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Home > Resources > Students > 2006 Interns

2006 Interns

Please review current and previous internship projects and look at what past interns have to say about their experience:

Brandt Coultas

Picture yourself in a meeting. You are sitting down with a University of Michigan faculty member who is a research expert on a particular subject and has developed a technology that may have commercial applications. The faculty member is interested in exploring this possibility and needs a team to move the project forward. This is what the TechStart internship program is like - you work directly with the inventor and help them figure out a potential commercial path for their discovery.

The teams you work with at TechStart tend to be diverse and specialized. I worked on one project this summer and our overall project team included two MBA students (TechStart interns), a local consultant, the faculty member, and a post doctoral student and a master's student from the faculty member's laboratory. Our job as interns was to analyze and evaluate the potential markets for the technology.

We spent a significant chunk of time upfront understanding the science behind the technology and doing library and web research on the markets. Doing this work upfront enabled us to then ‘enter the industry’. We met with local experts, talked to potential partners and analyzed potential competitors - all with the goal of figuring out if our technology would add significant value to the market. In short, on this project we functioned as consultants who were an important of the team.

As an Evening MBA student I found the TechStart program invaluable. It gave me the opportunity to explore my interest in working with early stage startup companies, and I came away from the program with a real understanding of how technology-based startups happen in a University environment.

Thomas Fry, MBA, Ross School of Business

Prior to attending business school, I worked for Fortune 500 firms as a researcher in the field of computer engineering. I had extensive experience with creating new technology, but was seeking an opportunity to experience first hand what the process is, and what it takes to, commercialize new technology into the marketplace. I chose the Techstart internship primarily because it provided an opportunity to do so and to experience first hand what the process is of how new technology is brought to market through identifying what the value proposition is, where the end-market is and what the product development path should be.

The Techstart program definitely provided these experiences, and more, and I enjoyed the opportunity to participate in the program. Throughout the summer I was able to interact with students, UM faculty, local entrepreneurs and consultants in a variety of disciplines ranging from life sciences to health care to engineering. I was also able to work on 3 individual projects, each at a different stage of development.

The first project involved a pharmaceutical which can reduce the effects of long-term noise induced hearing loss in people exposed to hazardous noise. The firm was at a fairly well developed stage in terms of both the technology and team members. However, since research to date focused on the science and clinical trials, the company did not have a clearly identifiable end-user market. Our involvement with the firm involved gaining an understanding of what populations are exposed to hazardous noise and who the key influencers are within these populations. The cumulation of our work consisted of formulating a clear and concise marketing plan, and writing the marketing section of their business plan.

For another project we worked with two researchers who were interested in commercializing a pharmaceutical which helps to accelerate wound healing. This firm was at an earlier stage with a less clear understanding of the science and clinical trial path. We performed extensive research in the field and developed a framework to help the company’s founders better understand how various choices taken today would effect the product 7 to 10 year development lifecycle, the end-user market and the resulting competitive positioning.

The final project I participated on was also at the earliest stage of development. Several researchers in the school of engineering had completed a several year project and developed a micro gas chromatography instrument, which was believed to be superior to current products in the market place. The Techstart interns worked to better understand what true needs of the instrumentation market are and what the primary benefit of the technology is.

I am happy to say that the internship provided all of the experiences I was looking for, but most of all it was a great experience to work with so many people from a variety of different background and positions. Through the Techstart internship I have gained valuable skills in understanding all of the aspects involved with entrepreneurship and what it takes to commercialize new technology from a business perspective.

Jason Gillow

I was made aware of the TechStart program while presenting my senior design project at the College of Engineering. With a previous undergraduate degree in business, I looked to utilize this internship as a way to recapture those lessons once learned. I had entertained the idea of entrepreneurship and wanted to determine the feasibility of such a venture. I had also hoped this experience would provide me access to the Ann Arbor networking community, local start-ups and other influential individuals in the area. Working in the TechStart program has provided that and more.

The varied range of educational disciplines in the Program allowed for different skill sets, backgrounds and perspectives. Spreading this diversity amongst the various summer projects provided a unique framework of teams that allowed for continued learning within each group. The support, guidance and advice garnered from the Office of Technology Transfer staff supplied invaluable industry insight and experience. The mentorship they provided greatly assisted our work with the various research projects.

I was assigned to work on three projects with varying levels of product development. The broad spectrum of these allowed me to use my engineering skills and those experiences working at the medical school. I was also given the opportunity to learn about a new technology thereby expanding my personal knowledge. Two of my projects involved initial market research into the current and future competitive landscape of the industry. These technologies were in the early stage and needed this information to help outline their path towards commercialization. The third project involved an already existing company that had a working lab model. Their need focused on funding and the various sources that invest in their particular type of technology.

The experiences and people I've meet through the TechStart program are invaluable. It allows inspiring and would-be entrepreneurs a glimpse of the steps necessary for the commercialization of their ideas.

Lindsay Klee

My interests in biotechnology/life sciences and economic development led me to search for an internship that would challenge me while providing an opportunity to build both upon knowledge gained as a management student in the MHSA program at the School of Public Health and upon work experience within research and development in the pharmaceutical industry. I scoured available resources in search of such an opportunity and discovered an ideal possibility: UM TechStart.

