The Office of the Vice Provost for Research announced the creation of a grant to advance pre-commercial projects.
The NextUP Program will provide recipients with up to $50,000 in funding per project to “address critical gaps that will help to attract industry partners and external investors.” The grant is open to applicants from all 12 schools and is managed by Penn’s Office of the Chief Innovation Officer.
According to the program description, projects with the strongest commercialization potential will be prioritized.
To be eligible for funding, program applicants must have a Penn faculty member as a lead participant. Additionally, the project plan must address “a critical need directly related to the potential commercial feasibility of the idea or technology in question.”
In a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian, OCINO Senior Executive Director Thomas Logan wrote that pre-commercial technologies represent innovations that “have the potential to result in meaningful and practical application in the marketplace.”
“The earliest stages of technology innovation are inherently risky and typically have a high failure rate,” he wrote, adding that NextUP will help reduce the level of risk by helping researchers “fill information gaps that potential industry partners typically look for before they are willing to enter into partnerships or commit further investment.”
Logan explained that possible “good candidates” for the program may include “a software application requiring initial beta testing, creation of an early device protype, or a therapeutic candidate requiring proof of concept in an animal disease model.”
NextUP is intended to serve as an “upstream ‘feeder’ of promising technology” toward programs like the StartUP Fund “that are positioned to further advance innovations towards the market,” according to Logan.
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Penn announced the creation of the StartUP Fund — which is also managed by OCINO — last December. In a release, the office wrote that the “evergreen fund provides vital seed-stage capital investments to qualifying startups” from the Penn community.
Logan added that NextUP is part of Penn’s larger efforts to support innovation and lead in the fields of “technology advancement, translation, and commercialization.”
Funding recipients will be encouraged to participate in the Penn i-Corps program at the Penn Center for Innovation, according to Logan.
Programs like NextUP, StartUP, and Penn i-Corps exist in an ecosystem of University partnerships and regulations that encourage the creation and commercialization of research projects.
These collaborations are rooted in the Bayh-Dole Act, enacted in 1980 so federally funded researchers and their institutions could retain patent rights to their inventions. According to Penn’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research, the act helps “encourage the commercialization of research to benefit the public.”
The NextUP application deadline is on July 31.
