Trojans, bruins on same transfer team: USC, UCLA join Caltech to maximize research returns.

L.A.'s three heavyweight university research arms have joined forces to speed the transfer of technological discoveries made by their faculty and students to the marketplace.

Last week, the vice provosts of USC Stevens Institute for Innovation and UCLA Office of Intellectual Property joined Caltech on the 13-member board of Entretech, a non-profit that provides day-to-day support for fledgling tech companies and connects them to investors.

The alliance comes as venture capital investment is surging in Los Angeles. Already during the first quarter of this year, an estimated $1.15 billion has been invested in Southern California, compared with $800 million during the same period last year, according to Socaltech.com, a Web site that tracks tech ventures.

David Cremin, managing director of venture capital firm DFJ Frontier, expects the synergy of UCLA, USC and Caltech on the board of Entretech will help produce a new wave of brilliant entrepreneurship in Los Angeles. His optimism is shared by many other local investors. "You put M.B.A.s in a room with Ph.D.s. That's where innovation occurs," Cremin said.

The three universities come armed with $1.6 billion in annual research grants and contracts, ready to help create what Krisztina Holly of USC Stevens calls an "ecosystem in Los Angeles that stimulates, inspires and empowers innovators to make societal impact with their ideas."

Kathryn Atchison, vice provost of UCLA's Office of Intellectual Property, said the bottom line for tech transfers, or turning cutting edge discoveries into thriving businesses, is simple. "It means more jobs for California," said Atchison. "But no one university can be the 800-pound gorilla. We all need to work together."

For years, there has been a perception that UCLA was not maximizing its potential in terms of monetizing its research developments. In 2001, UCLA was plagued with dwindling number of tech transfers bringing in $7.5 million revenue while it was putting $500 million into research. Today, UCLA collects $20 million annually in license income while spending $900 million in research.

"Am I satisfied with the amount of revenues we receive? No, but I can see it is growing," Atchison said.

She pointed out that the university's grant funds do not all lead to invention disclosures because they also go toward clinical trials at the hospital and training programs that serve 12,000 graduate students.

Since UCLA is "not in the business of providing connection between industries and universities," Atchison said she hoped the three universities working together through Entretech would help fill this void.

With the appointment of Atchison and Holly, Entretech of Pasadena will expand its focus from San Gabriel Valley to the rest of the county, said Stephanie Yanchinski, the group's executive director.

Entretech board member Fred Farina, vice provost of Caltech's Office of Technology Transfer, believes Los Angeles does not suffer from a lack of talent, but from a perception problem.

"It's just about making the world realize that there's a lot of high quality research going on in L.A.," said Farina, whose office helped launch 80 tech companies since its inception in 1995. "L.A. is not known for entrepreneurship and innovation yet, but it's starting to grow."

For Yanchinski of Entretech, the growing excitement about Los Angeles as a tech center marks the end of an uphill battle to grow and keep companies in an area where there was little capital and infrastructure. "For the first time, I feel like we have wind behind us," she said.

Building momentum

Ben Kuo, founder and editor of Web tech tracker Socaltech.com, believes the successes of local ventures, such as MySpace, acquired by News Corp. for $580 million in 2005 and PriceGrabber, bought by Experian Interactive for $485 million the same year, are spawning more companies. A handful other Los Angeles and San Diego tech companies were snatched up by Google earlier this year.

"People are realizing that there are great companies to fund and acquire coming out of the area," Kuo said.

Southern California is benefiting from a 21 percent surge in venture capital investment last year, which made the region second only to Silicon Valley, propelling it past New England, according to a PriceWaterhouseCoopers report. Of $3 billion in total investments, Los Angeles got $1.2 billion. That's a 34 percent jump for Los Angeles from the previous year, dwarfing a 12 percent national gain.

Some major investments include $42 million to Symark Software International, a data software company in Agoura Hills, and $34 million to Xencor, Inc of Monrovia, which develops drugs based on protein targets.

"This is an indicator that Southern California is viewed by investors as a bonafide region," said Randy Churchill, director of business development for PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Venture capital will likely continue to flow into the region from local or out-of-state investments, Churchill said. The diversity of Southern California--with life science technology in San Diego, software and medical devices in Orange County and telecommunications, digital media and clean technology in Los Angeles--makes this ballooning interest in technology sustainable, he said.

As recently as two years ago, Churchill said he got no more than a "deer in headlights look" from San Jose venture capitalists when he mentioned Los Angeles as a viable tech market. Now, he said, Los Angeles is considered a hot area for investment, especially for digital media.

Richard Lee, chief executive of Bluebeam Software, compares Los Angeles to Silicon Valley more than a decade ago, when it was on the brink of a boom. Lee's company, launched in 2002 at the heels of the dot-com crash, produces software that allows architects and engineers to create blueprints electronically.

"Five year ago, it was hard to find capital, real estate, vendors, HR, consultants, all of the resources needed to start a small company," Lee said. Now, seasoned startup executives from Silicon Valley are moving to Los Angeles to commercialize tech inventions born out of research universities here, he said.

Paul Ouyang, chief operating officer of Sherman Oaks-based NTI Group, Inc, is one of them. After launching several companies in Silicon Valley, he moved here to start a company that provides text and voice communication devices to school districts and local governments across the country.

None of this would be possible if not for an emerging network of venture capital firms in Los Angeles, Lee said. Twenty years ago, Brentwood Venture Capital was the only well-known venture capital company in the area. Now there are at least a dozen, including Arcturus Capital that arrived in 2005, DFJ Frontier in 2003 and Clearstone Venture Partners in 2000.

BY BOOYEON LEE

Staff Writer