Steve Kluemper

Mentor in Residence @Spartan Innovations

East Lansing, MI, US

Accelerate and expand the understanding of potential value and commercialization options for new MSU technologies (especially in the agriculture sector) by making connections with key industry resources (organizations, individuals, and information), including potential customers, that may help assess technology value, reduce investment risk and identify new high-value applications.Identify and minimize key market risks, including gating and critical path items, develop overall business model and investment/funding thesis where appropriate, perform customer discovery for the technologies and accumulate industry feedback, make connections with key start-up resources when technology assessment suggests that as a viable path to market, and improve effectiveness of early-stage translation and commercialization decisions by assisting with assessing technology and market potential, recommending target applications, industries, licensees, etc, participating in discussions related to potential funding strategies for technology, translation and commercialization, identifying opportunities for researchers to access gap-funding resources (e.g,MTRAC, ADVANCE, TSGTD, etc), assisting the effective employment of funding by finding talent or other resources required for execution on translational research projects, measuring, monitoring and reporting on progress in the use of gap funds, and providing MIR support for the needs of the member universities of the Tech Transfer Talent Network (T3N) program.

Purdue University

B.S., Agricultural Economics

Purdue University Daniels School of Business

MBA, Food and Agribusiness