Entrepreneurship internships with Wichita State University professors offered Hoainam Duong the opportunity to intern at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the world’s leading research institutes.

Duong first came to WSU in 2000 as an aerospace engineering major. After graduating in 2005, he worked as an engineer at Raytheon Aircraft, now Hawker Beechcraft, and then at Cessna.

Studying entrepreneurship is not a path many people take, but Duong has always enjoyed the subject.

“I like the idea of doing something different, building something new,” he said.

As a child, he set up a portable shop and “sold stuff” on the playground. He also took entrepreneurship classes in high school.

When he came to college, he said, he just forgot that interest.

“Oh, yeah, I used to like this stuff. What happened?” he said.

And he knew he needed something more than a bachelor’s degree, so he came back and began working part-time on his MBA at WSU.

“One could even say part-part-time, because I’m still working on it now,” he said.

While looking for electives for the 2007 summer semester, he saw a flier about a new product and technology development course specifically looking for people with science or engineering backgrounds.

“It sounded interesting, so I enrolled,” Duong said.

In the class, he learned about technology transfer, the process of moving technology from the lab to commercialization and use.

The main purpose of the course was for students to look at early-stage technologies and determine their commercialization potential, whether licensed to a company or made into a business.

“The purpose (of the class) is to help students understand the process,” Wolff said.

The students looked at technologies created by WSU professors with the goal of giving the faculty feedback on their inventions.

Duong said they “just dug into that technology space to find out how special what (they) have actually is and if there are people out there willing to buy it if it was a product.”

He was given a reality check.

“Even though this is a great idea, it may not be useful, not successful,” he said.

He said there are technologies that are useful, which become successful, and then there are technologies that are just “neat” to look at.

The class was structured for students to apply for internships with WSU professors working on technologies close to the commercialization phase.

“Process, practice, real thing,” Duong said.

Immediately following the class, he did an internship with Prakash Ramanan, electrical engineering and computer science professor.

He worked with Ramanan during another internship a year later.

His responsibilities involved taking the inventions into the marketplace to determine whether consumers or companies were interested or whether someone else had already tried it and failed.

“The experience I gained through the class and those internships led to me obtaining an internship with the technology transfer department (at) Los Alamos National Lab,” he said.

Employees at Los Alamos were impressed that Duong had previous experience with the business side of entrepreneurship and technology transfer.

“They were like, ‘You know what this is, you’ve done this before,’ and that’s why they picked me,” Duong said.

Being at Los Alamos gave Duong the opportunity to speak with professionals who’ve started their own companies.

“That exposure (was) really helpful,” he said. “They were pretty open to talking about goof-ups.”

The risk of investing in a technology is huge, but Duong wants to start his own company. He decided that now, or in the near future, would be the best time to take a big risk.

“It’s exciting, but also ridiculously high stress,” he said.

He is searching for a technology he’d like to work with and has found ideas at WSU and Los Alamos, but most ideas aren’t ready to be commercialized.

“It’s hard to find something at that sweet spot of getting to be licensed out or spun off into a business,” he said.

Duong plans to compete in the 2010 Shocker Business Plan. The winner three years ago received $10,000 to start his own business, which is still running out of the incubator in the basement of the Center for Entrepreneurship at WSU.