A bike or trike? Purdue invention makes the cover of Time magazine.

IT SEEMS LIKE THERE'S NO limit to the things one can learn from Purdue University: engineering, agriculture, business, how to ride a bike.

No, there's not a 100-level course in basic bike riding. If all goes well, this venture into cycling education will spread far from the West Lafayette campus into driveways and cul-de-sacs around the world, wherever youngsters (and their parents) are figuring out how to balance on a two-wheeler.

The answer is called Shift. It's a special cycle created by a Purdue industrial-design professor and two students, and it's turning heads around the world for its innovative approach to teaching riders to balance on two wheels. The Shift cycle won first prize in the annual International Bicycle Design Competition in one of the world's bicycling capitals, Taiwan. And it recently made the cover of Time magazine as one of "The Most Amazing Inventions of 2005."

"This bicycle, which is for toddlers, was designed with my son, Kevin, in mind," says professor Scott Shim, who collaborated with now-graduated industrial-design students Ryan Lightbody and Matt Grossman.

The Shift cycle Rear wheels join as speed increases, helping children learn to balance. The design will be one of more than 600 technologies Purdue has licensed.

The device resembles a tricycle, with two wheels in the rear that tilt toward each other at the top in a triangular fashion when the cycle is stopped or traveling at low speeds. That provides a larger stance that helps the rider maintain balance when starting and stopping. As the rider gains speed and momentum, a spring-loaded hub shifts the rear wheels inward so that they merge into one wheel. That gradually shifts the burden of balancing from the cycle to the rider.

"Most children learn how to ride a bike on training wheels, but these simply keep the bike from tipping," Shim explains. "Our bike allows children to learn how to balance themselves as they ride, instead of looking back to see if their parent is still holding the bike."

Though Shim had his preschooler in mind when designing the Shift cycle, those who follow the $5.7 billion American bicycle business believe children aren't the only potential users. Elderly riders for whom balance is a problem might find that they can venture out on a Shift, and so might people with a variety of disabilities. Bike retailers do carry adult tricycles but find that they're not hot sellers, in part because some adult riders feel self-conscious about cruising around on a three-wheeler.

The Shift seems clear to be a Purdue technology ripe for transferring to the marketplace. A number of manufacturers made contact with the inventors following their design-competition victory. Helping it speed to bike shops will be the fact that the product can be manufactured mostly with standard parts already on the market. Only the frame and the spring-loaded rear hub are proprietary designs.

The Purdue Research Foundation's Office of Technology Commercialization is in charge of bringing Purdue-created inventions to the marketplace. With regard to the Shift, patents have been filed and "we're going through proposals to see what's best for the product and what's best for Purdue," says technology manager Eric Lynch.

Simran Trana, acting director of the Office of Technology Commercialization, says there are currently more than 600 Purdue technologies that have been licensed to companies for manufacturing and marketing. They include the extracellular matrix technology used by Cook Biotech and DePuy Orthopaedics to create tissue-engineered medical products--one of the university's most successful commercialized technologies.

The office processes more than 200 Purdue invention disclosures a year, Trana says. "We figure out which are patentable and look for market opportunities. We probably file patent applications on about half of them, and about 5 percent actually make it to the marketplace."

Shim is always on the lookout for new industrial-design inspirations--for example, watching students sit cross-legged in Purdue hallways led him to work on a special ergonomic cushion. "This is how industrial designers think," he says, "how we can make daily life better for someone."