UNM Rainforest Innovations and Innosphere Ventures, a Fort Collins, Colorado-based business incubator, are partnering on an economic development initiative. Innosphere’s University Partner Program works with technology transfer offices at research universities to facilitate introductions to corporate partners and advance technologies to the commercialization stage, according to a release.
“UNM Rainforest Innovations has always done a great job protecting technologies developed at UNM and transferring these technologies to the marketplace,” said Mike Freeman, Innosphere Ventures CEO, in a statement. “Innosphere is excited to be one of the entrepreneurial resources that UNM offers to their technical founders and university faculty. Working with New Mexico’s leading research university provides Innosphere’s commercialization program with high-quality deal flow and opportunities to work with their innovative programs.”
UNM Rainforest Innovations acts as the technology transfer and economic development organization for the University of New Mexico. It seeks to protect and commercialize technologies developed at UNM by filing patents and copyrights and transferring them to the marketplace, as well as connecting the business community to those technologies for licensing opportunities and the creation of startups, the release says.
Innosphere says it also works with Colorado State University, University of Colorado and University of Nebraska. The organization seeks to accelerate the success of startups and emerging growth companies with a commercialization program, office and lab facilities and a seed-stage venture capital fund, according to Innosphere.
The nonprofit says it has been supporting startups for more than two decades.
“An innovation ecosystem is only as strong as the people that make it up,” said Lisa Kuuttila, CEO and chief economic development officer at UNM Rainforest Innovations, in a statement. “It’s a place where people with creative ideas, business insights, and those with the desire to facilitate change come together to nurture budding ideas into sustainable enterprises. When new partnerships are formed and collaboration is set in motion, our whole innovation ecosystem benefits.”
