Stephen Su, General Director of IEK, was invited to share “ITRI Entrepreneurial Ecosystem” at the 2015 Stanford-ITRI Forum “Entrepreneurs without Borders” hosted by Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD) from the School of Engineering. In this presentation, Stephen talked about ITRI, as the largest non-profit research institute in Taiwan, focusing on commercialization of advanced technology and industry development. In the past 42 years of ITRI’s history, ITRI has spun off 103 companies to foster industry development. From 2010 to 2014, there are total of 31 spin-off companies, about 3 times as many as prior years.

During his presentation, he shared some key features and accomplishment of ITRI’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystem:

• Integrate HW/SW system to capture Taiwan’s opportunities in IoT
• Help Taiwan industries to shift paradigm from “Manufacturing” to “Infofacturing”
• Include Open Innovation Platform and entrepreneurial ecosystem in ITRI’s innovation system
• Unite major users (industries) and partners (universities) via ITRI Open Innovation Platform
• Monitor commercialization of innovative technology by Technology Readiness Level (TRL)
• Spin-off example: ButyFix was recognized by Google Solve for X as Taiwan’s first Moonshot in 2014
• Cultivate entrepreneurship culture by networking VCs from Silicon Valley
• Leverage ITRI Laureates to advise ITRI strategy in science, technology and industry