Rutgers offers a one-stop innovation shop for its aspiring founders

The journey of any invention from inspirational spark to marketable product is complicated under the best of circumstances—even more so when the inventor hails from a university campus. To bring their best ideas out of a lab and into the hands of the public, such founder-researchers must learn a set of skills they might struggle to pick up in the hallowed halls of academia: the art of securing capital. Thankfully, researchers at most top institutions of higher learning across the United States now can access offices wholly tasked with helping to usher their ideas to market.

Rutgers University’s Office for Research, at its main New Brunswick campus, in New Jersey, is tasked with supporting the entrepreneurially minded members of its research community—who received a total of $969.5 million in research funding in the fiscal year 2024—at every step of the way: applying for grants, navigating the patent process, obtaining the proper licenses to ensure federal and state compliance, marketing, and more.

“We try to enable entrepreneurship for the people who are interested,” says Deborah Perez Fernandez, the executive director of Technology Transfer, one of the office’s six units. “We partner with innovators across the university to help develop their inventions into real-life products while at the same time protecting their intellectual property.” This past year, the office supported 162 new inventions, 123 patents, and 104 active startups.

Diverse Community, Diverse Ideas

Accounting for students, faculty, and staff, Rutgers’s population is roughly 100,000, on par with a small city. The university—an honoree of Ignition Schools 2024, Fast Company and sibling publication Inc.’s inaugural list of the 50 colleges and universities making an outsize impact on business and society—makes a concerted effort to offer entrepreneurial opportunities across its vibrant community. The Center for Urban Entrepreneurship & Economic Development, launched in 2003, empowers minority and urban entrepreneurs—some of whom have gone on to launch successful startups.

The Office for Research relies on this diversity of people and perspectives, not just to identify the most promising founders but also to pull in whatever expertise might be needed to help determine the best path forward—efficiently. “It’s such a large university,” Fernandez says. “When you concentrate everything under one umbrella, it helps streamline that process.”

A legacy of innovation

Rutgers’s history of innovation runs deep. Selman Waksman’s research in the 1950s led to the discovery of the first effective tuberculosis treatment, earning him a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. But for most of its existence, neither the school nor its academic community could financially benefit from its inventions.

Then, in 1980, the federal government overhauled its policy regarding intellectual property: Whereas before, any inventions developed at universities that received federal funding had automatically belonged to the U.S. government, now, academic institutions were able to retain ownership of such rights. This gave schools a strong incentive to keep innovation on campus. Ever since, entire ecosystems have emerged to support on-campus innovation, including the robust environment at Rutgers.

Fernandez touts recent wins for Office for Research collaborators—the research team that developed a novel saliva-based test for COVID-19, the team with a test of a woman’s ovarian reserve to determine whether she’s a good candidate for in vitro fertilization. Such innovations, with their potential both to improve lives and to create economic value, inspired the office this year to launch the Rutgers Innovation Awards, which recognizes researchers across 10 categories.

The Office for Research plans to continue growing in every direction it can. Fernandez references goals the team has set to increase various metrics—the number of new patents, the number of startups—but she doesn’t get specific. “More than the number itself,” she says, “we want to expand our reach.”

This story is part of Fast Company and Inc.’s Ignition Schools 2024 awards, the 50 colleges and universities making an outsize impact on business and society through entrepreneurship and innovation. Read about the methodology behind our selection process.