As indicated by Professor John L. Hennessy (Former President of Stanford University), “High-technology companies are both an important part of our world’s economic growth story as well as the place where many young entrepreneurs realize their dreams”.

Starting from an old photo which was taken over around 1982, the speaker will first share his own story on how and why to develop the world’s first prototype of “Touch Phone (1982)”, with audiences. He will then couple his R&D experiences of over 36 years in the US industry and 10 years in academia across the world with his global touch and involvements with several startups. This talk will blend technology, liberal art, creativity, innovation, business and management together to guide the audiences to go through an interdisciplinary process from “Curiosity > Opportunity> Business Model> Risk Management> Technology Commercialization and Business Innovation”. A Case study will be also discussed. At the end of this talk, the speaker hopes that the audiences will have a first-hand feeling to understand how technologist and entrepreneur transfer their curiosity, hard work, and ambition at the very early stage into decisive actions of establishing their own enterprise, and then eventually expand it to one of the top Fortunate 500 corporations in the world.

In the meantime, the creation of academic spin-offs from universities research labs and research institutes are now playing a key mechanism of the technology commercialization for IPRs-based research prototypes. University spin-offs are now starting to play a critical role for economic development, Commercializing university technologies and also helping university with their major missions of research and teaching.

Based on speaker’s own experiences as corporate technical staff, director and executive director for 26 years and then visiting professor (since 2012); Hopefully this talk might be able to stimulate audience’s entrepreneurial spirit, and ultimately encourage some of faculty members and students to make their dreams of having their own Technology Start-Ups through Academic Spin-offs.