Strengthening UD’s innovation culture

Small business owners, entrepreneurs and academic researchers recently gathered at the University of Delaware's Science, Technology and Advanced Research (STAR) Campus for a special workshop to learn ways to successfully compete for federal funding to move health science innovations from the lab to consumers.

Miguel Garcia-Diaz, UD vice president for research, scholarship and innovation, opened the program by sharing a conundrum found on many university campuses: Universities are at the core of innovation and faculty excel at making groundbreaking discoveries, but translating these breakthroughs to society doesn't always happen. Sometimes this is because researchers don't want to become entrepreneurs or business owners. Other times they struggle to find partners or funding to take their innovations to market.

At UD, changes are afoot to encourage the academic culture to embrace innovation and entrepreneurship. Last year, for example, UD was selected to receive funding from the National Science Foundation's inaugural Accelerating Research Translation (ART) program, which is enabling the University to invest in more infrastructure for translating research into practice.

"We are really working hard to make this part of our DNA," Garcia-Diaz said. "We understand that [research] translation is a team sport … and that translating does require public-private partnership."

The event, hosted by the Institute for Engineering Driven Health, College of Health Sciences and Delaware Small Business Development Center, featured a virtual presentation by Stephanie Fertig, director of small business innovation programs at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Over the past 20 years, the University's NIH research expenditures have grown from about $8 million a year to almost $50 million. Meanwhile, the explosion in biomedical research is starting to yield more opportunities for translating research discoveries into practice where they can have a positive impact on people's lives. Many UD faculty and researchers are at the forefront of this effort.

Getting these innovations into the hands of clinicians where they can benefit society often starts with de-risking technology. The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs are federal grant programs that provide early-stage capital to help small businesses take these steps toward commercialization through seed funding. At NIH, these congressionally mandated set-aside programs provide more than $1.4 billion per year to small business concerns.