University Times

Got the passion and the willingness to spend time and energy to make a marketable idea a reality?

Michael Lehman can help.

Lehman joined the Katz Graduate School of Business’s Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence (IEE) earlier this year after leaving his position as executive director of the Juniata College Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership. As director of IEE’s PantherlabWorks and student services, his job is to encourage entrepreneurship within the University and beyond.

Funded by area foundations, PantherlabWorks offers free consultation to help entrepreneurs commercialize new products and technologies. While approximately 60 percent of PantherlabWorks clients are from the outside community, the rest are faculty, staff or students with entrepreneurial aspirations.

PantherlabWorks can assess a product and its market, offer advice and connect entrepreneurs with experts and resources.

Its mission differs from Pitt’s Office of Technology Management and Office of Enterprise Development, which serve to commercialize University-developed intellectual property (IP).

“There are plenty of things people do outside of work that’s not Pitt-developed IP,” Lehman noted.

He said individuals typically come to entrepreneurship from a specific disciplinary expertise — perhaps computer science, medicine or engineering. “They really understand their academic area” but lack the network necessary to take their product to the marketplace, Lehman said.

“That’s the perfect place you want to be,” he said, noting there are plenty of people who can provide accounting or operations expertise for someone with the specialized skills or knowledge behind a potential product.

Among current PantherlabWorks projects are medical devices, products that need to be engineered, new technologies and software, said Lehman, remaining deliberately vague on details to protect the ideas.

Others, such as faculty who do consulting on the side, could benefit from PantherlabWorks help in marketing or developing a business strategy.

Help for entrepreneurs creates learning opportunities for students. Pitt faculty and students help entrepreneurs with their problems; the entrepreneurs provide the students with practical experience.

For instance, Lehman has connected an entrepreneur in need of a prototype with the Swanson School of Engineering, where students will develop prototypes as part of their class work next term. Entrepreneurs needing to have primary research done have been connected with marketing professors willing to let students do it as a class project.

Instead of inviting successful businesspeople to tell their stories, by exposing students to entrepreneurs who are in the midst of developing their businesses, the students see for themselves the passion and skills required as well as the challenges entrepreneurs face. “They also learn they go through many failures,” he said.

Another facet of Lehman’s work will be to help integrate entrepreneurship across disciplines and promote student entrepreneurship as part of the business school’s plan to increase its entrepreneurship efforts. “There are lots of opportunities to insidiously integrate it into courses faculty are teaching.

“When it comes to opportunities for faculty, giving them the opportunity to translate theory into practice is something I’m passionate about,” he said.

“Pitt has a lot of little areas of entrepreneurial activity, but we’ve got the opportunity to tie it all together in one consolidated strategy.”

Creating more connections among faculty, students and local entrepreneurs could impact economic opportunities in the region.

“People tend to stay when they have networks, relationships and job opportunities,” Lehman noted. Making and strengthening local company connections through IEE may encourage those people to remain here, which in turn can benefit students.

He cited as an example IEE’s Entrepreneurial Fellows Center where some 300 alumni of the program provide a growing list of younger entrepreneurial people “who are just a phone call or an email away” from visiting in Pitt classrooms, providing internship opportunities or lending their industry expertise.

Despite the poor economy, it is a good time for entrepreneurship, Lehman said. “No one’s quite sure what the market’s going to look like, who’s going to survive.”

Students faced with a bleak job market or experienced employees seeking to take charge of their own future may decide to pursue their own business ideas. “People are always going to spend money,” he said. “What will they spend it on?”

While there are financial challenges for finding loans or angel investors, there always is room for entrepreneurial endeavors.

Remember, Lehman said: Every industry started with one person and one idea — an entrepreneur.

—Kimberly K. Barlow