Interest: On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced a $4 million award to the city of Flagstaff for a new, 25,000-square-foot building next door to the existing incubator, the Northern Arizona Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology.
Interest: First Funder, a new crowdfunding platform based in Boulder, launched Friday with the goal of helping donors find and fund entrepreneurship programs and community organizations.
First Funder - http://www.firstfunder.com - is pitching itself as a safer way for donors and potential investors to contribute to organizations.
Interest: Recyclable car tires and thinner surgical gloves are just some of the products that University of Tennessee chemistry professor Jimmy Mays wants to see his new innovation, superelastomers, used for.
The invention, which has earned Mays a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Innovation program, has the benefit of strength and the ability to be reused.
Interest: UC Davis is one of six recipients nationwide, and the only one in California, to receive a $1 million award in the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration's 2012 i6 Challenge Grant competition. The university will use the grant to establish the Clean AgTech Innovation Center.
Interest: Officials unveiled a new business incubator in downtown Tuscaloosa Thursday afternoon that will serve as a working space for entrepreneurs and University of Alabama students.
The Edge Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the corner of 22nd Avenue and Eighth Street was developed through a partnership between the Chamber of Commerce of West Alabama, the City of Tuscaloosa and the university.
Interest: Ohio University ranks first among Ohio schools for research licensing revenue, with faculty inventions generating $8.6 million in fiscal year 2011, officials say.
The Athens college also ranks fourth in the nation after Princeton, Northwestern and New York universities for return on research investment. OU reported nearly 30 percent return on $30.9 million in research expenditures in 2011.
Interest: Anchorage’s new city-run 49th State Angel Fund is off to a good start in stimulating local entrepreneurs with small business startups or expansions.
Anchorage has received $13.2 million in federal funds under the State Small Business Credit Initiative to start the program, and is the first U.S. city to receive such an allocation.
Interest: A partnership with the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation will help fund five biomedical engineering research projects at MU's School of Medicine and College of Engineering.
The Coulter Translational Partnership Award in Biomedical Engineering will award $5 million over the next five years to the five projects as well as several more rounds of selected projects, said Laura Gerding, a School of Medicine spokeswoman.
Interest: "Have an idea?" That's the question posed on the sign outside a small cube of offices strategically located on the first floor of Kent State University's student union. Inside is Blackstone LaunchPad, an innovative program to provide mentoring, resources and advice to student entrepreneurs.
Blackstone LaunchPad is a partnership between the Blackstone Charitable Foundation in New York and the Burton D. Morgan Foundation in Hudson. Each provided $1.6 million to fund programs.
Interest: Research that would improve care for cancer patients, burn victims and others took a step closer to becoming real-life medical solutions today.
University of Missouri administrators announced the first round of recipients of a $5 million partnership launched last year with the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation.
Interest: Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced that the U.S. Photovoltaic Consortium (PVMC) and Ceres Technologies, a Hudson Valley-based nanotechnology manufacturer, have launched a $20 million partnership in which Ceres will become one of the first official suppliers of manufacturing equipment to the PVMC. The PVMC is headquartered at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering’s (CNSE) Albany NanoTech Complex.
Interest: Eight hospital and university systems in Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland will announce an agreement today that already has expedited the review process for multicenter research projects.
Fast-tracking approval for such research should give the state an edge in attracting clinical trials, which in 2008 supported an estimated 84,000 jobs, according to Archstone Consulting, a market-research firm based in Stamford, Conn.
Interest: Two young Denver entrepreneurs are taking their startups to the next level, thanks to recent angel investments from a unique venture capital program at the University of Colorado Denver.
Interest: A $69 million manufacturing initiative sought by a dozen other communities across the country will be headquartered in Youngstown, it was announced Thursday by an entourage of top White House officials and others.
The initiative will be housed in the Youngstown Business Incubator's 12,000-square-foot Boardman Street Annex.
Interest: New York City’s ambitions to challenge Silicon Valley as a technology center are taking root on a narrow isle in the East River, where Cornell University is building a $2 billion campus and startup incubator.
Interest: In the same week Kent State University was awarded $3 million for their nanoscale engineering project, Ohio State also received $3 million in the first Ohio Third Frontier Innovation Platform program.
The university’s “Next Generation Multi-Modal Molecular Imaging Technology Platform” project aims to advance, develop and validate new imaging modality [a technique used to create images of the human body]
Interest: Sponsored research funding for faculty members at the University of Colorado's Boulder campus registered at $380.7 million during the last fiscal year, a 6 percent increase over the previous year, the university announced Thursday.
Overall, the CU faculty throughout the entire system brought in $815.3 million in sponsored research funding, an increase from $793.5 million the previous year.
Interest: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is introducing a bill to create a $200 million fund to help biotech companies move discoveries out of the lab and into the marketplace.
Gillibrand (D-NY) announced the legislation, called the America Innovates Act, today at the University at Albany’s East Campus.
Interest: The Maryland Biotechnology Center delivered $600,000 in commercialization and research grants to three companies on Wednesday following the award of another $800,000 in an earlier round in December.
The seven total recipients are developing cancer therapies, malaria treatments, environmental and food testing biosensors and other products.
Interest: A new, high-tech device that generates intense pressure combined with heat to cut hard and brittle materials has been developed by Western Michigan University researchers and could soon have a huge commercial impact on the machining of difficult-to-machine engineered components.
The National Science Foundation recently awarded Patten and Ravindra an NSF Innovation Corps Program--I-Corps--grant of $50,000 to pursue the technology's commercial viability and ready it for commercialization.