Drexel University President John Fry says the school is "doubling down" on its focus on innovation as it launches a new fund that will invest in Drexel-affiliated startups.
The college's Innovation Fund and associated entrepreneurship courses will award up to four startups with $150,000 annually. Startups founded by undergraduate students, faculty, graduate students and Drexel alumni are eligible for the funding. The university will look to have two cohorts of applicants per year and hopes to announce the first round of awardees in the summer.
The university has committed to funding a portion of the program for five years and it will look to gifts from donors to meet a goal of raising $5 million for the fund.
Drexel has been leaning more into innovation in recent years and the new fund is a product of that. Drexel officials also hope it can be a catalyst to produce more startups and entrepreneurs.
Donna De Carolis, founding dean of the Charles D. Close School of Entrepreneurship at Drexel, believes the Innovation Fund will be "a differentiator" for Drexel and how its startup programs stack up to those at other universities.
"One of the driving forces of this was how do we get these ideas out there? How do we commercialize them?" De Carolis asked. "It's one thing to generate innovation. It's another to actually bring it to market, bring it to society for economic development, for societal welfare."
Aleister Saunders, the school's executive vice provost for research and innovation, said the fund gives Drexel a chance to pull all of its innovation initiatives "under one roof." It has an incubator called ic@3401 that it runs with the University City Science Center, already hosts Drexel Startup Fest, the Baiada Institute Incubator competition and runs the Raynier Seed Fund for underrepresented entrepreneurs with the Science Center. All the different "tentacles" will help feed into the pool of candidates for the Innovation Fund, Saunders said.
One new piece to the ecosystem that accompanies the Innovation Fund are experiential classes at the Close School that will help to decide the winners of the funding. The first part of the course teaches students about the world of venture capital. The second part sees students conduct due diligence on the cohort of applicants, then present their findings to an investment board made up of people within and outside the university who ultimately decide the recipients of the funding.
Saunders said that the new fund is an opportunity to "amplify" the school's continued work to be a leading innovator in Philadelphia.
"We think this will offer an opportunity or a logical next step for those faculty and graduate students who want to take that entrepreneurial leap," Saunders said. "We're hoping that it stimulates even more entrepreneurial activity."
He added, "We know there's a lot of entrepreneurs in our ecosystem and we hope that two cohorts a year and four awards — we hope that's too few."
