Photos by Alan Kim | The Roanoke Times

David Ball (left) and Julie Marchand work last month at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech. They are part of associate professor Jean Peccoud's lab; he has developed an idea he is trying to pitch in the business world.

Virginia Tech assistant professor Jean Peccoud sought help to explain the premise of one of his ideas.

The Roanoke Times | File 2005

Tracy Wilkins, founder of TechLab Inc., is a professor-turned-businessman.

BLACKSBURG -- When it comes to navigating the business world, entrepreneurially minded professors often find themselves at a bit of a disadvantage.

Accustomed to publication-based promotion and niche-specific jargon, the adjustment to bottom-line-oriented, give-it-to-me-straight boardrooms can take time and, often, translation.

Need proof? At a recent seminar hosted by Ohio-based business development company Eureka! Ranch, a number of Virginia Tech professors sat around a cluster of tables. Asked to introduce themselves and the ideas they hoped to turn into products or businesses, they gave lengthy descriptions often punctuated by $5 words.

Take Jean Peccoud's "computer-assisted design of synthetic genetic systems," for example.

"That didn't ring a bell with anyone," Peccoud, a research associate professor in Virginia Tech's Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, admitted later. "It was a good starting-out point, but we had to move beyond that."

And although learning to describe research simply might seem like an easy enough task, for business-bound academics, it often proves to be a significant hurdle, one of several that illustrates the cultural divide between academia and business.

"It's very difficult for people to take a step back and say, 'OK, now, without using all of the jargon that I use on a day-to-day basis, how do I explain what I'm doing, or what the value is, and what the impact could be on a business area or human health or society?' " said Otto Folkerts, associate director of technology development with the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute.

But for a university with an emphasis on invention and goals of fostering economic competitiveness, the push to produce and market commercially viable intellectual property is strong.

"In general, the university has taken a much more aggressive stance toward faculty entrepreneurship, a much more supportive stance, than it would have 15 years ago," said Jim Flowers, director of VT KnowledgeWorks, a business incubator located in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center.

In fact, in Tech's strategic plan, one of the aims listed is to "increase commercialization activities emanating from faculty research, including the number of public/private partnerships initiated, patents filed, spin-off companies created, licensing income generated and research and technical assistance projects completed with businesses located in the Corporate Research Center and across the commonwealth."

To help professors achieve this goal, a variety of entities has amassed on campus and beyond. Organizations such as KnowledgeWorks and Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties offer advice on issues from finding funding and identifying commercial opportunities to adapting to different measures of success.

But often, there are more basic difficulties, too.

"There's a big difference in the way you think about the science or the technology ... and how you would communicate that to other people," said Jackie Reed, a licensing associate with VTIP.

While in business, the goal is "having a product and saying, 'Here's my invention and here's what it can do,' " Reed said scientists "are very reluctant to make firm statements like that -- they want to say, 'This is what we've found, this is what we think we can do with it, [and] if all the conditions were right, we could cure cancer' or something like that."

Hence the value of "invention translation" workshops such as the one put on by Eureka! Ranch in late March.

In timed sessions, facilitator Ken Bloemer pushed professors to modify their product and business descriptions to target "end users."

The key, he explained, is to focus on three principles: useful benefit, a real reason to believe and dramatic difference.

"Nothing catches customers' attention like telling them what you can do for them," Bloemer, the president of Eureka! Ranch's invention group, told the professors. And "it's not boastful, if you can deliver."

Encouraged by Bloemer, Peccoud learned to describe GenoCAD and its "computer-assisted design of synthetic genetic systems" as a business that would use software to design and engineer DNA molecules for use by pharmaceutical companies and researchers.

The benefit, he noted, is the ability to bring increased predictability and speed to drug development.

"At this point, you get people's attention by giving a nice story that they can relate to and being able to adapt your message to something they can understand quickly," Peccoud said.

Yet communicating the premise of his business is hardly the only obstacle facing Peccoud as he attempts to convert his research into a moneymaking enterprise.

"The whole technology transfer process is not an easy process," Folkerts said. "People talk about it really lightly and say, 'Well, there's this great technology, and universities are doing hundreds of millions [of dollars worth of] ... research every year, and there should be all this IP [intellectual property], and it should be easy to get some IP in the hands of investors so that big money can be made, and all kinds of royalties can come back to the university.'

"Well, it's not that easy," he added. "It really is a very hard process."

In addition to the language barrier, there's also the problem of securing funding for product development.

"We've got that giant funding gap between pretty cool science and an actual usable product or service," Flowers acknowledged. "And that's a tough one."

Here, too, professors can be at a disadvantage.

"When it gets up to the point where you need bigger money, you really have to have your act together," professor-turned-businessman Tracy Wilkins said. "You have to have a management team, you have to make the right presentation to the venture capitalists, and they're tough nuts."

Particularly when it comes to university spinoffs such as Wilkins' own, TechLab Inc.

"They have a preconception of you as a university professor that you are a little scatterbrained, and they're real leery about giving you money," Wilkins said.

"When the first big companies came to see us, they thought they might see something like a garage operation with people running around in flip-flops," he added.

And although the assumptions aren't always correct, Wilkins said businesspeople often have good reason for their skepticism.

Universities "are not a product-development engine, they are an idea engine," he explained. And "expecting that person who's an idea generator and a bounce-off-the-walls-type person to make a transition over into a hard-nosed executive running a business is not reasonable."

"It's a very interesting tension, actually," said Peccoud, who is working to secure enough seed capital to hire someone with more of a business background to handle contact with potential customers.

Before coming to Tech, Peccoud worked for a few years in industry, developing technical software and, later, providing bioinformatics support to people doing biotech research.

"When I first left the academic world to work for a company, it was extremely refreshing ... to work on products that people will actually buy," he said. "There's an immediate reward, or validation, of what you spend your time doing everyday."

Success in academia, by contrast, often revolves around "writing publications that at the end of the day, very few people have read," he said.

Because of the vast differences between the academic and business environments, skills that make people successful in one sphere are often quite different from those that make people successful in the other.

And sometimes, Wilkins said, that's for the best.

"There is this great optimism that the university has a huge number of things that are just ready to go out and transform the world and be products," he said. "That's wrong -- they don't.

"There's good research going on, there's good stuff, but it's not ready for prime time," he added. "You have to be really good. Money follows excellence."