Accelerating UNC Chapel Hill’s profile as a startup hot spot is an increasing priority that is panning out, according to the university’s top innovation executive. Former Chancellor Holden Thorp hired Judith Cone as a vice chancellor in 2009 after she had worked for 15 years at the Kauffman Foundation, a leading entrepreneurship think tank based in Kansas City, Mo. She’s helped build Innovate Carolina, a university-wide project to turn ideas of students, professors and alumni into successful businesses. While university schools and departments often work in silos, Cone’s group is an advocate for commercialization activity across campus.
As of June, the university counted 475 affiliated ventures, a 26% increase from a year earlier. About three-fourths of the ventures, which range from one-person research projects to publicly held companies, remain active, and 85% are headquartered in the state. The businesses employ almost 64,000, according to the Innovate Carolina database.
UNC is among the few large U.S. research campuses without an engineering school, which tend to be tech-transfer hot spots. (Cone cites Emory and the University of Chicago as others.) But Chapel Hill has a good relationship with N.C. State University’s engineering school, she says, reflected by a joint biomedical engineering major and cooperation among the institutions’ venture-capital arms on various projects.
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