University of Maryland - College Park, George Washington University, and Virginia Tech has partnered with The National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) to organize a day-long summit focused on improving university innovation ecosystems by bringing researchers' and students' ideas to impact.
The University Innovation Summit will take place on Thursday, November 8 at the Virginia Tech Research Center in Arlington, VA, where leaders in university research-based innovation to catalyze the growth of effective ecosystems supporting their work.
NCIAA, a nonprofit organization devoted to supporting university invention, innovation and entrepreneurship, is helming the summit and is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and The Lemelson Foundation.
The summit hopes to bring together over 100 leaders, practitioners and supporters of invention and innovation to share practices, discuss resources and generate practical ideas for improving the ecosystem for university invention and innovation.
As it is evident, interest in entrepreneurship and technology commercialization within U.S. colleges and universities has grown in recent years, especially as related to scientific and technological discoveries.
Even higher education institutions are developing numerous programs and infrastructure to help faculty explore and realize the potential for commercialization of their research, through technology translation programs, captive incubators and seed funds. Collaboration efforts between engineering, science and business schools and co-curricular programming are aiding these educations institutions' intention of helping the innovators found within their university building.
Hence, through this summit, all the partners involved in the venture, aim to come out with some concrete, practical ideas at the end of the program.
The program is expected to actively engage the participants in discussion, by providing an opportunity to both inform participants about relevant services, resources and programs and put up a platform to gather their input on how best to support the development of effective and healthy university innovation and commercialization ecosystems to support researchers and students in bringing their ideas to practical reality.
The input provided during the sessions will result in an in-depth report which will be shared with participants, sponsors and the broader community.
