🔒Q&A: Bioscience exec aims to boost UConn’s startup backlog

Q&A talks with Dr. Mostafa Analoui, a life sciences entrepreneur and investment banker, who recently became executive director of venture development at UConn.

Q: You recently joined UConn to help lead efforts to increase venture development activity at the university. What is involved in your new role?

A: The primary goal is to help faculty and student entrepreneurs launch and grow new technology ventures based on the innovative research they conduct at UConn and UConn Health. This includes working with academic and research leaders across all UConn campuses to develop mentoring/educational tools and recruiting outside industry experts, investors and business leaders to participate in new and existing UConn ventures.

This entails collaborating with various entrepreneurship initiatives at the university, leading the UConn Technology Incubation Program (TIP), and collaborating closely with our technology commercialization team.

Q: What is the Technology Incubation Program?

A: UConn's Technology Incubation Program, also known as TIP, is the only university-based technology incubator in the state. The program provides high-value technology startups with a suite of business services, state-of-the-art labs, fully-equipped office space, and UConn's research infrastructure to grow their businesses.

A unique and highly valued aspect of TIP is the access it affords our companies to the extensive R&D capacity at UConn, such as core research facilities and faculty expertise, that is often unattainable for a fledgling startup.

Q: How many companies have come through the TIP program?

A: Since it was established in 2003, TIP has accelerated the growth of over 85 technology startups led by UConn faculty, students, and external entrepreneurs who collaborate with the expert researchers at UConn and UConn Health. These companies have raised more than $50 million in grant funding, $80 million in debt and equity, more than $45 million in revenue, and have created over 100 full- and part-time jobs in the last year alone. 

Q: How do you determine which technologies have commercial potential? How do you turn a technology into a successful product or company?

A: The key ingredients for the success of any innovation-based venture are: accurately identifying the market demand; establishing a clear and realistic business plan that covers technology development, finances, strategic partnerships, etc.; and recruiting an experienced team to execute the plan.

As a standard of practice, we rigorously evaluate each innovative concept developed by our faculty to identify potential opportunities, and more importantly, to assist and support them throughout the commercialization process, either through new company formation or licensing. To do this, we depend on internal experts like our licensing directors and industry liaisons, and we also reach out to external contacts from the investment community, other technology-based startups, and successful entrepreneurs and business leaders.

Q: What are the biggest challenges in your new position?

A: What makes venture development at a university unique may also be its greatest challenge. By definition, research institutions are places where discovery and innovation happen daily. There is a constant flux of fresh ideas from great minds. This provides a unique environment where some of the greatest challenges facing our society are being tackled. The mandate for faculty is to educate, explore new ideas, and to further knowledge. They are not expected to know how to start a company or market a technology.

Also, academic research requires a different type of capital to adequately support venture development from university technologies. Ideally, investors want to work with ventures that are close in proximity. This can be challenging for Connecticut-based startups, since there is a limited presence of venture capitalists in the state.

Yet even before this stage, we need to tackle the funding gap that exists between the federally funded research projects and applied R&D activities. To make a technology attractive to investors and partners, it is critical to have data to prove a concept. While there are a few federal programs for applied R&D, they are highly competitive and can take quite some time to access.

Our challenge is to move at a pace that keeps us ahead through easily accessible funding at this very early stage — sometimes even prior to company formation — that will allow us to attract investors and partners.

Q: There are currently 35 companies located at TIP's two major locations in Storrs and at UConn Health in Farmington. What are the prospects for growth in these sites?

A: Currently our TIP facility at Storrs is fully booked, but we expect some companies to graduate and make room for one or two new companies in the spring of 2017. The number of clients in Farmington has increased quickly since the state invested $19 million through Bioscience Connecticut to expand the facility in Jan. 2016, and we anticipate high-quality companies from UConn, Connecticut, and beyond will fill the remaining space soon.