FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Professors John Todd of the Sam M. Walton College of Business and Ken Vickers of the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences have been named winners of the Decision Sciences Institute 2001 National Competition for Instructional Innovation.

The Instructional Innovation Award recognizes outstanding creative instructional approaches within the decision sciences. Its focus is innovation in college- or university-level teaching, either quantitative systems and/or behavioral methodology in its own right, or within functional/disciplinary areas such as finance, marketing, management information systems, operations and human resources.

Todd and Vickers are the joint creators of the award-winning course, which mixes engineering and science graduate students with business graduate students to investigate commercialization of research on the Fayetteville campus. The course, MGMT 5383 Intra/Entrepreneurship of Technology, is designed to increase the number of new high technology-based industry startups in Arkansas.

"This course was developed in 1999 as part of the curriculum for the new interdisciplinary microelectronics-photonics (microEP) graduate program" said Vickers. "Its development was financially supported from such diverse agencies as the National Science Foundation IGERT program, the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, and the Arkansas Science and Technology Authority."

The course brings University of Arkansas researchers into the classroom with technology and business graduate students, who then analyze the research for potential commercialization potential.

"This provides our researchers an opportunity to have an outside group develop an independent business plan for commercialization," said Scott Hancock of the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at the U of A. "Our technology transfer office works closely with professors Todd and Vickers to select research that is at an appropriate stage to be considered for commercialization."

By teaching the theory of the commercialization process, and then immediately applying the theory in a live exercise with a real inventor, the students are given practice that could lead not only to immediate commercialization but also to future student businesses.

The students from each field must first learn to communicate across the discipline boundaries, and learn to respect the critical nature of each others’ expertise," said Todd. "Technology without marketability will always fail, as will a market plan based on a non-viable technology. Our students learn how to analyze both the technological and business potential of leading-edge research results."

The class is part of both the MBA curriculum and the microEP curriculum, making it one of the few courses that are part of both a business and engineering/science graduate degree program.

While the course has not yet resulted in accelerated commercialization of the analyzed research topics, two of its graduates have created startup businesses in high technology enterprises. These students give credit to the course for giving them the confidence to start their own companies much earlier in their careers than they had planned to before taking the course.

"Courses such as this are only part of the mosaic of activities that are necessary to create a high technology based economy in Arkansas," said Vickers. "But this course, combined with such things as the recent establishment of an innovation incubator on campus and future development of a Research and Technology Park, will result in the creation of a brighter economic future for Arkansas."

For more information, please see the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance Web site at http://www.nciia.org/, the National Science Foundation Web site at www.nsf.gov/igert, or the Decision Sciences Institute Web site at http://www.decisionsciences.org/.