Anthony Lentz Sirti Ready To Fulfill Potential, Associate Director Says

If the Spokane Intercollegiate Research & Technology Institute is to be successful in its aspirations to become an economic development force in the Inland Northwest, Dr. Anthony Lentz will play a critical role.

As SIRTI’s associate director of technology and commercialization, Lentz is at the heart of what SIRTI has decided it must be all about - converting technology to commercially viable products that will grow companies and jobs.

That’s always been SIRTI’s mission, but SIRTI officials agree that its focus has wandered in the past. Now, it faces the task of building visibility and credibility within the region’s business community in order to get the popular and financial support it needs to succeed.

“We are really trying,” says Lentz, “to be market-driven by understanding what the opportunities are; and not technology driven, by pushing a technology and hoping it can succeed commercially.”

Founded in 1989, SIRTI was conceived as an institution that would combine the research and technology capabilities of the region’s universities and community colleges, and make those resources available to business and industry.

Such support would help turn high-tech concepts into high-tech products which would develop the area economically and make it more attractive to high-tech companies that might want to relocate from other parts of the country.

But to a large extent, SIRTI has been a vague entity at best to the area’s business community and its production in terms of economic development has been spotty. But last month, the institute revealed a new master plan strictly focused on commercialization of technology and economic development.

“I’ve been here about 15 months,” says Lentz, a 43-year-old Michigan native, “and I’ve heard various stories from different factions about what SIRTI is and what SIRTI was expected to be. It’s my impression that some people, depending on what group they were affiliated with, have different expectations.”

He says that’s an understandable problem in a hybrid organization that tries to marry the academic and business communities.

“The academic culture is different than the business culture,” Lentz points out. “They really do have different needs, different expectations, even different reward systems.”

Historically, academia has done pure research. A professor’s concept of technology commercialization might be, “Here’s a real neat new thing we can do. Now go out and find a commercial application it might be good for.”

But industry’s concept of research is to find a market need and then conduct research to address that need.

Clearly, the latter approach wins out in SIRTI’s mission statement.

Lentz has seen the world from both viewpoints.

In his first career incarnation, he worked his way up to manager of research and development for Dow Corning’s silicon products. The company produced finger joint implants, plastic surgery implants, orthopedic implants and general surgery implants.

In a second phase of his career, he was a post-doctoral research associate at the State University of New York at Stonybrook. The group he worked with was responsible for the university’s technology transfer activities.

“So I understood technology transfer from the industrial side,” Lentz says, “but I was exposed to the academic side of the issue in New York.”

Lentz came from New York to Spokane to take on his SIRTI duties a little more than a year ago. When he got here, he found a community that was unclear about the opportunities SIRTI offered.

“When I would tell people where I worked, I would always have to explain what it is that we did,” Lentz says.

During the past six months, he says, the institute has made a concerted effort to get out into the business community to explain what SIRTI offers and to ask businesses what areas need technology development and commercialization support.

“It has been a fact-finding mission, of sorts,” Lentz says, “an opportunity assessment, for us, of our constituents.”

SIRTI will continue that process, Lentz says, and it will use that information to focus its effort on market opportunities that will produce tangible economic results.

“One of the things SIRTI can offer the high technology community is being able to recognize the market opportunity,” Lentz says, “and using our funding base, take the risk of financing that opportunity.”

Lentz believes SIRTI is now positioned to fulfill its potential here.

“We are doing a better job of talking about who we are,” he says. “I get the sense that the diverse elements of our constituency - business, academia and manufacturing - have a pretty good understanding of where SIRTI wants to go. I think the probability of success is quite high.

“I feel we are poised on the precipice and when we jump off, we are going to fly instead of drop.”

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