A capital idea: Finding funding

A new corporation on campus is going to help students bring their business ideas to the commercial world. At its last meeting, the Executive Committee of Penn's Board of Trustees approved the creation of a not-for-profit corporation, P2B. The new company will help students, faculty or staff with business ideas and assist them in finding corporate support through four subject-specific incubators that are currently in development. "Like other institutions, there's so much intellectual capital here, and we've now created a frame around it that would help both the outside and our own faculty and students and staff to get the resources that they need," University President Judith Rodin said. Under P2B, there will be four main incubators -- infotech, biotechnology, distance learning and e-commerce. Each will work in conjunction with other companies to help create businesses. Bringing new businesses to University City is another goal of the program. One of the incubators is already underway. This summer, Penn found a partner for the infotech incubator that will support the development of fledgling computer companies. The RedLeaf Group, a technology operating company, announced in August that it would partner with Penn to create PenNetWorks. PenNetWorks will be located at an interim facility at 3535 Market Street and will be operational in October. Executive Vice President John Fry said the necessary resources for P2B would be minimal -- P2B will refer those with ideas to the incubators, where the bulk of investing and business development will occur. "The space is not going to be all that material," he said. "It'll be a pretty modest staff." Fry said he hoped to have P2B staffed by late November or early December, though he noted that work has already begun due to the partnership with RedLeaf. "In effect, it's already started," he said. Fry also said P2B is currently looking for partners for the other incubators. Because most of the actual business development work will be done within the subsidiaries, Fry said the main job of P2B will focus on three things -- telling people where to go with their ideas, creating new incubators and filling in the gaps for projects that don't neatly fit into one of the four subsidiaries. But, he added, this allows P2B to be flexible to the changing business world. "This isn't all down, tied and buttoned up," he said. "This is going to evolve." To cue students, faculty and staff into the development of the new business venture, the University intends on embarking on a P2B marketing campaign in the coming weeks, Fry said. "We're going to try and blanket the campus with this thing," he added. Penn's plan coincides with a trend in higher education to help ideas from within universities become businesses -- especially in the infotech sector. Stanford University, for example, is affiliated with e-SKOLAR, an Internet spin-off that caters to the professional medical community. And Open Channel, a University of Chicago affiliate, looks to provide technical support for open-source software. Fry said that the already advanced work of Penn's peer institutions -- like Stanford and Cornell universities -- helped provide an extra push to put P2B together. "We felt that we had had a little bit of a delayed response to what was going on," he explained. "Now some people will say that was a very good thing." Rodin will act as the founding chairwoman of P2B, while Fry will be the president of the company.

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