The Laboratory’s Innovation and Partnerships Office (IPO) serves as a focal point for industry engagement and facilitates partnerships to deliver mission-driven solutions that support national security and grow the U.S. economy. Under a Congressionally mandated technology transfer mission, IPO equips Laboratory staff to approach projects with an entrepreneurial mindset and foster positive public–private research collaborations in areas where the Laboratory’s unique facilities, capabilities, and expertise overlap with market needs. IPO develops, manages, and sponsors multiple training programs for staff seeking to mature their inventions.
The process begins when Lawrence Livermore researchers report new inventions to IPO to secure the Laboratory’s intellectual property, but inventor involvement in nascent technologies need not end there. Researchers who hone entrepreneurial skills and understand the demands of commercialization can expand industry networks and technology customers, becoming IPO’s technology transfer partners.
Entrepreneurial training prepares Laboratory staff for the road to commercialization, whether it includes fielding questions from potential industry partners or taking the first steps toward a start-up. “The more researchers know about business, the more successful they will be in commercializing their technologies and developing more innovations in the future,” says Hannah Farquar, the Business Intelligence and Market Analysis group leader for IPO. “Entrepreneurial training supports researchers who want their research and development results to make an impact on the world.”
IPO Director Matthew Garrett agrees. “The Laboratory’s industry-changing impact in areas ranging from fusion energy to advanced manufacturing, critical materials, space, life sciences, defense, and more is wide-reaching,” says Garrett. “This impact spans decades of IPO supporting intellectual property protection, creating commercialization pathways for cutting-edge inventions, and providing entrepreneurship training to empower the nation’s economic competitiveness through the work being done at Lawrence Livermore.”
An Entrepreneurial Journey Begins
Farquar, who holds a doctorate in chemistry, worked many years in IPO as a market research analyst and business development executive—evaluating inventions, marketing technologies, and networking with industry to secure licenses and research partnerships for Lawrence Livermore technologies. She got her start in the business of innovation when she served as an industry mentor for a student start-up in a 2012 Department of Energy (DOE) entrepreneurship program. “I’ve been enamored with the entrepreneurial process ever since,” she says.
Roger Werne is the “ideator” of the Laboratory’s entrepreneurial training programs, according to Farquar. Werne launched IPO’s predecessor—the Industrial Partnering Program—in the 1980s when he served as associate director for Engineering. He then founded a medical device start-up in the 1990s. Werne returned to IPO in 2007 to manage technology licensing and industry partnerships until his retirement in 2024. “Scientists must understand business and entrepreneurship, because if their technologies are going to benefit the country, products and sales need to be deployed on a large scale by the business community,” says Werne. “Furthermore, when proposing new ideas to government funding agencies, scientists must realize that they are selling an idea for funding, which is also an entrepreneurial activity.” Werne and Farquar poured their Laboratory and innovation experience into creating IPO’s first entrepreneurial training program in 2015, later leading pilots for other national training programs.
Whether introductory or immersive, entrepreneurial training identifies a technology’s best trajectory to commercialization by addressing markets, networks, and means of revenue generation. “Economic impact is where these programs have flourished,” says Farquar. “Participants focus on what a future product will look like, who it will serve, and how it will attract business interest.” A tool that quickly becomes familiar to training participants is the Business Model Canvas, a template for brainstorming and fine-tuning the elements of a successful venture. At the core of each Business Model Canvas stands “value proposition,” which reflects the technology’s promise to its customers such as the problems it will solve; established activities that will become better, easier, or less costly; or new activities that will be enabled. Surrounding the value proposition are the networks, resources, customers, costs, delivery channels, and sources of revenue required to create and sustain a commercial product—all topics for discussion and development by new or experienced entrepreneurs.
Another training element is the pitch, a concise description of the business or product along with its benefits, markets, and economic promise. Honing a pitch and communicating the future promise of a technological solution are central to growing networks and reaching committed investors and customers, including funding agencies and other potential academic and government partners.
Through different programs, IPO has supported emerging entrepreneurs at the Laboratory with the opportunity to receive pitch feedback from experienced venture capitalists and angel investors. Farquar has drawn from hundreds of San Francisco Bay Area investors who have interacted with IPO on past projects or roundtables. “These types of meetings that strive to connect Laboratory researchers with the private sector provide an opportunity for investors to learn about our science while we gain their market insights,” says Farquar.
A History of Impact
The programs offered or coordinated by IPO have served a range of interests and goals along short or longer timelines. A point of entry for many Laboratory staff is the National Labs Entrepreneurship Academy (NLEA), a four-day workshop offered periodically to anyone at Lawrence Livermore. At NLEA, Farquar and other IPO staff partner with professors from the University of California at Davis’s Mike and Renee Child Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship to lead classroom- style, workshop-based training on topics such as entrepreneurial business fundamentals, networking, and identifying value proposition. IPO and Sandia National Laboratories’ California Innovation and Partnerships team collaborate to make the program available, while also presenting on intellectual property and partnerships between the national laboratories and private industry. Farquar moderates a panel, “Entrepreneurship at the Lab,” on using entrepreneurial skills in the Laboratory as well as in future business plans.
