Rice announces new tech development funding opportunities

Rice University’s Office of Research is launching three Creative Ventures Funds to seed new faculty initiatives and help guide them towards commercialization of their discoveries. The university will also open applications for two legacy grant programs to kickstart conferences and creativity. The programs, launching immediately, are the ARPA-H Strategic Initiative Seed Fund, the Technology Development Fund and the Patent […]

Queen’s Universitylaunches £1.2m seed fund for university spin-offs

QUBIS, the commercialisation and investment arm of Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), has announced the creation of a £1.2m seed fund. The QUBIS Innovation Fund will focus on supporting university spin-out companies and start-ups operating in the UK’s fastest growing sectors. It will be managed by Sapphire Capital Partners, with QUBIS as the portfolio mentor. The fund is […]

Startups: market validation attracts early investors

Many early-stage startups have a common problem: it’s hard to attract investors without proof that customers will pay for their product. Yet without investment to fund product development, it’s difficult to obtain market validation. The key to overcoming this challenge is to find creative and inexpensive ways to conduct market validation — a step in […]

Can We Really Teach Entrepreneurship At College?-Forbes

Schooling and entrepreneurship can seem paradoxical. One teaches you to stay in line, one requires you to stand out. One caters for the slowest moving, one benefits the fastest paced. One looks at what has been, one imagines what could be. Can we really teach entrepreneurship at college? GETTY Many successful entrepreneurs did badly at […]

Driving Academic Innovation | Higher Ed Gamma

Higher education is beset by wicked problems, problems that are exceedingly difficult to solve because any proposed solution is divisive, expensive, difficult to implement and conflicts with other institutional values and priorities. Controlling costs is a wicked problem that institutions have attempted to address in ways that quite rightly provoke resistance: outsourcing services, increasing class […]

Seeding the Future–Access to Capital for Funding Innovation

The new issue of Technology and Innovation® (22:1) (full text) features a selection of papers exploring the important topic of accessing capital to fund innovation, including manuscripts highlighting various funding opportunities available for inventors and innovators everywhere. “The National Academy of Inventors is proud to present this issue of Technology & Innovation, as funding is a key component […]

Coworking, incubators and accelerators… what’s the difference?

From working out of a garage to relocating for an industry-specific accelerator program, startups have more options than ever about where to work and how to build their businesses. Among the most popular are coworking spaces, business incubators and accelerators. You might think these terms are interchangeable, or that they are simply buildings or workspaces. […]

How University Impact Uses Donor Advised Funds to Innovate and Scale Impact Investing 

  University Impact (UI) is a nonprofit that invests in companies and nonprofits solving social and environmental problems. Investments are focused on funding the most promising social ventures. UI’s goal is to create the next generation of social impact leaders and provide capital to social ventures solving social and environmental problems. UI does this by […]

European Universities Are The Newest Deep Tech Hotspots

European universities have deep research talent that’s been nearly untapped by venture capitalists but that’s rapidly changing. While few unicorns have emerged from European universities – compared to their U.S. counterparts – there has been a steady, decade-long improvement, both in terms of entrepreneurial attributes at universities and university attitudes toward entrepreneurs. More than ever […]