Case Study: NCInnovation
For more than 30 years, we’ve operated in the action-oriented nexus of business, politics, and policy. We understand the exponential impact of leading leaders to take action. That core competency helped bring to life a novel public-private partnership that’s earned national attention: NCInnovation.
In the mid-2010s, a group of business leaders organized by The Results Company began looking at the UNC System’s capacity to drive economic growth in parts of North Carolina that haven’t seen the same success as the Triangle. By that time, other states had begun investing heavily in their “innovation ecosystems” – symbiotic partnerships between academia, industry, and finance that produce new companies and jobs in research-intensive fields like life sciences.
.jpg)
The group raised private funds to commission research and identify opportunities for North Carolina to compete with – or leap ahead of – other states. Over several years, curiosity turned into data gathering; data gathering turned into an idea; the idea turned into a strategic plan; and that plan turned into a nonprofit corporation called NCInnovation.
NCInnovation operates on the idea that UNC institutions, including those outside of the state’s traditional research hotspots, undertake applied research that has great commercial promise – but many of those promising projects fail to move from the lab to the marketplace. NCInnovation provides research grants and business-oriented support to public university researchers to help them push through the university R&D sequence, reaching the point they can attract private investment. Doing so will increase the volume of startups, licensing deals, and jobs that come out of UNC System schools.
In 2023, the North Carolina General Assembly allocated $500 million into an endowment for this purpose. The interest and investment returns from that endowment fund NCInnovation’s university research grants, while private sector contributions fund the organization’s overhead and other expenses.
Many view NCInnovation as a smart, promising model to advance public university applied research toward commercialization.