NASA

Through the Center for Entrepreneurship and Commercialization SBI Consulting Program, UC students and faculty put their skills to work helping NASA researchers plan to commercialize innovative new technologies.  This program operates as part of the undergraduate Capstone experience for UC students in partnership with the NASA Ames Research Center.  The collaboration with NASA is staffed by UC SBI faculty, and Carl H. Lindner College of Business students. It facilitates NASA’s goal to explore novel uses for its intellectual property and transfer technologies, developed initially for the space program, into a wide array of industries in ways that benefit our nation and the world.

This partnership marks a landmark collaboration between the University of Cincinnati and NASA. "Having students involved in assessing technology transfer opportunities adds an extremely powerful new tool, and a new perspective, for NASA," states Rose Grymes, Chief of Technology Partnerships, NASA Ames Research Center.

NASA Ames Research
NASA's Ames Research Center is located in the heart of California's Silicon Valley. It is one of ten NASA field centers. Since 1939, Ames has led NASA in conducting world-class research and development in aeronautics, exploration technology and science aligned with the center's core capabilities.

SBI Program
UC’s SBI Program is a faculty supervised student consulting program administered in graduate and undergraduate courses each fall and spring semester. The program currently serves approximately 30 clients each year, having successfully undertaken projects with well over 600 organizations since its inception in 1972. In addition to having benefited from adjudication and dozens of awards from SCORE, UC students have received 13+ national awards and earned an A+ client satisfaction rating.

Partnership Results
The ongoing collaboration between the UC SBI Program and NASA was launched in 2015. Since that time numerous projects have been successfully completed with many more ahead. Examples include:

• Evaluation of the commercialization potential of 174 NASA patents
• Industry analysis and assessment of the potential of coated/doped carbon nanotubes networks to provide a cost effective way to detect volatile organic compounds (VOCs)
• Commercialization plans for vision chip technology, which restores sight to patients with moderate to severe blindness due to aged macular degeneration (AMD), diabetic retinopathy, and retinitis pigmentosa
• Foreign expansion study which assessed the viability of five Latin American countries as viable sites for an offshore ecosystem that generates biofuel from algae, wind energy, and food through aquaculture