No more. Today programs are being established to ensure that those who want to apply their engineering skills to real-world problems will have, as any engineer can appreciate, the right business, management, and financial tools in their toolbox.
Many are offered through the Whiting School’s Center for Leadership Education (CLE). Notably, CLE offers undergraduate engineers an Entrepreneurship & Management (E&M) minor, including classes in accounting, professional communications, and leadership and organizational behavior. The CLE program is headed by Tim Weihs, a professor of materials science and engineering who is also an entrepreneur, having patented and developed reactive foil technology.
If Karin Hwang is fortunate, she’ll end up like Matt Daimler. Daimler is the poster child for all an entrepreneurial-minded Whiting School grad is supposed to be.
A computer science engineer, Daimler was one of the first engineers to graduate with an E&M minor in 1999. To say he set the bar high for all who followed would be an understatement. Shortly after graduating, Daimler was flopping around his coach seat on a 12-hour flight to the Czech Republic, desperately trying to get comfortable. Diagonally across from him was a man who managed to snag a spot with no seat in front of him; that lucky traveler pulled down a sleeping bag, created an ersatz ottoman for his legs, and promptly passed out. Daimler, who was making regular business trips to Prague, memorized that seat number and swore he’d book it next time around. Only thing, there was no easy way to book it. At least, not until Daimler put his mind and programming skills to the task.
Five years later, with his wife, Susan Damelin Daimler (A&S ’99), he launched SeatGuru.com. The Internet portal that showed each airline’s airplane seat configurations was written up by Time magazine as one of the “50 Coolest Web Sites” of 2006, and a year after that, Daimler sold the company to a division of Expedia. The sales price remains confidential (“In our actual contract documents for the sale, I had to get a provision allowing me to tell my parents that I’d sold SeatGuru,” laughs Daimler, “and if my parents leaked the sale, I was on the hook for that leak”), but he admits he did “really well,” crediting his Whiting School education for “helping me in every stage of my career.”
“To go into a program where you learn a touch of business, a touch of law, a touch of marketing, it makes you dangerous when you get to your first job, your next job…it really does help you when you get out there in the real world. I think that’s what everyone on campus realized, that this was the kind of a ‘life/job’ minor you could use throughout your career,” says Daimler.
For universities like Johns Hopkins, the pressure to shift the traditional academic model away from strictly basic or foundational work was three-pronged, with the first two big knocks coming from outside the Whiting School’s doors. The groundwork was laid some 30 years ago when the Feds-through the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 (aka the University and Small Business Patent Proce-dures Act)-allowed universities to patent their research. The most astute university administrators understood Uncle Sam’s message between the lines: “We’ll fund your work…but you’ll need to have something useful to show the public for our dime.”
As an example, the National Institutes of Health, which drops more than $600 million in research money in Johns Hopkins’ coffers annually, has over time pushed more and more monies toward translational research aimed at yielding concrete drugs, devices, and other clinical benefits for patients.
At first, the response among academics was deep grumbles. Few had licensed their own research efforts; even fewer had developed them into successful businesses that students could emulate.
This changed at Hopkins as tech transfer offices became a campus staple, with ad hoc attempts on various campuses crystallizing with the creation of the Johns Hopkins Technology Transfer office in 2001. John Fini, director of Intellectual Property and Technology Com-mercialization for the Homewood campus, who interacts with the university’s tech transfer office on a daily basis, notes that the School of Engineering now has some 360 patents from engineering professors in its portfolio, and some researchers have opted to create their own start-ups.
This has had a trickle-down effect on students. Laura Ensign, a doctoral researcher at INBT, notes that her principal investigator has his own pharmaceutical start-up, while another engineering advisor has a company developing a gel to prevent HIV infection. “My thinking [about business] has evolved. At first I was all about the research, but as we’ve gone along it’s now about ‘what’s the application?’ Which I think makes it more exciting, the translational aspects,” says Ensign. “Plus, coming in, I hadn’t known about IP [intellectual property] and how you could take things we were doing at the bench and turn it into a product. I’ve been on a couple of patents with my PI that have gotten sold.”
Industry needs also fueled the change, as firms weighed in that they wanted engineering grads who could solve more than a calculus problem. “The whole E&M minor started because professors, notably John Wierman, kept hearing from potential employers: ‘Your kids need to know some business basics. I can’t even discuss a balance sheet and income statement with them,'” says Lawrence Aronhime, a senior lecturer who teaches Intro to Business, Financial Accounting, and Entrepreneurship to undergraduates. Aronhime also organizes CBID’s business curriculum and teaches Venture Planning in the MSEM program out of Whiting’s Center for Leadership Education, where he’s the associate director.
To Aronhime, a solid grounding in business matters is just as important to an engineer’s long-term success as technical proficiency. “The technical competency gets you in the door and starts you up the promotion line,” he says. “But at the end of the day, senior managers [in engineering and tech firms] start to slowly shift as they go up that line, toward a business competence and focus.”