Q&A with Amy Jones, marketing manager
The UAB Research Foundation was founded in 1987 as a nonprofit corporation to identify, assess and market commercially viable technology developed across the university. In 2013, the UABRF became part of the UAB Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The next year, Kathy Nugent became the executive director. In 2015, the Institute was rebranded as the Bill L. Harbert Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship after a naming gift from the Joy and Bill Harbert Foundation. It has 13 employees.
What does innovation mean to you?
Here at the HIIE, we tend to think of innovation in terms of intellectual property that has commercial value. Intellectual Property can include software, drugs and therapeutics, artificial intelligence or machine learning-based algorithms, cell lines, antibodies, protocols for teaching and training and much more.
What ways has your institute innovated and/or created meaningful impact?
Here at the HIIE, we serve as the university hub for innovations developed by UAB faculty and staff, and we help create business relationships between UAB faculty and commercial entities in order to develop products from discoveries and inventions generated by the research on our campus. In the last decade, we have helped launch more than 30 startups, executed more than 425 licenses and had more than 230 U.S. patents issued.
What else do you want people to know?
We take an immense amount of pride in the work we do to further UAB’s impact on our community, our state, our country and the world. We are dedicated to the successful commercialization of technologies created on our campus, which has many ripple effects. Successful technology commercialization leads to more research funding for our investigators; an increase in campus-wide interest in applied research and commercialization; the creation of a culture of entrepreneurship; reinvestment in Birmingham’s economic ecosystem; and, most importantly, the development of medical, health care and technology solutions.
