Universities encourage faculties to help commercialize their scientific inventions through tech IP transfer. They hold events and provide education resources. But commercializing tech IP, such as starting a tech-based startup company, isn’t easy for the faculty to do, because they don’t have bandwidth and/or sufficient management knowledge/experience, and their career goals often don’t align with commercial paths.
But what’s found to work the best is not necessarily more aggressive pushing by universities or better startup education materials, but the so-called Porsche Effect; the faculty in the next department successfully transfers a tech IP and earns profits, some of which manifests itself in the form of a shiny new Porsche in the parking lot.
Humans are local beings and there’s no better stimulation for success than seeing the next person succeeding. That’s why many human innovation breakthroughs happened locally – Silicon Valley, 19th century Impressionists, Kpop, the list goes on.
If you’re somehow on a first name basis with someone who’s super successful, first know it’s an awesome thing that not everyone has a priviledge of; then try to model after them and let the Porsche Effect kick in and become a new motivation for you 🙂