During the TechStart internship, I concentrated my efforts on two main projects. One of the two, Dermacyte, involved collaboration with a UM radiation oncology researcher, UM Tech Transfer staff, and two scientists who had recently formed the Ann Arbor-based start-up, Dermacyte, LLC. This project was extremely rewarding as I was able to witness the evolution of an early-stage start-up focused on advancing to market a peptide with significant potential for accelerating wound-healing. My understanding of processes for obtaining funding thru SBIR grants, state-based funding mechanisms, and from VCs improved significantly. I also learned a great deal about patent protection necessary for a start-up to advance a biological product or peptide variant. Additionally, I worked with another graduate student to develop short and longer-term recommendations for a reimbursement strategy, analyzed the impact of multiple pathways to market respective to combinations of delivery mechanism and FDA designation, interviewed numerous physicians on treatment protocols, performed a competitive analysis of wound-healing products and pipeline technologies, and provided considerations for Dermacyte to make when structuring preclinical and human trials.

My involvement with a second project challenged me to evaluate a healthcare decision-making tool from multiple perspectives. Although this tool, known as CHAT (Choosing Healthplans All Together), had been licensed out by the University of Michigan for some time, UM Tech Transfer and the UM-NIH co-collaborators expressed difficulty in marketing the tool and in assisting licensees in extracting value from use. Considering decision-making from the perspectives of healthcare consumers, payers, and providers proved worthwhile and allowed our team to craft strategic recommendations for CHAT advancement.

Finally, the TechStart experience allowed me to further develop relationships with leaders in Ann Arbor and more broadly, throughout the Southern Michigan region. Moving forward, I believe that this network will allow me to have a greater impact on entrepreneurial developments benefiting health.

Josh Palay, Graduate Student, School of Information

As a first year student at the School of Information, I became very interested in usability and design, with particular emphasis on how ideas are brought to the market. Also, as so much of my schooling was about facilitating information processing and retrieval, I was very anxious to get some first-hand experience “in the field.” When I heard about TechStart, it seemed a perfect fit. And it was.

The first TechStart project I worked on was the development of commercialization plans for a new algorithm (RCREC) to detect strained breathing. Strained breathing, unlike the more common related sleep disorder sleep apnea, is difficult to detect. There are currently no good means for quantifying its effects; RCREC tries to address this problem. Through the internship, I and my team members were able to work directly with the developer, Dr. Chervin, as well as numerous members of the health community ranging from software developers in the U.K. to V.C.'s here in Ann Arbor to sleep centers across the country. By the end of the internship, we were able to provide Dr. Chervin with a detailed overview of the sleep diagnostic and therapeutic markets, a set of steps to proceed through FDA guidelines, an overview of how insurance companies might code his algorithm, and seven possible commercialization plans.

My other project was CHAT, a tool for developing an understanding of the complexities of healthcare. When I started at TechStart, CHAT had already been licensed by the University of Michigan for the past five years. Tech Transfer wanted to know about the reaction to the product and how it could be improved. My team and I, through calling licensees, researching the market space, playing CHAT (numerous times), and talking to those involved in benefits consulting were able to delineate several distinct benefits of CHAT as well as a plan for how to concentrate those benefits further in the future. In fact, in September, I will hopefully be going to the Serious Games for Health Convention in Baltimore to present on CHAT.

TechStart was an excellent way of not only gaining first hand knowledge of how commercialization plans are developed, but for meeting numerous people who are involved in the process. Working in diverse teams, I learned a great deal from my teammates about different fields and different methodologies.

I am very glad to have been a part of the 2006 team. Not only did I learn a great deal from the experience, but I know that my efforts will have helped develop two projects that, when they are further developed, could help many others.

Gus Simiao, Ross School of Business

I am an MBA student at the Ross School of Business and I chose the Techstart internship because I was looking to get exposure to technology based startups. I wanted to learn how to transform a technology into a viable venture.

I enjoyed the Techstart experience because it gave me an opportunity to exercise the skills and knowledge I had acquired during my first year MBA. I found that this internship is really an exercise in market entry strategy. In developing such strategy, I found myself thinking of several aspects of business such as customers, competitors, industry, funding, and others...

I worked on three projects. One was an ocean energy technology that extracts energy (electricity) form ocean currents. The project was to identify funding sources for such startup. My second project was to develop a market entry strategy for software that diagnoses sleep disorders. My third project was to develop a market entry strategy for a conducting polymer that improves the performance of medical devices such as pacemakers.

Ultimately, the internship at Techstart is about understanding the capabilities of a technology and identifying the most promising market for such technology to be commercialized. In simple terms, the interns identify what a given technology can do and then look for a group of people that will benefit from the technology and is willing to pay for it.

I found the Techstart internship to be very educational and meaningful. Interns came from a variety of backgrounds, which made for interesting and productive group discussions. Moreover, the inventors of the technologies actually used the reports and recommendations generated by Techstart to start their technology based ventures.