In 2021, Skyler Bagdon, then a student at the University of Vermont, discovered a big disconnect at UVM. Entrepreneurial students like himself wanted to start businesses but lacked the level of technology, experience and credibility of their professors.
On the other hand, professors were developing amazing technology, but often did not want to become entrepreneurs. They wanted to remain researchers and professors.
“You got entrepreneurs without technology and technology without entrepreneurs,” Bagdon said.
Erik Monsen, associate professor in entrepreneurship at UVM’s Grossman School of Business, suggested Bagdon and other students in the Entrepreneurship Club meet with Kirk Dombrowski, the university’s vice president for research, to explore opportunities to expand entrepreneurship.
“Covid had really shut everything down here,” Dombrowski recalls.
Bagdon believes it was not a coincidence that the program got started during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I think everybody was in kind of a crazy ‘everything’s changing’ mindset,” Bagdon said. “So screw this. Let’s just try something different.”
Dombrowski recalls the students asking for $5,000 for a pitch contest to get the Entrepreneurship Club going again after a year of pandemic.
“So I said: What if, instead of a pitch contest for student ideas, we hired you as interns?” he said.
Bagdon recalls that students including Sarah Horrigan, himself and others proposed what became the Academic Research Commercialization program, or ARC. The idea was that the students would lead an initiative. They would act as if they were running a venture capital fund, analyze technologies coming out of the university, and decide which ones they thought were exciting and revolutionary.
The technologies had to be developed enough that the students could pursue their commercialization.
“The disconnect had become really clear between entrepreneurship students and researchers,” Bagdon said.
Once the students had identified “cool” technologies, Bagdon said, they proposed recruiting a multidisciplinary team of students from across the university.
“So this isn’t just business students, but this is engineers and art students and communications students,” Bagdon said. The teams of students would try to build a business model around the technology, looking at who customers might be, whom the business needs to hire, what grants and other sources of funding are available to get it off the ground.
“And crucially, this was not a hypothetical academic exercise,” Bagdon said. “This was real technologies that were really trying to be commercialized and students who were legitimately interested in being a part of that.”
The students thought that, if the program was to be equitable, all positions in the program had to be paid.
“Unpaid non-degree-requirement internships were really only accessible to students of upper income and supported by their parents,” Bagdon said.
The students went to Dombrowski with their proposal. Eventually, he approved a pilot project with a budget of $20,000, Bagdon said. The students eventually asked for and received an additional $8,000, he said.
The students started working with the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies, the Burlington business incubator Hula, the Vermont Small Business Development Center and the Lake Champlain Chamber business accelerator LaunchVT. The idea was to build startups that students could work at once they graduated.
“They put together a plan that we’ve all decided to fund and to support,” said David Bradbury, president of the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies, or VCET. “ARC is allowing a researcher or an inventor at the university who already has a full-time job teaching or running a lab to partner up with extremely motivated students with diverse skills to try to test and build out a commercialization path that they might never have gotten around to do by themselves.”
Bradbury said his happiest hour at VCET every week during the academic year is Friday afternoon between 4 and 5, when the ARC teams meet there.
“It’s the highlight of my week to see these students who, late on a beautiful Friday, are there debriefing one another, sharing insights amongst the teams and trying to advance the collective program and the underlying businesses farther,” Bradbury said. “That’s cool. That gives me hope.”
The Vermont Technology Council, also headed by Bradbury, put more funding into the program to enable students to create more teams.
Dombrowski said several UVM alumni — including Nate Bosshard, managing partner of Offline Ventures, a San Francisco venture capital fund — have also funded the program and have acted as mentors to the students. 100% of the alumni funding goes to the internships, Dombrowski said, with UVM carrying all the administrative costs.
Verde Technologies, a solar company now headed by Bagdon, was one of the startups that grew out of the ARC program.
“Verde is in a position to develop the lowest-cost, most accessible, most highly efficient solar panels in the world,” Bagdon said.
An impact within a year
In the program’s third year, the ARC teams meet at Hula on summer Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Through the glass walls of the incubator, the Adirondacks rise behind Lake Champlain.
Mason Tuff, a rising junior at UVM, leads the ARC program now. He met with VTDigger at Hula, along with Monsen and Molly Davis, the student entrepreneurship coordinator at the university’s innovations department.
The ARC program is looking for technologies where students can make an impact within a year, Monsen said.
This year, the ARC teams are trying to commercialize three technologies: lab-grown meat, smart knee braces and a suitcase-sized system to produce medical saline solution out of any local water source in the world.
“It’s creating amazing learning experiences for our students,” Monsen said. “In some cases, it’s creating jobs for students.”
A study by the Vermont Department of Labor found that in 2017, tech jobs already accounted for 21% of jobs in the state.
UVM wants to be a catalyst for growth in startups and the jobs they create, Dombrowski said.
Other startup programs around the country use graduate business students, but this program is unique in that it is for undergraduate students, said Monsen and Tuff.
Texas Tech University, Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, California Polytechnic University San Luis Obispo, Iowa State University, Dartmouth College and Freiberg University of Mining and Technology, in Germany, have approached UVM about starting similar programs, Monsen said.
“We don’t know of anywhere in the country where students are commercializing faculty technology,” Dombrowski said. “Taking undergraduates and plunking them right in the middle of an invention is really first of its kind.”
Dombrowski said the U.S. Department of Energy has reached out, expressing interest in putting together a program that would use undergraduates to commercialize energy technologies coming out of the department’s National Laboratories. He said Vanderbilt University has also reached out to ask how UVM got ARC started.
“UVM is really at the forefront of a kind of student entrepreneurship programming culture that is really unprecedented,” Dombrowski said.
Ten students are participating, three on each team, with Tuff leading the program. In all, 27 students have participated in the program, Monsen said.
“We’re trying to promote Vermont-based economic development by encouraging students to stay in Vermont,” Tuff said. “We have capital. We have business advisers. We have amazing spaces like this.”