Pettinger to guide Southwest Sustainability Innovation Engine's sustainable technologies to market

There’s a lot of daylight between coming up with a good idea and turning that idea into something people can use.

Katie Pettinger is here to help bridge that considerable gap. As the new chief innovation officer of NSF Engines: Southwest Sustainability Innovation Engine, or SWSIE, she’s responsible for developing a robust organization to accelerate the solutions and new technologies generated throughout SWSIE to commercialization.

Awarded earlier this year, SWSIE is one of the NSF’s inaugural Regional Innovation Engines. Led by Arizona State University, SWSIE unites academic, community, nonprofit and industry partners across Arizona, Nevada and Utah to create a regional economic development ecosystem in the Southwest based on carbon capture, water security and renewable energy.

“I am thrilled to welcome Katie to the team,” said Brian Sherman, chief executive officer of SWSIE. “She knows what it takes to accelerate research and technology to market, and her background and experience will be essential in advancing SWSIE’s goal of cementing the desert Southwest as a leader in sustainability innovation and leveraging our regional resource challenges into global economic development.”

Pettinger brings in-depth knowledge of every aspect of research commercialization, with previous roles in academia, industry, nonprofits and government. She co-founded successful research-based startup Gadusol Laboratories, worked for Oregon State University as a commercialization manager and entrepreneurship coach, and was a tech scout for an Oregon innovation fund. Most recently, she designed a Department of Energy-funded tech accelerator program for the U.S. Research Impact Alliance.

Here, Pettinger talks about what drew her to SWSIE and how to create a roadmap for successful research commercialization.

Question: What are some of the more complicated challenges associated with commercializing research?

Answer: I would argue there's no shortage of technology in the U.S. Take energy storage, for example. There’s an array of solutions to this problem out there, some of which have existed for decades, but it’s one thing to come up with a technology concept, it’s another to optimize it for deployment. With energy storage, you need to think about everything from grid integration down to your individual consumer. And how does this technology impact their power bill? How does it impact their behavior with energy use? We could go on and on.

So America has done an amazing job of coming up with new technologies, but we've fallen short in figuring out how to quickly accelerate and de-risk those technologies from the business and market side. If we get those two things to work together, then all of a sudden you can create fast-moving technology deployment with more rapid market adoption.

Q: Why have we fallen short? What is missing, and how can SWSIE bridge that gap?

A: I think that a huge part of it is a gaping hole in the workforce, and I think that SWSIE has a really great opportunity to create that workforce.

From my perspective, a lot of research commercialization efforts hinge on the “faculty founder model” in which a star faculty member not only does all the research, but also goes out, starts a company, pitches it successfully and finds funding. There are some fantastic, rare examples of this working, but do we really want our faculty members doing that? I would argue no. So instead, researchers might turn to an experienced corporate CEO or someone with startup experience. I’d argue neither are great fits for research commercialization, because CEOs are used to working with big budgets, and startup folks might not be ready to fight for survival all over again — particularly startup CEOs who have worked with “hardtech” companies where it is difficult to forge a way forward, requiring a lot of effort compared to software startup counterparts.

So what if we came up with a model that was a hybrid? Why don’t we create a technology commercialization track within MBA programs, equip students with the technical and business advisors they need for success, train them how to be commercialization leads, allow them to work with researchers on the ground floor and develop emotional equity in a budding technology and start a company they could potentially own a piece of?

I believe SWSIE could address this gap in a very unique way. We could create a new career path here, and meet that need for dedicated commercialization experts.

Q: You have a great deal of professional experience working with the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs. How does the impact of those federal programs speak to the potential of the NSF Engines program?

A: SBIR and STTR are the backbone of technology-based entrepreneurship in the U.S. I cannot stress this enough. These programs fill a vital gap because venture capital and private money is not going to go anywhere near the level of risk represented by early-stage tech commercialization. Government funding is the only way to overcome through the “Puddle of Peril” — a term I recently heard from Purdue University — that stage of uncertainty after a startup is launched. This comes before the more commonly known “Valley of Death,” when a company is in business but not yet generating revenue.

NSF Engines are given the freedom to deploy resources in an SBIR-like fashion — helping startups get early-stage research and development funding to build out a technology — but in a way that makes sense for their region. And now the hard part for us is figuring out what that looks like. We need to figure out this large-scale model together, and there’s going to be some bumps in the road. But if we do this the right way, we’re going to create a very valuable roadmap for research commercialization.

Q: So what are some of the challenges or the opportunities you foresee about building an innovation ecosystem roadmap that is both region and research specific?

A: For the Southwest region, there are very specific environmental, social and economic drivers that we need to address as SWSIE. The solutions to those problems can and should come from anywhere. So, what the engine really needs to be doing, in my opinion, is creating a brain trust of potential solutions. What research do we have right here, right now that we can continue to build value on while also respecting the fact that there's a lot of other sources of innovation and solutions from outside of our region that we can pull in to help our efforts?

What I really think the goal of the engine needs to be is to identify which technologies make the most sense for these specific energy and water issues that we're facing. And then how do we become the brain trust for optimization of those technologies in our specific area? What I think the danger might be is to only look at sources of innovation from our partners. So instead of being too partner centric, we need to figure out how to broaden our efforts to collectively look at solutions from all over and then optimize them for our region.

Q: What attracted you to this position? Was there something about this engine, its goals or ethos that excited you?

A: The NSF’s Regional Innovation Engines program is this groundbreaking effort that, as a nation, we need to make sure succeeds. This is the first time in my lifetime that I’ve seen this level of resources invested in tech-based economic development and respect paid to the effort it takes to make that succeed.

So what drew me to SWSIE was an opportunity to be able to work at the ground floor to build this the right way so we can yield a big return on this investment. I’ve seen and experienced all of the different issues along the entire technology commercialization path. This is a really exciting way to put my skills to good use.

Q: You've dedicated a lot of your working life to moving ideas and technology out of the lab and into the market. Why is that important to you?

A: It’s about the people. Seeing research have an impact is great — but I think about people. On one hand, the benefit to careers and workforce expansion is phenomenal — research commercialization is creating jobs and career paths we didn’t have 10 or 20 years ago. There’s also the individual impact. I’ve talked to researchers from very diverse backgrounds, all walks of life from so many different countries, and they all have such unique ideas and perspectives. Giving people the resources to create something based on those ideas is really gratifying. How cool is it that you were the one to come up with an invention, a company, a product that actually changed the world for the better? That’s the most exciting thing to me — passing my knowledge along and making it easier for people to make their own impact.

Q: What are you looking forward to?

A: I'm just really looking forward to getting to know all the projects and people. So I've done a lot of ecosystem development work, but I have not really spent a lot of time in the Southwest. I'm super excited to just dive into what all our partners have to offer, because there seems to be a massive depth of expertise in research here. I’ve been given a whole pot to sift through, and I'm excited to learn more and meet people and see what's going on and what we can pull out quickly.