Innovation is challenging.

Even for innovators.

How should university leaders think about innovation and impact? What role should entrepreneurship and technology commercialization have in a university environment? How should resources be deployed? What are the benefits? How should outcomes be measured? What about return on investment? Given an entrepreneurship program, a licensing office, and an incubator, why don't we feel successful?

We hear these questions - and many more - repeatedly from leaders, administrators, donors, faculty and students. Opus Faveo works with universities to answer these and other questions and to create success stories through venture development.  Our policy research activities are ongoing.

Universities and research institutions have historically been the engine for solving the problems of the world. These problems involve not only understanding ourselves, the universe, and our place in it, but also improving the human condition. Economic development is an important mechanism for both propagating innovation and improving the human condition.

By forcing open the wrought-iron gates and creating a path to the world of commerce beyond the cloistered walls and hedges, universities can generate societal and economic benefits that come full circle and reward the university as well.  Those that do this the best, tend to have the most impact - in their own regions and globally.

Opus Faveo terms this the Virtuous Innovation Circle™. And we measure this through our proprietary Innovation Impact Score™.

With a focus on real-world impact, Opus Faveo works with leaders and key stakeholders of universities and research institutions to better understand their challenges of innovation and to develop and improve programs to address them. We then partner with the institution, and its faculty and students, to create success stories through new venture creation and development.

In a time of radical change in the nature of both university education and fundamental research, leaders of universities and research institutions face many challenges: some are administrative, some are managerial, and some are existential. And the President's Office is a vantage point for the broader stakeholders in institutional leadership, including administration, trustees and regents, donors, alumni, and political leaders, all of whom are seeking to understand and address these challenges.

We put these challenges in two discrete categories:

1. Challenges of education, relating to the process of teaching students, and

2. Challenges of research, focused on the process of generating original research, especially in the "hard sciences", but also in the social sciences.

Effective innovation management and venture development can, and should, have a beneficial effect on both categories. We list a number of such challenges below, many of which may be quite familiar. Opus Faveo helps create and optimize integrated innovation management solutions that can have a substantive, measurable, positive impact on all of these challenges.

Over the past decade, most universities have added programs to spur the commercialization of university-developed technology. These include:

• Technology Transfer Offices
• Accelerators
• Incubators
• Captive Venture Capital Funds

However, most of these programs either seek to:

• Sell available technology to (often large) commercial enterprises via license agreements, or
• Assist entrepreneurs arising from the university ecosystem.

While both goals are important components for generating innovation impact, they leave many sources of such impact floundering on the laboratory floor for lack of the right buyer or the right entrepreneur.