Thinking outside the box

In one corner of the brightly colored room is the Vivid 910, a noncontact 3-D digitizer. At the opposite side of the room is the FDM 3000, a Fused Deposition Modelling rapid prototyping machine.

They’re just two of the hightech tools at Mind Studios, a product design and research studio housed in University Hall at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

The Vivid 910 can produce a 3-D scan of any object; the FDM 3000 is essentially a 3-D printer, making plastic models from such scans and other 3-D computer files.

“What we have here are all the tools necessary basically to take an idea from paper all the way to where you hold it in your hands and have a functional prototype,” said Luke Hooper, a senior designer at Mind Studios.

Mind Studios provides a resource for budding inventors who need help getting their concepts off the drawing board. And it provides a way for its director, Michael Larson, to carry out his mandate as El Pomar Chair of Engineering and Inno- vation.

Larson, 45, a professor of mechanical engineering, is one of three UCCS professors endowed by the El Pomar Foundation and given the task of stimulating economic development in the Pikes Peak region.

It’s a fitting role for Larson, who has a passion for combining academic research with entrepreneurship.

During 13 years as an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans, he co-founded two companies, one based on medical technology, the other on a board game that uses lasers.

Larson also established the Studio for Creative Design at Tulane, a predecessor to Mind Studios that earned him an “Entrepreneur of the Year” award from a New Orleans business magazine.

He would likely still be in New Orleans if not for Hurricane Katrina.

When the storm hit two summers ago, it was the fifth time he and his family had been forced to flee. This time, though, there was no returning. The hurricane not only damaged their home but wiped out Larson’s job.

After Katrina, Larson said, “the university saw the opportunity to make some strategic changes. And one of those was to eliminate the school of engineering.”

Larson, his wife, their three children and his mother-in-law ended up in the Boston area, with Larson as a visiting faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Larson earned his doctorate in mechanical engineering from MIT in 1992.

The family lived with friends in Massachusetts, a dozen people squeezing into a four-bedroom home.

“Amazingly,” Larson said, “they’re still friends of ours.”

Chased out of his home and his job by Katrina, Larson contemplated his career path. He considered abandoning academia and going into industry.

“A typical academic position is not entrepreneurial,” he noted.

Then he found one that was — the job at UCCS. He joined the faculty in time for the fall 2006 semester.

He was soon joined by Hooper and Jesse Mc-Clure, who had been his students at Tulane and were involved with his design studio there. The two, both with master’s degrees in mechanical engineering, work at Mind Studios and assist Larson in a grant-funded research project concerning laser interactions with different materials.

“Mind Studios is still kind of forming,” Larson said.

Its focus is medical innovations and he’s working with the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver to solicit physicians’ ideas. But Mind Studios also is open to people within and outside the university system who have ideas for all kinds of products.

The inventors retain the rights to their creations. Mind Studios’ role is to create prototypes and help take ideas from paper to production. Ideally, Larson said, new businesses will be born from those efforts — just as Hooper’s idea for Khet, the laser board game that Larson helped develop when Hooper was a graduate student, spawned Innovention Toys. Larson is chief executive officer of the Louisiana-based company.

Mind Studios fits perfectly with an effort by UCCS to distinguish itself as a campus of innovation, said Jeremy Haefner, dean of engineering and applied science at UCCS.

“It is an innovation in and of itself,” he said of Mind Studios. “It will really provide a resource for both the community and the university system as a whole to do product development.”

Some work will be done by students, who will be paid as hourly workers to do real-world design work. Larson is still figuring out what to charge clients, but said it’ll be much less than at a standard industrial product-design firm.

“I’d love to do it for free, but we do have to recoup costs.”

Mind Studios isn’t the only way Larson is working to fulfill his mandate from El Pomar. He is on a Colorado Springs Economic Development Corp. committee looking at ways to attract biotech companies to the area. And he has reached out to the community through events such as a recent Mothers of Invention workshop, which educated women about how to develop their ideas for new products.

“He’s out there engaged in the community to really help both the campus and the community members, the entrepreneurs, the innovators,” Haefner said.

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0272 or bill.radford@gazette.com

AN INVENTIVE MIND

When professor Michael Larson isn’t working, he loves to invent things — a passion he acknowledges is tough to distinguish from his work.

Larson holds two patents, one for a crawfish-peeling machine and the other for a board game. He has three patents pending on medical devices.

He shares the board-game patent with Luke Hooper, who conceived the game while a senior in a product design class taught by Larson at Tulane University. As a graduate student, Hooper developed the game with help from Larson and another student. Hooper now works at Larson’s Mind Studios.

The game, Khet (www.khet.com), is a two-player strategy game that involves lasers and mirrored, Egyptian-theme game pieces. It was one of five finalists as game of the year in the Toy Industry Association’s 2007 Toy of the Year Awards.

IN LARSON’S OFFICE

“The Klutz Book of Magic” —

“I enjoy amazing people.”

“The MouseDriver Chronicles” —

“I’ve been trying to read personal perspectives on starting businesses.”

Indiana Jones bullwhip —

“I can be very goofy in the classroom.”

Backwards clock —

“I guess somebody thought that matched my personality.”