UMass Lowell has several innovation and entrepreneurship related initiatives that support students and faculty to pursue their venture ideas.
Collectively, these initiatives provide an opportunity for students and faculty to go from idea to validation to launching of a venture. Students can tap into resources such as faculty and mentors to assist them in articulating and validating ideas, customer discovery process, prototyping, pitch contests, seed money, incubation, etc.
Faculty engaged in research can pursue commercialization of their intellectual property.
These initiatives are:
- Differencemaker - DifferenceMaker® is a campus-wide program that engages UMass Lowell students in creative problem solving, innovation and entrepreneurship.
- iHub - Innovation Hub offers premiere coworking space in both Lowell and Haverhill providing you the benefits of a research university at a price that startups can afford
- M2D2 - Medical Device Development Center (M2D2) is a lifeline for the state’s smaller medical device companies, offering inventors and executives easy, affordable, and coordinated access to world-class researchers and resources at the UMass Lowell and the UMass Medical School campuses of the University of Massachusetts.
- New Venture Development - provides a path for university-owned innovation to become a startup. We also provide support and resources for external startups seeking to do business with the university
- Technology Transfer - the Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) supports the commercialization of inventions emerging from research conducted at UMass Lowell. OTC provides researchers with the support to analyze and achieve the full potential of their inventions and to develop a commercialization plan for each technology.
- Mentoring - Mentor Program is a committed network of mentors with a broad set of skills and professional experience assisting UMass Lowell entrepreneurs in building knowledge and growing startups. This is important for continued entrepreneurial growth at the University and within the culture of our faculty and students.
- River Hawk New Venture Funds – enables startup ventures to go from seed investment levels to launch the venture.