Fusion › About
An interdisciplinary program, evolving since 2009
Fusion began in 2009 to address a problem universities discuss frequently and resolve rarely: the people who make discoveries, the people who protect them, and the people who fund them are trained separately, and are seldom given occasion to reason through a decision together.
How it started
The program launched with an Interdisciplinary Alliance Investment Grant from the Provost, working across multiple schools and departments at Case Western Reserve University. The premise was simple and slightly adversarial: put law, management, and graduate science students on the same team, hand them an invention nobody had yet evaluated, and require them to produce a single recommendation they would all sign.
No discipline sits above the others. A scientist who cannot say who pays for the therapy has not finished the analysis. A lawyer who cannot read the mechanism has no basis for a claim strategy. A manager projecting revenue on a technology at readiness level three has no basis for the projection. The curriculum puts each student on level footing with the others' expertise.
At the time, the vocabulary of technology transfer, commercialization, and technology entrepreneurship was expanding quickly while the scholarship and professional skills training behind it remained fragmented. Fusion was built to fill that gap.
Where it sits now
The center of gravity has moved to the School of Medicine. The core full-year sequence is taught through the M.S. in Regenerative Medicine and Entrepreneurship at the National Center for Regenerative Medicine, which also supplies the program's current technology focus.
The courses are cross-listed and the teams are mixed. The fall core course carries six course numbers across medicine, biomedical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science, genetics, law, and management. A parallel engineering track runs through the Division of Engineering Leadership and Professional Practice in the Case School of Engineering, as the Engineering, Innovation Management & Leadership concentration.
Teams still work a live, undisclosed invention from the technology transfer office, and they still present to a panel of technology transfer professionals and venture investors.
Across seven technology domains the program has developed a model in which the same framework applies with different emphasis on the variables each domain makes decisive. In the life sciences, regulatory strategy is the central question. In advanced energy, customer definition and market structure weigh as heavily as regulation. Applying the disciplinary factors together should produce at least a baseline decision about what to do with a newly disclosed invention.
An evolving program
Since 2009 the program has worked through genomics and genetic diagnostics, neuromodulation and nerve stimulation, advanced energy systems, two generations of neural device platforms, clean water technology, and now regenerative medicine. Across those cycles we have continued to identify where the key analytical factors reside and how to advance them from one year to the next.
Students should leave the program knowing which questions to ask of a new opportunity and holding the fundamentals needed to begin answering them. The record of technology focus areas sets out how that has developed.