We are at the cusp of perhaps the greatest period of commercial and practical peace-time innovation in history.
This might be hyperbole but having attended the NCET2’s 6th University Startups Conference 2012 in Washington DC to launch our new title of Global University Venturing this past week it is a statement with a fighting chance of coming true.
Only about a dozen US universities provide start-up funding to students and faculty, often through a university venturing fund, according to a survey of the top 200 research universities surveyed by NCET2 ahead of its Presidents-Investors Summit before its conference. However, the number is far larger globally and in the US is expected to increase rapidly as more than 135 presidents and deans of American universities last year signed a National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE) letter to US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to improve the commercialisation of university research.
Combined with corporations looking to play a greater role in university research, there is a more general understanding among the two main sources of innovation of how to work in a more open innovation environment. This mean that more fruits of good ideas are used rather than wasted.
Given the global nature of the trends – what Patrick O’Shea, vice-president of research at University of Maryland, called the need for greater innovation and entrepreneurship in a "globally engaged atmosphere" – the outpouring of good ideas and talented entrepreneurs is increasing rapidly. Given this outpouring, the successful clusters will be those that free up the human and intellectual capital and then find the language and sources of funding and marketing efforts to help take these to being used.