Quarter Life Crisis

One resource that may come very handy for you aspiring entrepreneurs is
your University's Technology Transfer Office.  This is where your
school keeps its goldmine of patents and technologies developed by the
faculty.  One of the Tech Transfer Office's main roles is to
generate income for the University through the liscensing of these
technologies to industry.  For instance, a licensing officer of
the tech transfer office calls up a business development guy at Pfizer
and tell's them that they have some technology that may be of interest
to Pfizer.  Pfizer does it due diligence and decides it wants to
liscense this technology from the University. Terms of these deals are
usually in the form of an up front payment of roughly ~$10,000 by
industry and future royalty payments of ~5%. Faculty who researched
this technology originally usually get something like ~33% of that 5%. Score.


Now what you need to know.
Many of these technologies are just sitting around waiting for some
business minded and ambitious individuals to pick them up and
commercialize them.   As you know may have noticed, many
faculty (especially ones at traditionally conservative engineering
schools) are not in touch with industry and would much rather focus on
research rather than explore the commercial opportunities for their
novel developments. Often times, although UCSD does not have this
problem, universities discourage these types of entrepreneurial
activiies by their faculty citing conflict of interest. The result?
Promising technologies get left on the shelf and gather dust… 
First hand at the Von Liebig Center, I can see that many of the
technologies that we have been funding and faculty that we have been
consulting need a business oriented guy to push this
technology to commercialization. ( I want to be that guy, but I know I
am not ready for it. What angel investor of venture capitalist in the right mind would fund a start
up with a CEO that has no industry/management experience who is not a
core developer of the technology? )

What you should do.
Once you have the background, knowledge, network and experience to take
on a venture, visit the Technology Transfer Office website of your
favorite university where you'll find a list of technologies.

Find one relevant to your background and interest and recruit a
technical partner(s). Preferably one from the lab where the technology
was originally researched.

Negotiate a license with the school. Your chances of getting that
license will be greatly enhanced if you manage to parter with the
original faculty researcher.

Yes I know, this is uber simplified. I haven't done it myself, but I am
sure it might come in handy for you (and me) someday.  Keep an eye
out for this when you're working on your MBA. Just another source of ideas.