Last week I posed a question regarding how to leverage NYC talent in the startup community.  Initially, the most obvious pool of candidates seemed to be talented analytical brains in finance and consulting.  Although I still think their skill sets are translatable to startups, there’s another group out there with serious potential: university researchers and academics.

NYC is home to some of the world’s top scientific institutions (e.g. Columbia University and New York University).  Each year hundreds of millions of dollars are injected into the research and development of new technologies, yet only 0.1% of funded basic science research results in a commercial venture.  The remainder of these projects inspire a piece of academic literature and are subsequently shelved.

Center for an Urban Future, a NYC think tank, recently published an in-depth study on the importance of developing a more robust and entrepreneurial research community.  It calls for a public institution somewhere between the EDC and SBS:

What’s needed is an office that builds linkages and structures to grow and retain the city’s own technology businesses, and not just in the life sciences.  We need an office willing to interact intensively with the universities - to be in their face all the time - and to court the entrepreneurial community.

Successful institutions like this exist in Philadelphia and the Boston area.  Why shouldn’t one exist in NYC?  They set tangible goals: raising the number of companies emerging from research at city universities from X to Y and increasing investments towards research commercialization.

This is a good idea, but I think an even better solution exists.  Public institutions are inherently inefficient - they’re bureaucratic by nature.  Same thing goes for major universities.  The opportunity exists for a group of VCs/entrepreneurs to develop tight-knit relationships with key players at universities.  If the private sector can tap into university academics, researchers, and inventors, fund them and help them bring their inventions to market, it would be an economic boon.  Simply raising the number of commercialized research projects from 0.1% to 1% would result in exponential economic and technological growth.

In order for this to happen universities need to relax their transfer office policies, embrace the private (and public) sector, and encourage communication and joint-entrepreneurship with seasoned professionals.  The major institutions win, the academics win, the entrepreneurs win, and NYC wins.