In earlier iterations of the program, participants started their partnership network development by preparing an elevator pitch they honed during a business mentor “speed-dating” activity. “They repeated their pitch to between five and ten mentors. The value to future entrepreneurs of that exercise alone is worth the time spent in the course,” says Farquar. “Past participants have also reported learning more about building networks, a skill that serves many goals.” More than 400 people have attended NLEA since its founding in 2015. This introductory program has reached beyond scientist inventors to proposal writers, program leaders, Laboratory administrators—anyone who wants to learn more about innovation impact.
Introduced in 2017, the National Lab Accelerator served for five years as the destination for researchers seeking to deepen their expertise and zero in on a value proposition and business need for their technologies. (See S&TR, June 2017, Ready, Set, Innovate! Entrepreneurship Flourishes at the Laboratory.) While focused on a specific start-up idea or technology, meetings were held once a month for a portion of the year. “The Accelerator was designed to be more intense than NLEA, but the effort was spread out to fit with researchers’ day jobs,” says Farquar. The program connected Lawrence Livermore researchers with business mentors in their specific fields to build industry networks and brainstorm market spaces for their technologies. Participants populated a Business Model Canvas for their product idea and created a product vision and pitch deck. The program concluded with a pitch competition. Livermore participants competed for the best business concept pitch, and the winner joined competitors from other national laboratories in a day-long pitch event judged by a panel of angel investors and venture capitalists.
The National Lab Accelerator embodied Werne’s vision of national laboratories hosting their own Shark Tank—a television series in which entrepreneurs pitch their products to celebrity investors. DOE funded development of the program, and Farquar recruited scientists and created a curriculum for the program that continued until 2022. Laboratory scientist Johanna Schwartz was the last Livermore winner of the National Lab Accelerator pitch event for her studying polymers on a chip (SPOC) project. She has continued to work with network partners she met through the program, collaborating on newly funded projects to move her SPOC technology toward full commercialization.
In 2023, Werne and Farquar won DOE’s Office of Technology Transitions Director’s Award for Innovative Lab Technology Transfer for developing the National Lab Accelerator, which trained more than 40 researchers, was supported by more than 70 San Francisco Bay Area investors and entrepreneurs as business mentors or pitch event judges, and hosted 10 pitch events with participants from 15 of the 17 DOE national laboratories. While this program has ended, IPO is developing new onsite training opportunities. “Just as entrepreneurs need to pivot as market forces change, IPO programs need to pivot and evolve based on the knowledge, skills, and needs of Laboratory researchers,” says Farquar.
Innovation at Scale
IPO supports Laboratory participants interested in national- level entrepreneurial training as well. These programs have served as either a continuation of NLEA and the National Lab Accelerator or as a first stop for researchers who fit the training models. Energy I-Corps, an initiative of DOE’s Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC), provides an 8- to 14-week course during which research teams from national laboratories each develop the value proposition and viable markets for commercially relevant Laboratory technologies by gathering input from interviews with as many as 100 or more industry stakeholders. The teams, which consist of a principal investigator, entrepreneurial lead, and industry mentor, are selected through an application process and commit to a part- time, intensive process. With $100,000 provided by DOE funding offices, researchers’ time is covered for the demands of the training, which supports workforce enhancement and commercialization of national laboratory technologies.
Fourteen Livermore teams have participated in Energy I-Corps since 2015. In 2017, a group led by Yongqin Jiao developed a commercialization plan for an environmentally friendly bioadsorption strategy to recover rare-earth elements from waste materials such as mine tailings and coal byproducts. Rare-earth elements, used in electric vehicles and electronic devices, are expensive to extract or mine, making alternative approaches appealing to a range of markets. Since her work in Energy I-Corps, Jiao’s technology was licensed by Alta Resource Technologies, and she has continued her work in this field with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Environmental Microbes as a BioEngineering Resource Program.
IPO also connects researchers with FedTech, a start-up studio that matches federally funded technologies with entrepreneurs. In this multiphase program lasting two months per phase, Laboratory researchers act as technical advisors to entrepreneurial teams exploring potential markets and developing business models and pitches for the researchers’ technologies. “FedTech programs are a good choice for Lawrence Livermore researchers who want to see their technology achieve commercial impact but may not be able to perform the market and business validation required to build a start-up,” says Farquar.
IPO continues to refine and develop new entrepreneurial training programs to meet the changing demands of customers, investors, and researcher inventors. IPO team member Candice Bila is focusing on the next generation of entrepreneurial offerings and skills training for Laboratory staff. Bila brings experience managing technology innovation and developing strategic project proposals for a large pharmaceutical firm to IPO’s business development team.
No matter how markets and training programs change, Farquar stresses that IPO will always be a resource for Laboratory inventors. She says, “We support the many ways staff can achieve long-term success in research and development, especially focusing on those avenues that require private industry to reach their ultimate impact. More broadly, we support the innovation culture of Lawrence Livermore and staff participating in the innovation ecosystem of the greater San Francisco Bay Area and the nation.”
—Suzanne Storar
For further information contact Hannah Farquar (925) 423-0587 (farquar3 [at] llnl.gov (farquar3[at]llnl[dot]gov)).
