ESPRESSOS & ENTREPRENEURS - Academic Venture Studio Teams: Opportunities to Translate Research into Impact

Join fellow faculty, Purdue’s collegiate Innovation & Entrepreneurship Fellows, departmental I&E Ambassadors, our entrepreneurial ecosystem partners from Purdue Innovates and NSF I-Corps as well as local entrepreneurs on Tuesday, March 10^th, 10:00 - 11:00 am (NOTE THE NEW START TIME) in the Gemini Room (NOTE THE NEW LOCATION) - right around the corner from Boiler Up Bar/Leaps Café, next to the Memorial Union’s Great Hall entrance on the first floor - for a complimentary morning beverage on your way into work - to meet, mix and mingle.

“Academic Venture Studio Teams – Opportunities to Translate Research into Impact”

Our entrepreneurial storyteller is Drew Beechler, Vice President of Marketing at Alloy Partners, formerly High Alpha Innovation.  Drew began his career in marketing at ExactTarget, which was later acquired by Salesforce. At Salesforce, Drew spent several years on the product marketing and content marketing teams. Later, he joined High Alpha as part of its initial team, where he built and led the marketing function. Over the past seven years, Drew helped create the venture studio category and co-founded and launched over 35 different startups.

He will share his observations and suggestions for the creation of venture studio teams of faculty, students, alumni and industry partners that can jointly turn Purdue’s vetted research into responsible technologies across the spectrum of our 2,000+ research programs system-wide.  For Purdue’s faculty this means an opportunity to engage, possibly pivot, and contribute their research and engagement expertise to create enterprises around real-life, identified problems for our communities and industries.

In today’s challenging research environment, it seems essential that every scientist considers an innovation/entrepreneurship plan.  This serves to project how scientific outcomes may - with reasonable time, administrative backing and a suitable entrepreneurial support ecosystem – be directly translated into actionable, stakeholder-inspired applications.  Showing that Purdue’s translational research remains highly relevant and tackles pressing and projected community issues is considered - now more than ever – a mission-critical part for all of our professors’, graduate students’ and post-docs’ creative work.

Espressos & Entrepreneurs is the Office of Research’s monthly networking opportunity to meet entrepreneurial storytellers you can relate to.  For a prosperous future empowered by use-inspired research commercialization, we aim high by exploring the building of comprehensive teams and partnerships, joining academic forces from across and beyond the Purdue system, to create new enterprises around stakeholder challenges.

Intrigued?  Espressos on me!

Christian Butzke

Professor and Senior University Fellow for Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Office of Research