07-29-2026
Business student practicums and Polytech capstone projects play a transformational role in how Purdue Innovates helps Purdue intellectual property — and partner founders — move from lab concept to company. These hands-on experiences serve as exercises and outcomes of student learning; they are carefully engineered to advance real technologies toward commercialization while giving founders practical, cross-functional support.
With limited resources, the founder of a new food safety lab enhancement company turned to Purdue for more than just promising technology — and he got integrated marketing, finance and student-powered support that helped transform a lab concept into a pitch-ready company.
The founder came to Purdue Innovates’ Dipak Narula, lead technology development liaison and assistant director of business development and licensing for physical sciences, and said, “I'm limited in resources, but I really want to commercialize this technology,” Narula shares.
It was a perfect set up. Narula knew Purdue students could help with finance and marketing.
“We did both for him. We had students doing some marketing outreach and understanding that. We had the finance team working. And now it is to the point where he's got his pitch deck and he's out there trying to raise capital,” Narula says.
Graduate students in practicum classes are winning with resume-ready experiences that extend their learning beyond tidy classroom cases into messy real business conundrums. They are helping advance real technologies toward commercialization while giving founders practical, cross-functional support.
It all begins with a disciplined vetting process. Inventors who think a technology could be patented, sold or manufactured approaches Purdue. Most technologies disclosed to Purdue Research Foundation arrive at low technology readiness levels, often around TRL 2 or 3, says Narula. They show promising science but limited proof of market fit or financial viability.
Before a technology becomes a student project, Narula and his team evaluate whether there is a plausible market and a path to monetization, sometimes doing early product development and market analysis. Only a small set of technologies that clear this initial hurdle are advanced into Capstone Plus® or Fusion Point®, ensuring that student time and founder attention are focused on opportunities with genuine commercial potential.
Capstone Plus® serves as a launchpad for internal development. Projects in this program are internally funded, giving Purdue IP a structured environment to move from concept toward prototype.
Fusion Point®, by contrast, is industry funded and often picks up where Capstone Plus® leaves off, supporting more targeted development based on specific market requirements identified by corporate partners. Together, these programs create a staged pipeline: technologies are first made technically credible, then refined with real-world market input, and finally positioned for startup formation or licensing, Narula explains.
Once a prototype begins to take shape, founders and Purdue staff need to understand “what is the cost of manufacturing, what will a customer pay for it” and how the venture can make money in a defined market. Business students step in to build financial models, estimate pricing scenarios and identify cost structures that make the technology commercially viable. They conduct market research, segment potential customers, and test different go-to-market options, often narrowing a broad set of possibilities down to one or two compelling paths.
Delegating to high-performing student teams fills founders’ business gaps and allows them to reserve capital for other startup costs.
One practicum team researched the markets and data to answer the question: how do we make money with this technology? The students began with a high-level overview of the market landscape, then methodically narrowed their focus to specific applications where the technology’s value and economics aligned. They presented several business options, and one “made perfect sense” for the company’s team to pursue, giving the founder a clear direction for product development and commercialization, Narula says. Their work saves founders the cost of outside consultants.
Purdue Innovates’ approach also reframes what success looks like for both students and founders. As Narula explains, “Knowing we can’t do something is also a success.” When a practicum project concludes that a technology is unlikely to generate sufficient returns, the team documents why, saving founders and the university from years of speculative effort.
“I think every project that we have had, we have gotten an outcome which either told us, ‘Hey, this is going to work or this is not going to work and there's no need to spend any more time and effort on it,’” says Narula.
In this ecosystem, students are co-developers working with all the complex, difficult aspects of business analysis, including messy data with its source issues. They work under the guidance of industry mentors and Office of Technology Commercialization staff and are expected to deliver real value.
“We just don’t want [students] to go there and create a spreadsheet. We want to see the point: ‘this is where we want to go with this,’” says Narula. That expectation gives students clarity about their role in the bigger picture and gives founders confidence that the analysis will be actionable.
The business school and Purdue Innovates are coordinating to offer resources that might otherwise remain siloed across campus, says Narula, who has a joint appointment within two units: Purdue Innovates Office of Technology Commercialization and Purdue Innovates Incubator.
Entrepreneurship training, proven technologies, market validation and finance expertise all exist within Purdue’s colleges and units. By connecting those pieces around real projects, these partnerships shorten the path from invention to impact and give founders a more efficient route from lab concept to company.
