Turning breakthroughs into businesses

In the late '90s, Errol Arkilic earned an aerospace engineering Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was an odd choice.

"Most people do a Ph.D. for exploring the frontiers of knowledge, but I specifically targeted engineering and aerospace engineering because I wanted to build companies that were a result of research coming out of academic labs," Arkilic says. "I studied that specific field for the purposes of seeing what I could do to develop experience in getting new technologies into the marketplace."

That area has been the focus of Arkilic's career. He's now UC Irvine's chief innovation officer and the executive director of Beall Applied Innovation, an on-campus unit that helps bring research to market. Fresh out of grad school, Arkilic started a defense contracting company doing mine sniffing in Southeast Asia, then moved to Silicon Valley and spent a decade at startups commodifying academic lab technologies. In the early 2000s, he was hired by the National Science Foundation, where he ultimately created the federal I-Corps program (now a pillar at Beall), which helps academics ascertain what their intellectual property is worth.

"There's a consistent thread throughout, which is: How do you take new knowledge and turn it into products and services that benefit society?" Arkilic says. "New knowledge, more often than not, is developed at an academic institution."

He spoke with contributing writer Alison Van Houten about Irvine's long legacy as a southern outpost of Silicon Valley; how the campus guides researchers through value proposition, creation and capture; and what he's currently excited about.

Irvine has been called "Silicon Beach South," a nod to L.A.'s Westside tech scene. How has UC Irvine been integral to the area's reputation as a premier hub for tech commercialization?

You have to really understand the history of innovation that runs through Orange County - and Irvine in particular. It's not just the last 10 years. It goes back many decades, to the aerospace industry and the semiconductor industry. Before we were a medical device hub, we were instrumental in the aerospace and defense program back in the '60s, '70s and '80s and even into the '90s. We were also a hotbed for semiconductor development. Southern California was the hub - and is the reemerging hub - of the aerospace and defense industry. It's a very rich history, and it's not an exaggeration to say "Silicon Beach South."

UC Irvine's biggest contribution to economic development is probably the students and researchers who go off and build companies with the knowledge they've taken out of the labs. There are companies built on the back of intellectual property developed at UC Irvine. Glaukos is a high-profile success story here in Orange County. They've developed a medical device for treating glaucoma. They're a multibillion-dollar company, and that IP was primarily out of UC Irvine.

UC Irvine has an emerging partnership with the Orange County Business Council to help move technologies out of the labs and into the market. OCBC has really stepped up to make that happen. This is one way UCI has been able to keep the innovation pipeline running, so that a company is more likely to stay headquartered in Orange County instead of leaving for the Bay Area or Boston.

How does UC Irvine help researchers, entrepreneurs, investors and the broader community collaborate?

Beall is helping researchers figure out what their work is worth, and to whom. We help faculty members and graduate students refine their story. That is oftentimes not second nature to academics - to talk in the context of value propositions. Then we follow that with education around helping them find the cash and the connections to turn that idea into something people can actually use.

Beall is a clearinghouse, and we run a funding program that we call Proof of Product. That's our flagship program, and it's what takes an idea from a concept to something refined. We do that through a process we call customer discovery, and it's really about getting out and talking to people in the community, identifying what their needs are, what their pain points are. That's hard work that is supported through PoP.

The program lends itself to early returns to the campus through companies that are developed as a result of PoP funds. When ventures turn into companies, they often contract back with the university to pursue additional research, and those funds come directly to the campus. We now have data showing that for every dollar we put into PoP funding, we get $1.04 back in the form of contract research.

What's an innovation coming out of UC Irvine that you're excited about right now?

A biotech spinout from UC Irvine, Eira Bio. This is not a one-asset company. It created a yeast-based synthetic biology platform to discover and optimize antibodies that can ultimately be used to make new medicines. So what it's got is a platform that allows it to develop not one drug but potentially many drugs that could be used for diseases that don't have adequate treatments.

This is a company whose genesis was in research. The intellectual property that was licensed to the company was developed by a biomedical engineering faculty member here at UC Irvine, Chang Liu. It received early-stage funding from Beall, which currently manages the IP that's licensed to the company, via the PoP initiative. It now has a multimillion-dollar investment from a venture capital firm called Venrock. Our first equity investment is in Eira, and we want to do a lot more of that moving forward. When we put money behind Eira, we're saying we think this platform could change how disease gets treated for a lot of people. That's exactly the kind of company we want to keep backing.

A version of this story will appear in the forthcoming fall 2026 edition of UC Irvine Magazine.