This December marks Ron Huss’s 20th anniversary working in the Office of Technology Management. Huss has been managing the office since 2000, and in 2008, he was promoted to Associate Vice President for Research and Technology Transfer, where he provides leadership of Penn State’s vast intellectual-property assets, which comprises thousands of patents, patent applications, copyrights, and other IP.

Huss earned his bachelor of arts degree in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Before his tenure at Penn State, Huss worked in grant management, and even worked on beer fermentation from a biochemistry standpoint.

Since Huss began working with university technology management, there has been a big shift in the perspective on entrepreneurship. We caught up with Ron to get his thoughts on Invent Penn State and its effect on entrepreneurship in our community.

Journeys: How has Penn State approached entrepreneurship during your tenure?

Ron Huss: The perspective on entrepreneurship has changed dramatically over the years to the point where it’s now front and center, and the president of the university talks about it. But not so long ago, that was not the case. Penn Staters were not really encouraged to be “distracted” in that fashion. When I started, there were seven Penn State–licensed start-up companies (in 1997). And now, there are 111 when you count them all over the years.

J: How did this process evolve?

RH: In 2003, the university published the RAG14 Research Administration Guideline, which provided guidelines for starting a company. At that time, even concepts like writing a business plan were foreign to Penn State researchers. This document was one of the very few available like it to provide entrepreneurial guidance. So it was a start.

If you contrast this today with the wealth of resources for start-ups—like Ben Franklin and its TechCelerator program, Happy Valley LaunchBox, and the Fund for Innovation—it’s easy to see how much more support inventors and researchers have today to bring their ideas to market. All of the incubation space that is now available to start-up companies—like the second floor of the Technology Center at Innovation Park and Happy Valley LaunchBox downtown—is another great example of this shift in support for start-ups.

J: Tell us about what’s happening with Invent Penn State.

RH: The upcoming Invent Penn State Venture & IP Fair is a prime example of how we’re prioritizing entrepreneurship and intellectual property at the university and beyond—connecting entrepreneurs with investors and mentors and highlighting the great work that occurs every day at Penn State.

With Invent Penn State and clear support from the current administration, we hope to bring more attention to some of the companies and technologies who’ve been in the headlines for their successes. We want to make sure that the well-kept secrets of our researchers’ successes become the well-known success stories that they deserve to be—by helping researchers make their ideas more saleable, by highlighting both their research successes and business successes, and by connecting researchers with the resources and networks they need to succeed.

Focusing on the success of companies with Penn State roots, like TRS Technologies, KCF Technologies, and Anacor, who utilized the available entrepreneurship resources to get to where they are today, will also help spread the word about our support for entrepreneurs and inventors.

This shift is important and exciting because support at the earliest stages of research and commercialization is crucial so that young scientists and inventors don’t get discouraged.

J: How do faculty members navigate the balance between research and commercialization?

RH: Faculty researchers are primarily focused on research and approach new technologies from that point of view. They self-select to be academics and/or researchers. They’re a group of people very interested in science, and usually not as much in business. They’re excellent at writing proposals, and that’s why they’re successful—they bring in money to support their projects and excel at attracting students, managing projects, and publishing results.

That’s a unique skill set, but to ask these researchers to have a separate skill set where they need to excel at managing a company and have all of the skills needed for that—that’s asking a lot. Some faculty have both sets of skills already, but we generally encourage faculty to focus on the technical side of things even as they move toward commercialization. We often encourage the researchers/inventors to become the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) or Chief Science Officer (CSO) of the company they helped found, and we help them find a career-entrepreneur to run the company as CEO.

J: So there is a career development aspect to Invent Penn State?

RH: What we see in our office with researchers—and it’s especially true for graduate students pursuing advanced degrees in science or engineering—is that after spending four to six years doing research, many of them realize that research is not what they want to do for the rest of their lives. Some of them do of course pursue careers in research. However, a sizable subset are looking for other ways to use their technical background. They could become a patent attorney, work in tech transfer, work at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, or become an entrepreneur. Many want to use their technical backgrounds in a non-research based career.

So, that’s what many of the support mechanisms that are in place here—TechCelerator, LaunchBox, etc.—are intended to do. If researchers and inventors have entrepreneurial aspirations, they can go through one of these workshops to see if being an entrepreneur is really something they’re interested in.

And, excitingly, our increased focus on technology transfer and IP continues. We’re in talks to develop a Penn State-focused angel investment group and also perhaps a Penn State-focused venture capital group. This type of funding is very important for start-ups, and it’s rather lacking in our area. But I predict more investment coming down the road.