Rice is launching a new program aimed at giving graduate and postdoctoral students the tools to turn their hard-earned research into tangible solutions to real-world problems.
The Provost office is partnering with the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (Lilie) to roll out the Rice Innovation Fellows program this fall. The program will allow students to focus on commercializing their research with personalized mentorship from Lilie and the Rice innovation network, which includes representatives from the Ken Kennedy Institute, the Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering, the Smalley-Curl Institute and the Office of Technology Transfer as well as an external advisory board of industry leaders and venture capitalists.
Elements of the program include: education (venture creation, business development, product management and business model/target markets), resources (venture funding, personalized mentorship, connections to talent and co-working/access to labs), licensing (IP databases, standardized IP licenses, market approved terms, deferred fees) and an innovation ecosystem (industry and talent connections, venture capital and accelerators, and office and lab space).
“For a university to have a well-functioning technology transfer and commercialization operation, many different parts must work together to reduce barriers to getting started, shorten the time to license and commercialize work and support emerging entrepreneurs with education, non-dilutive funding and personalized mentorship,” said Rice Provost Reginald DesRoches. “While we do this for undergraduates, we are lacking in this area for graduate students. This fellowship program is being created to help fill that gap and to subsequently unlock the massive potential of Rice’s young scientists and the intellectual property created through their discoveries.”
Launching this fall with six to 10 fellows, the program will operate as a pilot program during the next year and it will be overseen by an executive committee composed of Lilie, Kennedy Institute, Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering and the Smalley-Curl Institute leadership. The goal is to turn this program into a permanent fixture at Rice, said DesRoches.
“This program is a key step in providing a culture shift to a more entrepreneurial ecosystem at Rice that will in turn elevate recruitment of top graduate students and postdocs attracted to this unique training opportunity,” said Yael Hochberg, Head of the Rice Entrepreneurship Initiative and the Liu Idea Lab, as well as the Ralph S. O’Connor Professor of Entrepreneurship. “This will also create a robust pipeline of new ventures, preparing researcher-entrepreneurs to raise venture capital and grant funding as they scale their teams and businesses. And it will prepare them to make the next step in engaging with the entrepreneurial ecosystem by participating in accelerator programs or taking up residence in an innovation hub like The Ion.”
Any currently enrolled Rice graduate students in an engineering or science-related discipline who is in good academic standing, as well as post-doc researchers who are already a part of a lab, are eligible to apply to become an innovation fellow. Postdocs who are new to Rice will be considered on a case-by-case basis. To apply for the fellowship or to learn more information about the fellowship, click here.
“I’m really excited about this program and the life it will give to campus innovation,” said Vice Provost for Research Yousif Shamoo, adding that research projects will include new medical devices and therapies as well as new advanced materials breakthroughs and technologies for energy and urban sustainability. “Something like this has been needed for a while and it’s really just the first step of many to come in advancing our campus vision for research entrepreneurship.”