Bryn's Blog

Venture Partners Update: Startups Surge

Anonymous — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 20:55:02 +0000

Venture Partners Update: Startups Surge Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/12/2024 - 14:55

Bryn Rees

The University of Colorado is a star in the constellation of the U.S. innovation ecosystem. At Venture Partners at CU Boulder, we are proud to contribute to a tightly bonded community of entrepreneurs, companies, investors and government partners that make Colorado an innovation leader. By translating breakthrough research into new businesses, CU creates economic opportunities while addressing many of the world’s greatest challenges. In the past year, CU Boulder has burned especially bright through Venture Partners’ record-setting performance.

First Look at Fiscal Year 2023-24:

$ 426 M

CAPITAL RAISED BY PORTFOLIO COMPANIES

LICENSE AND OPTION AGREEMENTS

105

NSF I-CORPS^TM TEAMS TRAINED

CU STARTUPS LAUNCHED THROUGH VENTURE PARTNERS

In fiscal year 2024, Venture Partners helped to launch 35 new startup companies out of CU Boulder’s research labs. This is a great leap above CU Boulder’s previous record of 20, set in 2021, and places it among the very best university campuses globally. One of the 35 startups is Mana Battery. Built around the research of Chunmei Ban (CU Boulder Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering), Mana is producing sodium-based batteries as an alternative to the scarcity, performance and safety drawbacks of lithium batteries that enable clean energy solutions. Mana joins several battery companies to spin out from CU Boulder in the past 10 years, which have collectively created hundreds of jobs and attracted over $1 billion in investment to the state.

Our dramatic rise in startup production is no accident. It is the fruition of a multi-year strategy to make CU Boulder the premier university campus in which to launch a new company. The team at Venture Partners has built a suite of resources to inspire, mentor, train and fund aspiring founders among faculty, graduate students and post-doctoral researchers. The surging startup numbers are built on the record productivity of these founder support programs, including lean startup training through the NSF I-Corps^TM Hub: West Region (105 teams trained this year), proof of concept grants through the Lab Venture Challenge (12 awardees totaling $1.5 million), Ascent Deep Tech Startup Creator (15 graduating companies) and the Embark Deep Tech Startup Creator, our newest program, which paired community entrepreneurs with CU Boulder innovations to form 10 new companies.

We look forward to sharing our full upcoming annual report, which will include further details of how Venture Partners lights up the innovation constellation.

Bryn Rees

Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation; Managing Director of Venture Partners at CU Boulder

By translating breakthrough research into new businesses, CU creates economic opportunities while addressing many of the world’s greatest challenges. In the past year, CU Boulder has burned especially bright through Venture Partners’ record-setting performance.

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More goals, not just more shots: how universities can skate toward better innovation metrics

Anonymous — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 23:34:10 +0000

More goals, not just more shots: how universities can skate toward better innovation metrics Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 09/09/2024 - 17:34

Bryn Rees

The National Academy of Inventors recently released a list of the top 100 US universities for issued US patents in 2023, with the University of Colorado ranking 21st. While a welcome development and something we’ll continue to monitor, I focus on different metrics. Here’s why.

Universities file patents with the objective of the patented inventions being commercialized, thereby bringing new innovations to society and creating economic development. Many in the field of university innovation hold a long-standing idea that filing more patents will create more “shots on goal” (to use a hockey analogy) and thus increase the chances of hitting larger social and economic objectives. But do more patents (shots) lead to more successful outcomes (goals)? Maybe hockey, the source of the shots-on-goal analogy, can provide us with some insights.

In recent years, hockey has dramatically increased its sophistication with the emergence of advanced analytics. Rather than just tracking how many pucks found their way to the net (shots on goal), stats like “expected goals” or “xG” have been created. xG takes into consideration the angle of a shot, how far it was from the net, the type of shot, and how many players were in the way to potentially block it. In other words, xG is about the quality of the shots and their likelihood to result in goals. It’s goals that we are interested in, after all. Measuring university patent count is like the old-school shot clock in hockey. What we need is something more like xG – measures of, and emphasis on, patents that are likely to be commercialized.

The reality is, some shots are almost never going to result in a goal. Filing a patent application and hoping a company finds it on a website, licenses it, and commercializes it, is a low-quality shot. It’s almost never going to result in commercialization. The corollary of a high quality scoring chance in hockey is a university invention that does indeed have a solid patent strategy, but also an array of other characteristics including product-market fit within a compelling market, strong proof-of-concept data, and a clear path to the market via a startup company or a strategically aligned corporate partner. A solid indicator of these factors is when such a startup company or corporate partner executes a partnership agreement with the university for the invention, validating the commercial potential and indicating a commitment to realizing it.

Here’s a more effective university innovation stat – like xG, but for university innovation. Instead of the number of issued patents, let’s look at the number and percentage of patents partnered with companies through licenses, options, and assignments.

Revisiting NAI’s 2023 report on issued patents, out of the 44 patents issued to the University of Colorado Boulder that year, 21 of them (48%) have been partnered with companies for commercialization. That includes 13 CU Boulder startup companies, which have collectively raised over $1 billion to bring to market innovations including biomedical breakthroughs, advanced robotics, and better electric vehicle batteries.

