CU: Commercialization activity generated $8B in impacts over 5 years
BOULDER — University of Colorado Boulder-led commercialization activities — intellectual-property licenses and companies spun out of school labs, for example — resulted in $8 billion in economic impact across the country over the past five years, according to new data from the university.
That’s an increase of more than 400% compared with the five-year period preceding March 2019, when Venture Partners at CU, formerly the school’s technology transfer office, last reported commercialization figures.
The lion’s share of the total 2022 economic impact, $5.2 billion, occurred, unsurprisingly, in CU’s homestate.
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“The university’s role is to support our innovators,” CU associate vice chancellor for research and innovation Brynmor Rees said in a prepared statement. “These are our creative faculty, graduate students and postdocs who are addressing important problems in their research. Commercialization increases CU Boulder’s ability to translate promising discoveries and innovations into real-world solutions.”
Between 2018 and 2022, Venture Partners “held 315 unique commercialization agreements, including more than 200 intellectual property licenses and 70 startups spun out of CU Boulder innovations,” the report said.
During the same period, CU inventors and researchers were awarded $45.4 million in commercialization-specific grants, and CU spinoffs employed about 39,000 workers nationwide.
“Today, someone wishing to commercialize an innovation at CU Boulder has access to a tremendous amount of support, and they have that because of the past successes of their peers and the reinvestment of the university’s share in that success,” Rees said in a statement. “The end result is a greater capacity for CU Boulder to deliver on the promise of breakthrough research to produce new solutions and economic growth.”
