Fusion — Disciplines
Three disciplines, one invention
This is the element that distinguishes Fusion. Law, management, and science students do not take parallel classes and compare notes afterward. They work the same technology on the same team, and are required to produce a single recommendation that each of them can support.
It is impossible to make decisions around complex technologies from a single perspective
Our goal is to integrate and synthesize the value brought by each of the perspectives in support of a decision, acknowledging that they complement one another in arriving at least at a baseline judgment about what needs to happen.
Each perspective answers a question the others cannot. The scientific perspective establishes what the technology does and what would be required to demonstrate it. The legal perspective establishes what can be protected, what freedom exists to operate, and what regulatory path applies. The management perspective establishes who the customer is, what the opportunity is worth, and what resources reaching it would consume. None of those answers is sufficient on its own, and each of them changes the weight of the others.
The curriculum therefore puts interdisciplinary students on level footing relative to each other's expertise and training. Each arrives fluent in one discipline and is expected to become conversant in the other two — not expert, but conversant enough to question an assumption and to recognize when their own discipline is not the one that decides the question.
Law
Intellectual property law, corporate law fundamentals, securities and investment, and the industry regulation that defines a product's path to market.
Read more DisciplineManagement
Financial modeling, understanding value, industry structure, and the collaborative process through which early-stage technology actually gets developed.
Read more DisciplineScience
Working depth in the scientific domain underlying the current program — and the technology focus areas the method has been applied to since 2009.
Read moreHow the teams are built
Teams are built from law students, management students, and M.S. or Ph.D. candidates drawn from engineering and from the medical and biomedical research disciplines. The technology is chosen so that no single member of a team can carry it alone.
Law and management students arrive having completed prerequisites in their home schools. Engineering, medical, and science candidates are selected for familiarity with the subject matter of the cycle. The invention is an actual disclosure filed with the university's technology transfer office, not a teaching case with a published answer.