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���� Boulder is collaborating with the City of Boulder and Innosphere to construct startup wet laboratory spaces including offices, meeting rooms, and entrepreneurial incubator programs and services across the community.

The IEP Innovation Award recognizes exemplary initiatives spurring innovation, entrepreneurship and technology-based economic development.

Eleven university innovators pitched their innovations at Lab Venture Challenge (LVC), an annual funding competition hosted by Venture Partners at С���� Boulder that accelerates commercially promising technologies accelerate into impactful

С���� Boulder researchers attracted a record $634.4 million in fiscal year 2021 for studies that, among other things, examine how artificial intelligence can transform education, led to the United Arab Emirate’s Hope spacecraft orbiting Mars, and address threats posed by climate change in the Arctic.

In the past year alone, С���� Boulder spun out 20 new “deep tech” businesses from its research labs. At the same time, as we reflect on our progress as an Innovation & Economic Prosperity (IEP) University, we are careful not to lose sight of the very personal stories that are contained within the metrics of economic impact.

“Rather than just focusing on intellectual property and IP transactions, we are putting our effort and our resources toward developing entrepreneurs and helping them build businesses," says Brynmor Rees, assistant vice chancellor for innovation at С���� Boulder and managing director for Venture Partners.

Startup company founders who commercialize С���� Boulder’s research innovations will be getting a boost in 2022. Ascent, a startup accelerator specifically created for С���� Boulder innovators, will help founders launch their companies, raise investment capital, and gain market and partnership traction.

With a new, $15 million dollar award announced by the National Science Foundation (NSF) on August 25, engineers and scientists from top research universities across the Western United States—including С���� Boulder—will form a new consortium, the I-Corps Hub West Region, to help advance new technologies and incubate emergent companies that can move breakthrough discoveries from the lab to the marketplace.

A detailed article on Venture Partners' “hyper-accelerator” program—Pandemic Hyper-Accelerator for Science and Technology (PHAST)—appears in the July issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. PHAST leverages Economic Development Administration (EDA) funding while also rapidly bringing innovative solutions to market. That program is now beginning to bear fruit, with a first cohort of startups preparing for an inaugural Demo Day scheduled for January 2022.

SBIR and STTR grants are highly competitive programs that encourage research by small U.S. businesses with the aim of putting innovative, profitable products on the market. The STTR program also requires small businesses to collaborate with nonprofit research institutions such as ���� Boulder.