Tennessee platform looks to connect academic research with business
Barry Winiker via Getty Images
By
Chris Teale
The Tennessee Innovation Exchange provides a central repository for institutions and the private sector to partner and showcase their expertise.
Tennessee contains numerous universities, each producing world-leading research, but no central place for businesses, other partners and their academic peers to find that research. A nonprofit is looking to change that.
Launch Tennessee, or LaunchTN, is a public-private partnership with the state that works to support business development and innovation, and last month it launched the Tennessee Innovation Exchange, known as TNIX. The centralized digital platform acts as a repository for the research of participating universities and showcases the expertise of their academics and researchers.
Participating universities for the initial launch are Tennessee State University, Meharry Medical College, Tennessee Tech, Middle Tennessee State University, East Tennessee State University and the University of Memphis. Those institutions are all members of LaunchTN’s Tennessee Technology Advancement Consortium, an effort to help boost the state’s innovation economy and promote cooperation between academia, with the option for more to join in the future.
“TNIX represents a major step forward in Tennessee’s innovation infrastructure,” LaunchTN CEO Lindsey Cox said in a statement. “By giving visibility to the incredible research happening across our universities, we’re strengthening the pipeline between discovery and real-world impact.”
The innovation exchange has its roots in a report prepared just over two years ago for LaunchTN to measure how Tennessee compared to 11 peer states in various economic development metrics. Among the report’s various recommendations, it suggested creating a central repository for academic research, as well as a number of other proposals.
“We know there's great research happening at these universities,” Cox said in an interview. “It's just not being elevated and accessed by industry. So how can we make that happen? How can we facilitate that opportunity? That's really the genesis for the innovation exchange platform.”
A key part of the exchange is to help bring people closer together, officials said. It can be tricky to get academia, government and the private sector all on the same page when it comes to influencing policy or learning what research is being done on campuses across the state. This exchange can help break down some of those barriers, they said.
“In terms of research and development partnerships, the most significant driver for that is relationships,” said Charles Layne, LaunchTN’s technology advancement director. “It's one of the hardest things to scale and then actually build out that human network, that infrastructure…There is a front door for not just advancing the research enterprise on campus, but identifying those industry partners and others.”
TNIX also complements the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development’s Innovation and Research for Industry Success grant program, which looks to stimulate and incentivize research and development in the state and partnerships with academic institutions.
The exchange is built on the Halo platform, which connects businesses with research and experts to help bring products to market faster, and it provides a place for academics to pitch their ideas and expertise, among others. The platform will pull information on an institution, their researchers and their capabilities and populate that with other details about available facilities and the like.
Kevin Leland, Halo’s CEO, said in a statement that the effort “will make Tennessee one of the most accessible research networks in the country.”
“If you are an industry partner, or someone conducting or leading corporate research and development in Tennessee, you can go into the Tennessee Innovation Exchange, post a request for proposals or submit a challenge, and say, ‘We have this technical problem that we're searching for some new capability for, we would like to seed and invest, or support research from these institutions in Tennessee for solving this problem,’” Layne said.
Cox said she hopes TNIX can help spark a five-fold increase in the amount of private-sector research and development in Tennessee, something she said represents a “good stretch goal for us to be focused on.” Layne said it can help make Tennessee be seen as a “friendly place for conducting research and development.”