Placing importance on such metrics could help steer universities away from any tendency to pursue patent volume and toward building value in their patents. There is precedent for value-building at universities: the national network of the National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps Hubs, the University of Chicago's Duality quantum startup accelerator, the IDEA Center at the University of Notre Dame, or our own Ascent Deep Tech Accelerator here at CU Boulder, to name just a few. Let’s use new metrics to encourage more creation of high quality scoring chances!

Admittedly, commercially-partnered patents and percentages are not perfect metrics. It is a proxy measure for future success, but not a direct measure of commercial impact. It also does not differentiate between the type of commercial partner and their relative chances of bringing a product to market. A single-founder startup partner faces steeper challenges than a startup with strong venture capital backing, or an established corporate partner.

Despite those limitations, the metrics I’ve suggested are simple, would be easy to measure and report, are based on data that universities already possess, and are more indicative of innovation impact than the conventional metric of issued US patents. In the worst instances, issued patents can become a vanity metric that a university might chase purely for rankings, yet without any tie to meaningful innovation outcomes.

As for Venture Partners at CU Boulder, we’ll be including in our annual report what percentage and how many of our issued patents yield commercial partnerships, and I encourage other universities and data aggregating groups like NAI and AUTM to do the same. As universities play an increasing role in technology-based economic development – let’s acknowledge that we all want more goals, not just more shots.

Bryn Rees

Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation; Managing Director of Venture Partners at CU Boulder

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An Engine for Climate Resilience

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 23:44:28 +0000

An Engine for Climate Resilience Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/30/2024 - 16:44

Bryn Rees

A regional partnership dubbed the "Colorado-Wyoming Climate Resilience Engine” is one of ten awardees in the unprecedented regional innovation engines program from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Each engine is awarded up to $160M over 10 years to drive innovation-based economic development. Our rendition, the CO-WY Climate Resilience Engine, will build climate resilient communities by combining applied research, translation of discoveries into new businesses and real-world solutions, and inclusive workforce development. Our Engine is a collaboration among universities, industry, and economic development organizations across Colorado and Wyoming, including the University of Colorado Boulder. I was fortunate to participate in the design and leadership of the Engine and will share some thoughts on what winning this grant means.

Climate change is something that has been in our collective awareness for decades, albeit sometimes as an abstract and future-oriented concept. Presently, however, direct impacts are front-and-center in the Mountain West region and elsewhere; the challenges to communities are unavoidable. Whether we live in rural or urban areas, wildfire, smoke, and drought affect us. Solutions that help communities become more resilient are needed – such as earlier detection and more effective responses to wildfire, improved sensing of emissions that enable new incentives for GHG reductions, and more sustainable use of water. These solutions are just what our Engine will create.

The technical focus of the Engine is on measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification (MMRV) and spans applications in extreme weather, soil carbon capture, earth sensing, methane emissions, water security, and wildfire. These MMRV advancements will be the basis for improved decision making tools, resilience solutions, and incentives like voluntary carbon markets.

NSF’s engines program is unique in how it supports needed innovation. It goes far beyond funding research and technology development, NSF’s historical areas of focus, and supports a holistic approach to ecosystem growth. Innovation ecosystems are of course not new, and well-known examples like the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, and Research Triangle Park arose organically around excellent research universities. Here in Boulder, Colorado, Brad Feld has written extensively about startup communities, where entrepreneurial values are the basis for a thriving ecosystem. By providing this forward-thinking funding opportunity, NSF enables partnerships like the CO-WY Climate Resilience Engine to apply what we know about successful ecosystems (and importantly what we know about our own local ecosystem) and the principles of startup communities to meaningfully accelerate climate resilience.

For the past seven years, our Venture Partners at CU Boulder team has been building programs that bridge the gap between promising research and innovative solutions. During that timeframe, we’ve launched 76 startups, attracted $3.7 billion in investment capital (including the creation of CU Boulder’s dedicated venture capital fund, Buff Gold Ventures), and generated billions in economic impact. Now, the Engine is an opportunity to direct our gap-bridging process from research to innovation with a specific focus on climate solutions.

My role in the Engine has included developing the process of what NSF calls “translation of innovation to impact” where the Engine will provide entrepreneurial education, access to early-stage and risk-tolerant funding, founder stipends, and mentorship from seasoned entrepreneurs and industry partners. In essence, we are adding more horsepower to programs and principles that are already tried and true. Whether it’s proof-of-concept funding akin to the Advanced Industries program from the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, founder support through our partner Activate, or Feld’s “founders-first” principle, the CO-WY Climate Resilience Engine is building on a solid foundation of what we know to be effective locally. An important aspect of the Engine is the role of Innosphere Ventures, which led the proposal and will see several key folks from its leadership transition into the Engine. Innosphere is our longstanding partner and has worked closely with us and the other partnering universities to accelerate science-based startups formed out of university labs.

Climate resilience research is a core strength at CU Boulder and the other partnering universities—Colorado State University, the University of Wyoming, and Colorado School of Mines. The bold and holistic approach of NSF’s regional innovation engines program, together with a consortium of diverse partner organizations, will help to deliver the promise held within this research, and yield climate resilience solutions so desperately needed in our region and beyond.

Bryn Rees

Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation; Managing Director of Venture Partners at CU Boulder

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