CLEVELAND, Ohio — Yukang Zhao doesn’t want to open a restaurant. He wants to help run a biotech company.
“All the classes in business school, they teach you to open a restaurant — this has nothing to do with technology,” Zhao said. So in 2004, the biology graduate from Shanghai, China, rejected the path to an MBA and entered the Science, Technology & Entrepreneurship Program (STEP) at Case Western Reserve University. He found himself in accounting courses, learning to write a business plan and getting lessons on how to turn a scientific breakthrough into a valuable product.
Soon after he was an intern writing grants at Arteriocyte — the fourth employee of a local medical device start up. There Zhao dabbled in everything from marketing to manufacturing and has since joined the company full-time handling project management and new-product development.
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“At a small company you can see and work on every side of the business,” Zhao said.
Case Western has spent most of the last nine years building its STEP program on that philosophy, trying to turn a perceived weakness into a strength. It can’t lure business-minded scientists into the program with promises of working at big-name medical companies comparable to what’s in Southern California or in the East Coast’s pharmaceutical sector. Instead, it offers the offer unglamorous, do-it-all experience of working in small startups, exposed to all aspects of a business.
“We can’t plug people into Genentech,” admits Edward Caner, the program’s director. “If you are going to work with innovators this is what the program should be like.”
The STEP program is a professional science master’s program — also known as an MBA for scientists and mathematicians — that has become increasingly popular with the increased emphasis on commercializing promising academic research. They’re at schools like the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences in California and Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.
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Curriculum can vary depending on the school and the subject matter. At Case, students focused on life science can spend at least a semester into the classroom and are then usually deployed into an internship like the one Zhao had at Arteriocyte.
Caner admits he’s lost students because of the structure. He recounted one student who recently challenged him to match another program, which promised that her internship would be in a major life science company. Why should she come to his program, she asked Caner. He told her Cleveland wasn’t for her.
Zhao also acknowledges the tradeoff. A small start up could fail and the experience may be limiting. But the environment at Arteriocyte let him work alongside the company’s chief executive officer, and then with staff at Medtronic when Arteriocyte purchased a small business from the Minnesota medical device giant and Zhao helped with the transition.
“You see leadership,” said Zhao, now 27. “That is something you can never learn from school.”
The STEP program wants a similar benefit from training these students. Many are largely from overseas, including the Middle East and South Asia. The most recent 15-member class came entirely from India, Caner said. Supporters of the STEP program want graduates to stay in the region, staff start up companies and hopefully emerge as senior executives at local companies or start their own. Right now, about 60 percent of graduates are still in Greater Cleveland, Caner said.
“In 10 or 15 years we want our students to be starting these companies or running them,” Caner said. “With that pool of people we would be a formidable force for innovation in this area.”
