Ohio State University's Center for Software Innovation, established with a record $110 million donation, starts its first classes in a few weeks and will host a Midwest startups conference even before starting construction on its future home.
Startup Midwest, billed as "the premier event for technology entrepreneurs," is set for Oct. 24-25 in Columbus, according to the center's website that went live this week.
"We are on a very rapid time scale," Peter Mohler, OSU interim executive vice president of research, innovation and knowledge, said onstage Thursday at Business First's CIO Tomorrow event.
The Timashev Family Foundation, led by serial entrepreneur and OSU graduate Ratmir Timashev, donated $110 million in February to establish the center. The funding will go toward a building in the Carmenton innovation district on west campus, faculty recruitment, student scholarships, a startup accelerator and other programming.
Timashev co-founded Veeam Software Corp., a data backup and recovery firm with $1.5 billion annual revenue that moved its headquarters to Columbus from Switzerland. Before that he co-founded a software company while an OSU grad student that was later acquired.
"We're hoping to catalyze a high-tech mecca, started right here in the American heartland," Timashev said in a pre-recorded interview played at CIO Tomorrow. "We envision these skilled Buckeyes will become managers and executives, ... then they start their own companies."
Techstars has had a job posting for an on-site managing director of "Techstars Columbus Accelerator Powered by the Ohio State University," but university officials have not yet confirmed the partnership for that segment of the program.
The business and engineering colleges already developed an initial curriculum for this fall, said Mohler, who's also OSU's research vice president and chief science officer of Wexner Medical Center.
The center's physical building will take at least three years to build.
Courses likely always will take place in classrooms and labs across campus as well as the eventual home base, Mohler said. The building will serve as a "nucleation site" where students, faculty, entrepreneurs, investors and industry executives can convene and generate ideas.
That requires breaking free of academic silos for interdisciplinary work, he said, but also increased partnerships with the outside community. Rather than a department, such as computer science, the teams will focus on solutions to real-world problems.
"We have big, big problems to solve," Mohler said. "This is not just about Ohio State."
This story has been updated to correct misheard words in Ratmir Timashev's quote from the video.
