CHANCELLOR’S INNOVATION FUND TEN YEAR IMPACT

The Chancellor’s Innovation Fund (CIF) Program, established in 2010, awards up to $50,000 to support short-term, commercially focused research projects. Each year, a select few promising proposals are chosen based on their likelihood of market success — as well as their potential societal benefits.

The CIF seeks to help this research bridge the gap between public and private funding. For every dollar the CIF awards, it generates close to $20 in additional funding or investment.

To date, the CIF has granted nearly $3.9 million to 63 projects — which have attracted nearly $75 million in follow-on funding. These projects have led to 32 startup companies, 61 commercialization agreements and $2.5 million in licensing revenue.

“CIF continues to serve as one of the most effective ways we can help our world-class faculty commercialize their cutting-edge research,” says Wade Fulghum, Assistant Vice Chancellor of the Office of Research Commercialization. “The goal is to provide the critical funding needed to translate technologies to a point where a startup can be formed for commercialization or a license can be executed with an existing company.”

CIF has supported a variety of successes since its inception, including funding research that ultimately supported the formation of rising startup Locus Biosciences and supporting a mobile security platform project that was licensed to Samsung and is now part of its Knox Security System. In addition to these high-profile impacts, several diverse, CIF-funded projects are now beginning to gain commercial traction.