To Vanessa Chan PhD ’00, effective engineers don’t just solve technical problems. To make an impact with a new product or technology, they need to bring it to market, deploy it, and make it mainstream. Yet this is precisely what they aren’t trained to do.In fact, 97 percent of patents fail to make it over the “commercialization wall.”“Only 3 percent of patents succeed, and one of the biggest challenges is we are not training our PhDs, our undergrads, our faculty, to commercialize technologies,” said Chan, vice dean of innovation and…
