BizSugar.com › Startups › Why University Spin Offs Need Engineers on the Founding Team

Recently a team of graduate students came to me to talk about a company they were planning to start. They had an option to license a university invention that used would detect heavy metal ions in water.
They had clearly researched the idea and had identified a market. They would sell sensors to companies required to comply with Environment Protection Agency standards.
As I listened to them describe their idea, my mind kept coming back to the same question: How would they make the sensors? No one on the team was an engineer, let alone an engineer with expertise in designing these types of devices.