Companies seeking teams of innovators with equal parts technological prowess and business acumen need look no further than Cornell's Business of Science and Technology Initiative (BSTI).

Launched this year by Cornell's Johnson School and College of Engineering, BSTI brings major technological companies together with teams of Johnson School and engineering students, who collaborate with the company to innovate new technology-based products.

By "innovating the innovation process," says Richard Shafer, associate dean for corporate relations in the Johnson School, companies get new business ideas that they cannot totally generate on their own, while students get to flex their innovation muscles.

The pilot program is led by Eugene Fitzgerald, a visiting professor at the College of Engineering and the Johnson School and a materials science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Andreas Wankerl, BSTI operations director; and Shafer as business director.

Program leaders say the companies are easily recognizable multinationals and that two team/company matches are already under way this year.

BSTI is a new model in which the companies present a problem or specific need, and the right teams of students are selected to take a fresh look at how to solve the problem. That eliminates the inefficiency of a company fishing around for the right technology, the leaders explain.

"It's not just the innovation process and not just commercializing technology," Shafer says. "It's actually figuring out how that process is morphing and changing."

A typical BSTI team consists of two MBA students, two Ph.D. or M.Eng. students, and one engineering professor with expertise in the field. The projects are about a year in length and involve several sessions between company officials and student teams.

"Since these projects cover things that are important to the company, they need to be approved at a pretty high level in the company," Wankerl explains.

Fitzgerald, who worked at AT&T Bell Labs after getting his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1989, became interested in starting such a program because of the changing climate of companies' innovation efforts. The large-scale, expensive research laboratories built years ago by companies like AT&T are not financially feasible in today's environment, Fitzgerald explains. BSTI officials are convinced that companies will, and should, look more to universities for their innovation needs and to streamline the process.

"We ask, 'What are your needs in innovation?'" Fitzgerald says. "'What do you need to do?' And places like Cornell and MIT are awesome resources for solving these problems. We can pull together teams that can innovate in areas that a company by itself can never do."

The new BSTI model augments the technology-transfer approach, Shafer says. Usually, technology developed at universities gets marketed to companies, which may or may not choose to pick it up. BSTI complements this by bringing the market pull for technologies to campus.

Companies have also traditionally maintained relationships with universities through sponsored research programs -- for example, the longstanding ties the College of Engineering has with such companies as Xerox and Lockheed-Martin. The BSTI initiative is a more targeted approach to innovation, program leaders say.