University President Ronald J. Daniels announced a new $40 million initiative on March 4 to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation. The plan is in response to a May 2014 innovation report, which called for three major proposals to foster innovation: a new, designated space in East Baltimore; seed funding and an investment fund; and more commercialization services, infrastructure, education and policies to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship.
Fifteen million dollars will be allocated to the new space, $10 million to the new funding and $15 million to resources and policies.
A new group, Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures (JHVI), will be handling these new ventures.
“[JHVI] will encompass technology licensing, corporate and industrial relations and FastForward [Hopkins’ existing innovation center],” Daniels and Miller wrote in the forward to the report.
“Our emphatic conclusion is that the University needs to take a broad range of steps to strengthen its innovation ecosystem, in a manner that spans the entire Johns Hopkins community,” the report stated.
The innovation space in East Baltimore will open in late 2016 and be located at 1812 Ashland Street, within walking distance of Johns Hopkins Hospital, the medical campus and the schools of nursing, business and education. The space will be open to the entire Baltimore community, with low rent for those within and outside Hopkins, in an effort to expand the FastForward innovation space on the Homewood campus.
The grant program will provide funding for technological innovation efforts, Hopkins start-up companies and undergraduate business proposals. The report identifies a lack of venture funding opportunities in Baltimore, and the new center will try to compensate for that deficiency.
Another goal of the initiative is to create an entrepreneurs-in-residence (EIR) center that will be available for business advice. The center will provide new entrepreneurship education opportunities, including an expanded version of a summer entrepreneurship bootcamp, which is organized by the Whiting School of Engineering, the Carey Business School and the School of Medicine, and is similar in style to the reality competition series Shark Tank. One session of last year’s bootcamp featured nearly 70 doctors, researchers and other healthcare professionals.
The main goal of the new initiative is to foster innovation and the creation of new Baltimore-focused businesses using Hopkins capital.
Correction: This article formerly stated that Edward Miller is the dean of the Hopkins School of Medicine. He retired from the position in 2012 and was succeeded by Paul B. Rothman, the current dean.
