New IU initiative targets startup growth

Indiana University this week unveiled an initiative designed to support greater startup creation and growth across its statewide footprint. Set to launch this fall, IU Innovates will serve as a network to help faculty and students accelerate their ideas and turn them into products and services that can go to market more quickly.

“The idea is to create that system that encourages and supports people in taking their work [further] for the betterment of society,” said Rahul Shrivastav, executive vice president and provost at IU Bloomington.

Shrivastav told Inside INdiana Business the university is putting a greater emphasis on entrepreneurship and innovation.

“[IU will support] everything from taking an idea, building it into a prototype to thinking about how to launch a company, how to do licensing, how to scale up a business from a basic, small idea to something bigger,” he said. “It’s about connecting entrepreneurs in the state and the region and nationally, connecting our alumni who are in the business world back with ideas here on campus.”

Shrivastav said the goal is to create a pipeline of resources to take discoveries and inventions that are happening on campus and create real products on the market.

IU Innovates will initially feature programming that includes ongoing student and faculty events, as well as seminars and workshops on entrepreneurship. The university will also leverage existing pitch competitions and create a guided program to support faculty and students through the incubation of new business ideas.

“A lot of the ingredients have been there [but] we are adding more emphasis and more bandwidth. So, we are scaling up what we already have, but we are also creating a series of programs and services that hold people’s hands and helps them cross the threshold from basically lab research into practical applied research. That’s been the piece that has not been as strong historically.”

Students and faculty will be able to access a formal curriculum for launching new startups, as well as business services such as legal counsel, branding and marketing support, and venture capital consulting.

Shrivastav notes that importance of making IU Innovates a university-wide initiative, including IU’s campuses throughout the state because “the talent is all over IU.”

“There are also needs that are unique to specific regions, and people in various places can address those in a way that’s more direct,” he said. “So, the infrastructure we are creating is designed to really help anybody with an IU connection throughout the state. I think the impact will be bigger. It will influence most of the state, and it’ll certainly help faculty and students all over the system.”

Shrivastav said over the next few years, IU hopes to produce a few dozen startup companies annually. He cites incubators such as The Mill in Bloomington and 16 Tech in Indianapolis as places to where startups can advance after launching out of IU.

“There’s a very good and growing infrastructure for supporting entrepreneurship. So it’ll hopefully feed into that and help the state really grow,” he said. “And as this scales up, hopefully other regions of the state can replicate or do whatever is appropriate for that region as well.”

IU plans to hire a staff director for IU Innovates in the coming months. An internal advisory board comprised of faculty and staff, as well as an external advisory board will be appointed in 2024.