“We think it’s quite important that students know that there are options open to them … for joining a start-up company or potentially even starting their own company, commercializing what they’re doing in the lab.” Peter Searson, director of the Institute for NanoBioTechnology

Weihs believes that exposing engineering students to business concepts-indeed creating entrepreneurially minded engineering graduates and a campuswide movement to take technology from research papers to applied, useful products-is very important, even if it means some adjustment from traditionally research-driven educational models.

“I think in an engineering school there’s room for both [research and business exposure] and, frankly, if you don’t have both, you are less competitive. My basic argument is that engineering schools should deliver three ‘products.’ Students are your top product. Knowledge is number two. And a close number three should be technology development. Instead of just handing knowledge over the fence, you also want to be creating technologies and transferring them to the world to make it a better place.”

Weihs notes that a related tech transfer/entrepreneurial push is occurring in the two-year-old Master of Science in Engineering Management (MSEM) program. That degree pairs a concentration in one of 13 engineering specialties with five business courses covering multiple topics from finance and management to intellectual property and venture planning, all within Whiting’s CLE. The MSEM is, in part, an outgrowth of the hugely popular Entrepreneurship & Management minor, which is essentially the same financial inculcation experienced by students in the Center for Bioengineering Innovation & Design (CBID) master’s program.

Similar exposure to the potential of commercialization is taking place at the Institute for NanoBioTechnology. The institute has created a summer seminar for doctoral students that brings in venture capitalists, tech transfer experts, and corporate leaders as a way of balancing what is, by its very nature, an intensive research experience.

“We think it’s quite important that students know that there are options open to them other than academic careers or careers in an R&D lab; i.e., there are possibilities for joining a start-up company or potentially even starting their own company, commercializing what they’re doing in the lab,” says Peter Searson, director of the institute and a professor of materials science and engineering.

Across the board, these program directors say there’s a certain kind of mindset that’s growing among their students. “The students who come [to our program] are the kinds of students who really want to have an impact on the world,” says Youseph Yazdi, executive director of CBID and of the David E. Swirnow Master of Science in Bioengineering Innovation and Design program.

CBID’s yearlong master’s program places students like Karin Hwang into three months of rotations at various Johns Hopkins Hospital units. There, working side by side with clinicians, surgeons, and nurses, they analyze literally hundreds of systems, devices…anything that catches their eye as a potential problem to solve. These myriad possibilities are boiled down to three team projects that by year’s end will yield prototypes and, more importantly, proto-minds capable of understanding the stress loads that can fracture a medical device or their investor’s bottom line.

For Hwang and her team, their interest was piqued by the fact that devices for sensing when a woman was going into premature labor were both primitive in design (a belt worn around the waist to mechanically detect uterine contractions, a notoriously poor design for obese women) and antiquated (nothing new had come on the market in almost 30 years).

Knowing the precise stage of labor is vital to physicians who are trying to bring a baby to term; Hwang’s team had struck upon the idea that a device that analyzed electrical signals directly from the cervix could be far more accurate and popular for use among OB/GYNs.

“We make the commitment to our CBID students that they will work on projects with both significant clinical impact and high commercial potential,” says Yazdi, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering who also holds an MBA. “It may not be something that gets you a Nobel Prize in physics, and it may not always be cutting edge in terms of technology, but it will be cutting edge in terms of impacting people.”