Victor Kane brings to the job of boosting collaboration between the national labs and America’s top innovators direct experience helping businesses and entrepreneurs achieve commercialization.

Kane’s background includes an engineering-related turn at multinational giant General Electric, a business development/partnership role at solar cell startup Suniva, and five years at EERE’s SunShot program, where he expanded its incubator program.

In an interview with Amped Up!, Kane discussed steps he will take as the new director of the Lab Impact Initiative to shift the culture at the labs and build new roads to commercialization.

What are the top goals for the National Lab Impact Initiative in 2016?

In the next two months, they are The Lab Impact Summit, Lab-Corps, and Small Business Vouchers (SBV) pilots.

At the May 4 Lab Summit at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), we will host 200 representatives from industry including many that have not worked with the labs before. We’ll discuss the successes the labs have been able to generate for other companies, and how the companies can work with the labs in the future. The idea is for them to return to their company and say: we need to work with these guys.

What are achievements of the Lab Impact Initiative as it nears the two and one-half year mark?

We made our second Lab-Corps selection in March and there are now 14 teams covering eight different clean technology areas. Based on the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps model, these lab-based teams will gain market feedback on their technologies during their entrepreneurial boot camp at NREL. It’s an exciting model that’s working well. So well, that the Office of Nuclear Energy is supporting one team for round two and one team for round three, and the Office of Fossil Energy plans to join the third cohort.

The other priority is SBV, where we recently announced the first round of 33 small businesses now working with the national labs on very important work to the success of their business that the Energy Department is funding with a 20% cost share arrangement with the companies. We received several hundred requests for assistance covering 44 different states and almost all the national labs. So, it covered a lot of ground and many different needs in one program.

What else is on your plate?

A priority over the long term is to show we were effective and helped drive toward the Lab Impact mission, which is to increase and enhance national lab/private sector relationships, increase and streamline access to national lab capabilities, and demonstrate the value of lab-based science and technology. These are the reasons we started this initiative and it’s important to look back after a few years and say, yes, we moved the needle on these goals. Data collection and analysis work this year will shine a light on exactly how we are doing.