////////////
FEATURE
From the ground up BY ERIK GUNN
Nurtured by a more entrepreneurial college and campus culture, more students and recent grads are taking the startup plunge.
Jacob Rammer was simply trying to make a stationary platform on which to mount a wheelchair. Aiming to shoot videos showing how wheelchair users use their muscles while moving, he hoped to help them reduce their injury risk. It took Dr. Tamara Cohen, Grad ’15, to show him that his project could germinate a startup business. Today, Rammer and Cohen are the founders of EngAbility Inc. Their first product — still going through prototype development and testing — is the Personal Wheelchair Platform. “A bike trainer but for wheelchairs,” Cohen calls it. In a collaboration with Marquette, they conduct NSF-supported customer discovery interviews out of a third-floor room in Olin Engineering Center, where Cohen completed her doctorate and Rammer is a doctoral candidate. Both have found the shift from engineering as an academic pursuit to one that can produce a real tool for real people both startling and deeply satisfying. “I love research, knowledge and learning,” says Cohen. “I had never thought about entrepreneurship as an option.” But after a friend encouraged her to “crash” an entrepreneurship weekend event at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, she was inspired to approach Rammer about commercializing the wheelchair platform. Both of them are now fulfilling a drive that they realize drew them to engineering in the first place. “I really wanted to make an impact,” Cohen says. “As engineers, we’re supposed to be problem-solvers.” These days more Marquette engineering students are fast-forwarding their career ambitions by becoming business founders instead of first-year hires in industry, consulting or academia. Finding market potential in ideas forged in classrooms and labs, they credit an academic environment that promotes creativity and practical know-how for pointing them down this less-traveled road. 16 // 2016
Such an outlook has been embedded for years in the college’s culture, says Dr. Gerald Harris, P.E., Grad ’78, ’81, professor of biomedical engineering, who has spent his career developing better diagnostic tools and devices to help orthopaedic doctors and their patients, especially children. It’s reflected in programs such as the senior capstone design course pioneered a decade ago by Dr. Jay Goldberg, P.E., clinical professor of biomedical engineering. And recent years have seen that focus sharpen. President Michael R. Lovell has made a top priority of fostering a strong culture of innovation and entrepreneurship on campus and beyond. While overseeing the growth of seed funding vehicles for student-led ventures, Lovell also championed The Commons, which enrolls students from 23 area colleges and universities in an entrepreneurial boot camp where they can take on projects for sponsoring companies or pursue ideas of their own. Rammer and Cohen took their project through the nineweek Commons course in 2015 and, with support from Harris, entered training programs sponsored by the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps, or I-Corps. Reflecting the program’s emphasis on extensive market research, a local I-Corps event sent them on a round of interviews with 45 potential users. A subsequent national workshop in Houston led them to interview 115 more nationwide. “They really drill into you the importance of forgetting your technology and looking at who you are helping,” Cohen notes. The homework helped them recognize a potentially huge new market for the device: wheelchair athletes training for their sports by “wheeling in place” when unable to gain access to large gyms. Given the laborious FDA approval process for medical devices, this has been an important expansion. Still, EngAbility isn’t abandoning therapeutic uses; Harris helped get the device into use at a partnering clinic in the Philippines. Continued on p.19
Dr. Tamara Cohen and Jacob Rammer determined a market existed for their wheelchair trainer platform.