TEC Graduates Reflect on How the Program Helped in Their Corporate Careers

It sounds strange at first, but not all students who learn how to turn an idea into a business model at NC State start their own business afterward to immediately apply their new skills.

In the Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization (TEC) program, students choose a piece of intellectual property from one of NC State’s partners—various universities, NASA, NSA, the Navy—and turn it into a product or service. Through hands-on learning, students gain skills such as how to ideate a product or service, deciding what idea is worth spending resources on and how to convince decision makers to commit to their projects. These skills benefit students in every path they choose after completing the TEC program.

One of those students is Chris Gautcher, a senior software engineer at a data infrastructure company who graduated from the TEC program in 2019. He praised the structure he learned in the TEC program saying, “That process has been really helpful to weed out the bad ideas and only focus on the good ones.”

Gautcher noticed a lot of parallels between the business he worked on in the TEC program and his current work. Being able to explain to decision makers why the company should use resources for a project has been “extremely helpful.”

By working with people of different personality types and taking a class about emotional intelligence, Gautcher learned to be more assertive. “That has helped me a lot in my career, making sure that people know where I stand and where I’m coming from and why,” he said.

After graduating, Gautcher started participating in hackathons his company holds. These are events where employees get time to creatively solve problems or improve processes, and the best ideas get funding. “It’s managed innovation,” Gautcher explained.

The experience from the TEC program helped Gautcher to craft effective presentations for the hackathons to convey the problem, his solution, the cost, the benefit and the essentials of any compelling value proposition. “I don’t think I would have done that had it not been for the TEC program,” Gautcher said.

He has won the vast majority of his company’s hackathons since graduating with his MBA. “I kind of have a reputation as the guy that wins all the hackathons,” Gautcher said, “I tell peopIe I did the TEC program, and it really helped me hone that craft.”

If you have those skills and that mindset and use it for intrapreneurship, you can still be quite successful.

Gautcher emphasized that the TEC program is valuable for intrapreneurs—people who behave like entrepreneurs while working within a larger organization. “If you have those skills and that mindset and use it for intrapreneurship, you can still be quite successful,” Gautcher said, “As a senior level software engineer, I am designing things, so the thought process that I’ve learned from TEC has been huge, I can’t recommend it enough.”

Hannah Webb completed a master’s degree in microbiotechnology before doing a Master of Business Administration with a concentration in TEC. “The TEC program was definitely my favorite thing at NC State during my MBA,” Webb said.

She now works in business development at a biosciences company and feels the TEC program provided a clear framework for turning an idea into a business. “What the TEC program really does, especially for STEM-related fields, is look at a scientific solution and analyze the ‘so what’ of it to see if it could actually be a product or a business,” Webb said.

Webb uses all the skills she learned in the TEC program as an intrapreneur to differentiate programs within the company and champion one versus the others. The program also helped her to consider what patients need, what the competitors are doing and to adapt the product and associated value proposition accordingly.

Lisa Chang, director of the TEC program, takes pride in the fact that the program teaches students how to make evidence-based decisions and how to articulate the value of a vision. She stressed that the students will, at some point in their careers, either ask for resources to back a project or make the decision about which project should be funded.

“Having these abilities to determine the relative merit of different projects and having the flexibility to pivot and reshuffle when necessary are really valuable experiences,” Chang said.

All graduate and PhD students and even non-degree-seeking students at NC State can take four classes that are required for the TEC Certificate.