Universities have been helping students become entrepreneurs since before the word “startup” existed, but it wasn’t until the dot-com boom that they started taking the commercial value of campus innovation seriously. In the mid-1990s, many technology licensing offices and campus venture funds began popping up. And by the 2010s, more universities were realizing that throwing real resources behind nascent companies could stimulate local economies, bring academic work into the public sphere, and leverage powerful alumni networks.
Today, top universities are moving past lectures and pitch nights to play a more direct role in company creation. That can mean anything from providing lab space and the light-touch mentorship of an incubator all the way to running full accelerator programs that offer funding in exchange for equity. In contrast to traditional accelerators such as Y Combinator and Techstars, which sit outside the campus ecosystem, university accelerators can tap cutting-edge research, student talent, and alumni to be engines of commercialization within centers of learning.
At the University of Michigan, that effort takes the form of the Innovation Partnerships program, which functions like an incubator with industrial-grade infrastructure. The program “handles all the IP that comes out of research at UM. We protect it, we form licenses, [and] then we support and invest in startups that grow out of it,” says Dave Repp, director of ventures for the University of Michigan and managing director of the Accelerate Blue Fund; the university’s early-stage VC arm invests exclusively in startups based on University of Michigan intellectual property. The program targets students and faculty who want to commercialize their innovations and entrepreneurs who want to make use of UM intellectual property. In the university’s 2025 fiscal year, its innovators registered 673 inventions and launched 31 startups, a new record that made its commercialization success among the best in the nation.
Full story: Startups and Universities Are Forging New Synergies. Here’s How
