TLOs -- The Rise Of Professor-Entrepreneurs

Another high-tech venture with university links is DiMagic (www.dimagic.co.jp), founded in Tokyo in June 1999 by Hareo Hamada, a professor at Tokyo Denki University. DiMagic's stereo dipole technology enables extremely high-fidelity reproduction of sound by placing two interlinked speakers close to each other. The technology has already been licensed to other companies and is being marketed under the P2DiPole 3D-Stereo brand. Sales have boomed, at least in part due to the system's compatibility with Sony's PlayStation 2 gaming platform.

And it isn't just the professors who are getting entrepreneurial religion. Ritsumeikan University class of 2001 grad Takahisa Nakayama signed on as a director of Shiga prefecture--based 3D Media, where he's helping develop software that will render regular graphics as 3-D images. At 3D Media, Nakayama joined Hirohisa Teramoto, a second-year graduate student at Ritsumeikan, and Gang Xu, a fully tenured Ritsumeikan professor (see People item).

The presence of professor- or student-entrepreneurs is not limited to high-tech ventures. In April, the Advanced Science and Technology Enterprise Corporation (ASTEC) was founded by 10 professors at the University of Tokyo. The company is a sort of incubator and aims to support professors launching VC-backed enterprises. Although it is not clear how many professors in Japan are now engaged with private businesses, at least 33 national university professors have taken up management jobs at private corporations as of March 2001, says Shinichi Wakamatsu at the Industry-University Cooperation Division of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology.

Even so, for young student-entrepreneurs like Nakayama and Teramoto, the decision to become kigyoka (entrepreneurs) didn't come naturally. Like many other graduate students, they too once contemplated the benefits of joining a prestigious and financially secure giant.

"Although the idea of starting a company was intriguing, I was also worried about my future," says Nakayama. "Will the business go well? What if it didn't? But I reasoned with myself that I could get a job somewhere even if I failed. I told myself, Why not?" His colleague Teramoto agrees with him. "I guess we are the minority among graduate students, especially those with a science major. Most of our classmates consider university as a rite of passage, because they know big corporations will reset everything we learned once we join one. [The companies] don't really care what we learn; they just want somebody who can conform to their corporate culture." Despite this view, the majority of university students end up choosing a big-name corporation anyway. "Very few will continue their research at the cost of becoming entrepreneurs themselves," Teramoto says. And that's part of the reason why technology and knowledge generated at universities doesn't get utilized well in this country.