The NSF grant will launch the Oregon Technology Entrepreneurship Consortium (OTEC). OTEC will provide interdisciplinary teams of graduate students in business, law, science, and engineering with opportunities to identify the commercial value in scientific discoveries made at Oregon's public universities, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI). A second component of OTEC will assess market opportunities for technologies developed in Oregon's high-technology sector.

"Connecting Oregon's research institutions with the high-tech industry will lead to a more robust regional economy through technology commercialization," said Dean James C. Bean. "OTEC is a great model to create economic opportunities by integrating graduate education with private- and public-sector product research and development," he added. "Students get an intense experiential educational experience, industry and universities discover the viability of new technologies sooner, and the most promising discoveries make it to market faster."

To accomplish this, OTEC builds on the success of the Technology Entrepreneurship Program (TEP), an initiative spearheaded by the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship. Through TEP, UO students evaluate technologies developed at UO and PNNL for commercialization potential. OTEC expands the collaboration beyond UO and PNNL. As Randy Swangard, managing director of the Lundquist Center, explained, "OTEC is TEP on steroids."

OTEC is also emerging as a flagship initiative for the university because, according to UO Vice President for Research Rich Linton, working in interdisciplinary teams gives students real-world experience and enhances their employment opportunities.

UO was one of eleven out of 206 applicants to receive funding from the NSF's Partnership for Innovation Program in 2007. To leverage the three-year grant, ONAMI awarded OTEC an additional $45,000, bringing total funding to $480,000.