I’ve picked on the word “innovation” a lot this week, but here’s something pretty cool from the University of Illinois at Chicago: The just-established Chancellor’s Innovation Fund established $2 million per year for five year fund to “facilitate the transformation of discoveries and technologies originating at UIC into useful products and services that benefit society.”
The fund will be managed by IllinoisVentures, an early stage technology investment firm launched by the University of Illinois. Of the total fund, for half a decade, $1 million will go toward proof-of-concept funding and the other $1 million will be used for equity seed investments in companies closer to market with their ideas.
And, just in case you’re a little hazy on Illinois’ history with important discoveries/creations at universities, the world’s first graphical web browser, Mosaic, was created at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in late 1992. UIC specifically, and more recently, can be credited with the development of Prezista by medicinal researchers, a treatment for HIV.
You can read more about it here via an internal UIC memo and a further analysis over at the Trib.
David Wolinsky is a freelance writer and a lifelong Chicagoan. In addition to currently serving as an interviewer-writer for Adult Swim, he's also a comedy-writing instructor for Second City and an adjunct professor in DePaul’s College of Computing and Digital Media. (He also co-runs a blog behind the DePaul class, DIY Game Dev.) He was the Chicago city editor for The Onion A.V. Club where he provided in-depth daily coverage of this city's bustling arts/entertainment scene for half a decade. His first career aspirations were to be a game-show host.
