By Ted Nesi
PBN Staff Writer

Richard G. Horan, senior managing director of the quasi-public Slater Technology Fund, has noticed an interesting paradox.

Officials regularly extol the potential of the students at Rhode Island’s colleges and universities, saying they are the key to the state’s economic future. But, Horan wondered, how is a 22-year-old graduate supposed to figure out the challenging process of starting a company?

In an effort to fill that void, Horan created a pilot program during this past spring semester that gave seven graduate and undergraduate students – five from Brown University and two from the University of Rhode Island – a close-up view of how a startup firm gets off the ground. All the students had both a science background and an interest in entrepreneurship.

“Entrepreneurship is very much an empirical discipline, and that’s not something easily taught in the classroom,” Horan said. “But if you give [students] the benefit of the classroom of a real-world, venture-backed company, there’s a tremendous learning curve that can be [scaled] in a relatively short and concentrated period of time.”

The students received $3,000 stipends paid for with funding from the Rhode Island Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), an initiative jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the state, and were given the title EPSCoR Fellows.

Horan said the Slater Fund had been looking for ways to engage the state’s large student population for years. The federal government awards roughly $150 million in research grants to institutions in Rhode Island each year, but much of the work is low-profile.

The EPSCoR Fellows’ work had three components: identifying emerging technologies from research institutions in the state; performing due diligence on early-stage companies and providing consulting support to companies in the Slater Fund’s portfolio.

Horan compared the program to the internships and residencies that medical students undertake while they are studying. “These students were able to sort of work side by side with the investors and the entrepreneurs in these very early-stage ventures,” he said. “It’s there where you really get the empirical knowledge that forms the basis of the judgment about what makes sense and what doesn’t in the field.”