The Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship staff are dedicated to helping Pitt faculty and student innovators and regional small businesses make an impact for their ideas and research in the wilder world beyond the university. We will be introducing you to some of those people who work day in and day out to protect and promote intellectual property, provide innovation commercialization education, mentoring and funding opportunities, and engage with industry, investment, economic development, and other external innovation partners.
We kick off our staff spotlight series with George Coulston, who joined the Innovation Institute, the operating unit of the OIE responsible for intellectual property management, licensing, and startup creation, in 2016. Today, he is the senior licensing manager for the physical sciences. We are starting with George, in part, to recognize his work for the OIE before his planned retirement at the end of 2024.
George earned a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Connecticut. He received his PhD in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale University before becoming a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at the University Kaiserlauten in Germany.
Before coming to Pitt, he held numerous positions in research and development, manufacturing process management, new business development, and marketing for DuPont, Kennametal, and Vesuvius, the latter of which he served as vice president and chief technology officer.
We spoke to George about his experience at the Innovation Institute.
How did your career in industry help you in your role in academic innovation commercialization?
Early in my career, the CTO of DuPont told me, "If you want my job one day, you need to get out of R&D and get some business experience." So I started down the path of building a cross-functional business experience. I’ve learned many things about innovation along the way. For one thing, innovation is a very cross-functional activity. Every function within a company, and typically across several companies, must work together to launch and support a new product. Development of the underlying technology is just one piece of the puzzle. I carried this perspective into licensing negotiations, which often helped me anticipate the company’s needs and find win-win opportunities. But perhaps above all, I believe my strong customer service orientation has helped me in my role at Pitt. Whether that customer is a colleague, faculty member, young entrepreneur, or company representative, I have tried to add value to the relationship.
What have been some of your most memorable experiences in working in academic innovation?
No one experience jumps out at me as most memorable. Physical Science at Pitt runs broad and deep. One minute I’m learning about a fantastic new assistive technology coming out of the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, then I’m meeting with a Distinguished Professor of Physics to learn about a new electromagnetic phenomenon in interlayer materials, both before jumping on a call to negotiate a license for a movie production. And I haven’t said anything yet about the School of Engineering or the Department of Chemistry! I’ve truly enjoyed working with so many brilliant and creative people, and this goes for my colleagues as well as the students and faculty.
How has the Pitt innovation ecosystem evolved in your nearly nine years here?
The innovation system has become so much more robust since I arrived. I joined Pitt shortly after the technology transfer office combined with various functions charged with developing and delivering education, support, and mentorship for entrepreneurship to form the Innovation Institute. Since that time, with the leadership of (Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Entrepreneurship) Evan Facher, and with the support of many innovation champions in the various schools and academic departments, the innovation ecosystem on campus has blossomed. Need prototyping support? We have that! Need to talk to an Entrepreneur in Residence to get an unbiased opinion about some aspect of your innovation? We have that! Have a desire to test your mettle in an innovation competition? We have those! Need help connecting with companies who might be interested in supporting your translational research? We have that! Need some gap funding to get across a goal line? We have that too! The policies regarding faculty involvement in innovation and entrepreneurship have also been updated to make it easier for them to prioritize innovation commercialization, and for them and their departments to reap a larger share of the rewards.
What is your advice to students postdocs or faculty interested in exploring innovation commercialization?
“Think big, start small, scale up fast” is one of my favorite expressions when it comes to commercialization of breakthrough technologies. I would encourage them to unpack that expression and really think about how to apply it. But above all, especially for scientists: most innovations fail because some critical aspect of the marketplace/value chain was not understood. The technical problems can almost always be solved. So don’t mistake assumptions for knowledge. You need to probe the market and learn.
If you want to learn more about innovation commercialization, the Resources page at the Innovation Institute website contains a curated set of videos and other content to help you learn at your own pace about a broad range of topics from intellectual property to launching a company and everything in between.