IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - September 2021 - 16

to host the STEM technical and
dynamic learning activities. Through
our comprehensive customer discovery
phase where we interviewed publishers,
business owners, and leaders
at the ePub3 Working Group, the team
and other experts in the field determined
that the commercially available
publishing platforms could not support
the learning innovations as they
were originally proposed where
numerical and mathematical content
become highly interactive. However,
building a new platform would be both
time intensive and costly. Therefore,
the team made a significant pivot to
move away from developing our own
publishing platform and instead decided
to focus on a new business model
that allowed a startup company to
deliver its technology within the existing
publishing platforms.
Lesson Learned
The experience has been truly rewarding.
We learned that startups and
small businesses are not small versions
of large companies. We also
learned how the culture of a startup is
dramatically different than the culture
within a university. In the university,
praise is given publicly and criticism is
only shared in private-public critiques
in front of peers is considered
abrupt, brusque, and embarrassing.
I-Corps instructors intentionally emulated
the pace, uncertainty, and pressures
of a startup-they were brutally
honest and straightforward and taught
us that public criticism should not be
taken personally. The experience
pushed the team-both faculty and
students-out of its comfort zone. We
experienced a paradigm shift in how
students and faculty foresaw technology
transfer and commercialization,
and in the process we changed the
academic commercialization culture.
The pivot saved our company and
caused our business plan to fail-but
fail fast! The saved time and resources
caused our would-be spin-off company
to change its business direction.
Commercialization Efforts
A year after we participated in the
I-Corps program, we launched a new
company, Tech-e-book, LLC, and
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licensed its technology from UCF to
focus on developing interactive modules
that enhanced STEM education
and boosted STEM students' performance.
Seventy-five of the 130 teams
that participated in the I-Corps program
between 2015 and 2018, including
Tech-e-book, ultimately created a
startup company.
Our target customers are undergraduate
and graduate students in
U.S. colleges and universities who are
enrolled in STEM courses. After meeting
with several traditional publishers,
it was clear that we were facing a true
challenge: publishers are used to publishing
printed books, not technically
interactive textbooks. When we were
interviewing them in 2015, their publishing
platforms were not equipped
for the new digitally interactive media.
However, as I always tell my students,
" never give up if you believe in your
technology and you have the passion to
defend it. " We persevered and just this
year a licensing and publishing agreement
was signed with a major U.S.
publisher to develop my ebook. The
publisher said, " It will be the world's
first interactive textbook in electrical
engineering, " so stay tuned! Thanks to
NSF's I-Corps Program and the great
team of instructors at UCF, our Teche-book
business made a timely pivot,
avoiding the loss of significant time, efforts,
and resources.
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About the Author
Issa Batarseh (issa.batarseh@ucf
.edu) received his B.S. degree in electrical
and computer engineering and
his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical
engineering from the University of
Illinois, Chicago, IL 60607, United
States in 1983, 1985, and 1990, respectively.
He is currently a professor of
electrical engineering in the Department
of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Central Florida,
Orlando, FL, USA. He is the founder of
two startups in power electronics,
Petra Systems and ApECOR, and is a
member of the National Academy of
Inventors. Plus, he has been inducted
into the Florida Inventors Hall of
Fame. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.
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