Fusion — About
An interdisciplinary program, evolving since 2009
Fusion began in 2009 to address a problem universities discuss frequently and resolve rarely: the people who make discoveries, the people who protect them, and the people who fund them are trained separately, and are seldom given occasion to reason through a decision together.
How it started
The program launched with an Interdisciplinary Alliance Investment Grant from the Provost, working across multiple schools and departments at Case Western Reserve University. The premise was simple and slightly adversarial: put law, management, and graduate science students on the same team, hand them a real invention nobody had yet evaluated, and require them to produce a single recommendation they would all sign.
What made it work was refusing to let any discipline sit above the others. A scientist who cannot say who pays for the therapy has not finished the analysis. A lawyer who cannot read the mechanism has no basis for a claim strategy. A manager modeling revenue on a technology at readiness level three is modeling fiction. The curriculum was built to put everyone on level footing relative to each other's expertise, which mostly meant making each of them uncomfortable in the same room.
At the time, the vocabulary around this work — technology transfer, commercialization, technology entrepreneurship — was expanding fast while the actual scholarship and professional skills training remained fragmented and thin. That gap is what Fusion was built into.
Where it sits now
The center of gravity has moved to the School of Medicine. The core full-year sequence is taught through the M.S. in Regenerative Medicine and Entrepreneurship at the National Center for Regenerative Medicine, which also supplies the program's current technology focus.
The courses remain genuinely cross-listed, and the teams remain genuinely mixed. The fall core course carries six course numbers across medicine, biomedical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science, genetics, law, and management. A parallel engineering track runs through the Division of Engineering Leadership and Professional Practice in the Case School of Engineering, as the Engineering, Innovation Management & Leadership concentration.
Teams still work a live, undisclosed invention from the technology transfer office rather than a teaching case with a known answer, and they still present to a panel of technology transfer professionals and venture investors under no obligation to be generous.
Through a series of seven discrete technology domains we have come to define a model that helps students understand that the general framework can be applied with different emphasis on the appropriate variables. In life sciences, for instance, regulatory strategy is the key question. In advanced energy, regulation is certainly an issue but it is not the issue. What matters is that applying the disciplinary factors together should lead to at least a baseline decision about what to do with a new technology presented in the form of an invention.
An evolving program
Since 2009 the program has worked through genomics and genetic diagnostics, neuromodulation and nerve stimulation, advanced energy systems, two generations of neural device platforms, clean water technology, and now regenerative medicine. Across those cycles we have continued to identify where the key analytical factors reside and how to advance them from one year to the next.
Our goal is that students leave the program with a basic set of skills — not so much to settle the question of whether a given opportunity is good, but to understand which questions to ask, and to have the fundamentals in place to begin answering them. The record of technology focus areas sets out how that has developed.