The basics:

• New Jersey has a deep concentration of scientific talent, research
• Universities generate nearly $2B in research annually
• NJII Venture Studio helps turn discoveries into startups

New Jersey should be one of America’s great scientific startup engines. It has the highest concentration of Ph.D. scientists and engineers in the United States, and one of the nation’s largest concentrations of life sciences and biopharmaceutical companies, including 14 of the world’s 20 largest pharmaceutical companies.

The New Jersey Institute of Technology alone conducts more than $170 million in annual research across fields including AI, advanced manufacturing, and human health. The state’s life sciences sector contributes more than $120 billion annually to the economy and has become one of the world’s leading hubs for cell and gene therapy development. By any measure, New Jersey ranks among the best-resourced states in the country for turning research into companies.

New Jersey has the talent, research institutions, corporate presence, and capital to compete with the country’s leading innovation ecosystems. The challenge is capturing the economic value that science creates — and that challenge is beginning to be met. Organizations such as the New Jersey Innovation Institute and its Venture Studio are building the infrastructure that sits between scientific discovery and company formation, turning a long-standing gap into an active opportunity.

The entrepreneurial culture that turns scientific discovery into startups has developed more slowly in New Jersey than the pace of the state’s own scientific output. The state helped build the modern innovation economy through institutions such as Bell Labs and large corporate research organizations, but the center of gravity in innovation shifted decades ago toward small, venture-backed companies emerging from universities and startup ecosystems.

New Jersey’s universities collectively conduct nearly $2 billion in annual research, yet their startup output has not yet matched the scale of Boston or the Bay Area. According to data from the Association of University Technology Managers, Stanford or MIT can each produce roughly as many spinout companies in a year as all the universities in New Jersey combined. This gap reflects infrastructure and culture more than the quality of the science.

But the ingredients required to build a culture of commercialization are emerging, and institutions are now being built specifically to connect the dots. Researchers are increasingly seeing entrepreneurship as a realistic and supported path, and universities are beginning to treat company formation as a core outcome alongside research and publication.

The missing piece

Over the past decade, I have learned that closing the gap between scientific discovery and company formation requires a level of patience and hands-on involvement that few investors or institutions are structured to provide.

Part of the challenge is that the pathways from university research to commercialization are far narrower than many people realize. Corporate partners, which often represent the most direct route from university intellectual property to commercial products, tend to engage with the same small group of elite institutions year after year. As Michael Van Ter Sluis, vice president of entrepreneurship at NJII, once put it to me: when prospective industry partners consistently overlook your intellectual property, you have to build the companies that carry it to market yourself.

The second challenge is that much of the most valuable science never enters the traditional technology transfer pipeline in the first place. Researchers often spend years solving important problems without ever considering whether their work could become a company because nobody with the experience or patience to have that conversation has been in the room.

Some of the most commercially interesting intellectual property only surfaces through long-term relationships and sustained engagement with researchers. That kind of presence takes years to build, yet very few investors or institutions are structured to maintain it. As a result, discoveries with real commercial potential can remain hidden in laboratories, not because the science is weak, but because nobody has helped illuminate the path from discovery to company creation.

Building institutions

The NJII Venture Studio is designed specifically to address this. It helps researchers navigate the path from discovery to company formation and identifies technologies with the potential to become viable businesses. Its first venture, PureTrace Labs, is commercializing next-generation PFAS testing technology developed at NJIT. Another company under consideration, Fria Jewelry, is developing wearable technology to provide passive cooling relief for women experiencing hot flash discomfort. Both are early, but they demonstrate what becomes possible when the right institutional infrastructure is in place: world-class science that was already here is now on a path to market.

None of this works on a conventional fund timeline. The capital must be patient, and the commitment must extend well beyond what most traditional investors consider appropriate. Researchers and technology transfer offices need institutional partners specifically built for this work, with a clear mandate to bridge the gap between scientific discovery and company formation. For many researchers, there is still no obvious path from a patent filing to a funded company – but that is beginning to change as new commercialization programs and venture creation initiatives emerge across the state.

New Jersey has all the ingredients required to become one of America’s leading company-creation ecosystems. The next chapter of its innovation economy will depend less on whether the state can generate discoveries and more on whether we continue building the culture and infrastructure that consistently turns those discoveries into enduring companies. The institutions doing that work have arrived, and they are just getting started.

Aryeh Ganz is investment manager of the New Jersey Innovation Institute Venture Studio, and founder and managing partner of Cornucopian Capital.