i6 Challenge grant

I just wanted to let you know Catalyzing Collaboration successfully submitted an application for the i6 Challenge grant. We will keep you informed of the progress of our application.

 

We could not have done this without the collaborative efforts from others!

 

Thank you for your help in our submission.

 

Ron Kirschner, MD

Catalyzing Collaboration

 

 

 

 

 

Catalyzing Collaboration Grant Proposal

Executive Summary

 

Catalyzing Collaboration seeks funding to create a framework and processes with which

to identify, organize, and facilitate technology-related entrepreneurial activities in the

Chicago-Cook County region with special emphasis on centers of technology and

entrepreneurship. We believe this will promote a new ecosystem more conducive to

technology start-ups. Initially these activities will be applied to the local major

universities, with eventual expansion to include other non-university affiliated centers as

well.

 

The framework and processes include:

 

• Assisting our university and private research institutions to make their research

more accessible to those who might be able to make use of it (that is,

entrepreneurs);

• Facilitating entrepreneurs and researchers to find and to work with each other, in

other words, to create a community;

• Creating innovative and more efficient methods of obtaining local venture capital

interest to enable the focus to be on constant growth rather than on mere

survival;

• Streamlining the identification of community-focused commercial and financial

resources to decrease bureaucratic and institutional barriers;

• Encouraging industry to engage start-up companies with creative ways to share

human resources (e.g., management, boards and/or advisors) and ideas (for

example, via crowd sourcing);

• Seeking new financing approaches to facilitate prototype testing;

• Increasing the visibility of entrepreneurial successes and resources available

locally;

• Leveraging the power of the Internet to promote technology dispersion, social

networking, and scientific collaboration.

 

This model both encourages and rewards the integration of the private and public

sector. It looks to individuals and institutions to work for the success of others, because

that effort benefits their own self-interests. It relies on the historic ingenuity and

creativity of individuals who have made each generation’s contribution to future

generations so exciting and unpredictable. It is a model that can be used in a small town

with a teen-age girl tinkering in her dad’s garage as well as in large metropolitan areas

with technology valleys, pastures and corridors.

 

Catalyzing Collaboration will orchestrate this partnership approach. The power of the

collaboration increases with each new supporter of the process, whether it is an

internationally well-known institution or private citizen practicing his/her profession.

The charter members range from universities, such as Northwestern University and

Rush University, to small private businesses, such as Mark Partridge and his law firm,

Partridge IP Law.

 

This combined bottom-up and top-down approach will bring together individuals,

companies and institutions. It proactively leverages the existing financial, educational

and governmental resources at the local, county, state and federal levels with the new

paradigms of personal and professional collaboration (as Facebook has so aptly

demonstrated). It realizes that the challenges to technology commercialization are

almost always due to resource constraints, and most of these constraints are due to the

limited knowledge base and the limited personal network of the entrepreneur.

Information and communication technologies can now have people bridge these gaps.

 

Catalyzing Collaboration’s program will enable the entrepreneur to finally find those key

individuals who know what has to get done and how to do it. The program will marry

face-to-face communications with machine-to-machine communications. The program

will allow the “little guy” in the garage to have on his advisory board the serial

entrepreneur who retired at 40 and the principal of angel group specializing in disruptive

and best-in-class technologies. Thus, businesses begin and grow one at a time,

following people who know where they’re going and how to get there.

This “network of networks” approach will establish this model as the benchmark for life

science development in the same way that Silicon Valley established the benchmark for

IT development. This approach can then be expanded to include science-based

technologies.

 

By creating forums in which human, intellectual and financial capital are joined for a

common purpose, this approach will be the catalyst in the process of innovation.