CALS mentor-in-residence helps students and faculty find the path from idea to success

Emre Toker likes to talk about the "idea-to-reality funnel." It's a pleasant term for what often turns out to be an arduous process.

Many people have big ideas – a plan to solve climate change, an invention to make them rich – but may lack the willingness to undertake the hard work and personal sacrifices to see the process all the way from scratch pad to reality, said Toker, mentor-in-residence for entrepreneurship and innovation in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

"Ideas are a dime a dozen," Toker said. "We all know people who started with 'I have an idea' and make it all the way to 'I have become successful,' but the conversion from idea to success is actually about one in 1,000. The marketplace doesn't care how nice a person you are; instead, it presents you with a relentless filtration process."

Toker's role with CALS is to help students, faculty and staff figure out how to navigate that process, to learn from and overcome inevitable setbacks along the way, and ultimately to turn their ideas into successes.

Toker is the founder of three successful biomedical startups and co-founder of several software and environmental startups. His position is funded by the Charles-Sander Dean's Chair Endowed Fund.

"Emre's experience as a successful entrepreneur combined with his academic credentials make him an exceptional asset to CALS," said Shane Burgess, dean of the college. "Our primary goal is to provide students with the knowledge and skills to perform jobs that don't yet exist, to be innovators and entrepreneurs. What better role model could our students have than Emre?"

Since joining CALS in fall 2018, Toker has partnered with Matt Mars, associate professor of agricultural leadership and innovation in the Department of Agricultural Education, Technology and Innovation, and director of faculty engagement in the CALS Career Center, on several projects, including:

• Designing innovation and entrepreneurship courses.
• Building online tools, including a StartUp game and a virtual incubator.
• Working with CALS faculty on grants to accelerate commercialization of their technology, and with Cooperative Extension on rural economic development programs.

"Emre provides a unique opportunity for our students to gain a deeper understanding of how an entrepreneurial mindset can enhance their capacities to innovate and have impact regardless of what academic and professional paths they are on," Mars said. "His guidance and mentorship is a powerful representation of CALS' strategic pillar of preparing students who can do jobs that do not yet exist and create new jobs."

Entrepreneurship as a 'way of life'

Toker, who grew up in Istanbul, learned entrepreneurship principles at an early age. His father raised chickens and grew peaches and apples, and Emre and his older brother were expected to contribute to the family business. Toker's first job was in sales.

"My dad used to send me out to sell eggs, to sell peaches, and you had to quickly learn to understand what people respond to when you're selling something, because there were many others in that market selling essentially the same products," Toker said. "The joke I tell students is that when I when I was 11, my dad sent me out to negotiate the price of eggs with our distributor. Luckily, the distributor sent his 9-year-old son, so I crushed him in the negotiations. But it was a way of life, this entrepreneurship, and standing on your own and doing the maximum that you could with what you had, because there were no excuses."

Toker's hard-earned experience in the Istanbul marketplace gave him street smarts – what are now called soft skills – such as knowing how to read a customer and selling to them accordingly, or simply to recognize a bad deal. "That's the type of thing you can learn on the ground about entrepreneurship," he said. "There's a lot of gray areas, a lot of subtext."

But Toker knew if he wanted to be a successful entrepreneur, his street smarts would be only part of the equation. He knew he'd also need expertise. He moved to the United States on a scholarship to continue his formal education, earning bachelor's degrees from Reed College and the California Institute of Technology before finishing his master's in electrical engineering at the University of Arizona.

Toker began his professional entrepreneurial career in the 1990s. His first startup, based on his master's thesis, was a Tucson-based biomedical device company that used first-generation digital X-ray sensors for mammographic imaging. That startup was bought seven years later by a large company, enabling Toker to start two other biomedical companies. One of those, Bioptics, eventually reached a valuation of $85 million, after several mergers and acquisitions.

"My master's thesis really changed my life completely," Toker said. "To go from scratch paper and models to a startup, and to eventually build $85 million in value at the tail end, that was my experience converting everything I learned."

Toker has also worked at Washington University in Missouri, Arizona State University, and the McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship at the Eller College of Management in teaching, entrepreneurship mentoring and management roles.

Guiding students and faculty toward innovation

His experience and education help him connect with students who may not fully understand how entrepreneurship and innovation will play a role in their careers, and faculty members who are developing a product or idea and need guidance before stepping into the marketplace.

Toker's first task often is to explain that entrepreneurship rarely, if ever, resembles the television show "Shark Tank," where you simply show up with a product and hope a one-time pitch attracts a major investor. Instead, it is the "relentless filtration process" that involves time and setbacks before a breakthrough.

"You need enough self-confidence to keep going, and overcoming fear of failure," Toker said. "Typically, 99% of entrepreneurial ideas are going to fail, but the idea is to fail fast, fail cheap, fail smart. The bottom line of what I teach is tenacity – what I learned when I had my idea but no money."

Angus Donaldson, who is pursuing his master's degree in agricultural education, said Toker's classes have helped him develop a deeper understanding of entrepreneurship and problem-solving.

"Emre helped us see that an entrepreneurial mindset allows individuals to think innovatively to find solutions to problems in many different settings," Donaldson said. "He also helped us understand that it is not so much about being perfect the first time, but being ready to learn from each attempt or failure, and then you can try again to create a solution that better addresses the issue. His teaching methods were challenging in the best way."

Anyone at the University is free to work with Toker on taking an innovative idea from the lab to the marketplace. He can be reached at etoker@arizona.edu.

A version of this story first appeared on the CALS website.