Rutgers University is challenging its students and faculty to solve big problems, and they’ve offering big financial grants to help spur those solutions.
The university this week announced the establishment of a Disruptive Innovation Fund to provide up to $1 million to support the commercialization of innovative products developed at Rutgers.
Michael Pazzani, vice president of research and economic development at the university, said the fund is different from typical academic research funding.
“The typical goal is you receive federal funding first … you invent something with that, and you see if it applies to a problem,” Pazzani said, noting that the school receives more than $300 million in federal funding each year.
The Disruptive Innovation Fund will reverse that structure, he said. Researchers will identify a problem they want to solve and receive funding in order to pursue a solution.
“The goal is to solve a problem that no one has solved before,” he said. “That’s actually why most of us are in academia.”
Pazzani said there are no limits on what kinds of inventions can apply for the program: “We really want to have the creativity of our 2,700 faculty and 58,000 students to apply to problems they think are important.”
The fund was created with a $1 million commitment from IP Navigation Group, a Dallas-based patent monetization firm. Under the agreement, an executive committee will be set up to manage the fund and review proposals from faculty and students. The committee will award at least two grants annually of up to $500,000 each.
Pazzani said he anticipates IP Navigation Group will continue to provide funding in future years, though no commitment has been made at this time.
A half-million dollars is a significant amount of money, Pazzani said, but he said that’s because one goal of the program is “not to let money stand in the way of solving your problem.”
After receiving the money and developing their projects for a year, Pazzani said, the solutions should be ready to attract venture capital or other funding.
Pazzani said a timeline for this year’s grant application process is still being worked out, but the deadline for proposals will likely be sometime in January.
