Comment on Rutgers offers a one-stop innovation shop for its aspiring founders

The commercialization and technology transfer arm of the storied Baltimore university is helping to foster the region’s burgeoning tech scene. Attracting early-stage investment is never simple, but aspiring founders in Silicon Valley and New York and Singapore take for granted that even if individual deals can be hard to secure, there sure is a lot of money flowing.

In the fiscal year 2024, the New Jersey university’s Office for Research supported 162 new inventions, 123 patents, and 104 active startups. The journey of any invention from inspirational spark to marketable product is complicated under the best of circumstances—even more so when the inventor hails from a university campus. To bring their best ideas out of a lab and into the hands of the public, such founder-researchers must learn a set of skills they might struggle to pick up in the hallowed halls of academia: the art of securing capital.

Researchers at Arizona State University, Harvard University, and Georgia Institute of Technology view AI as a tool, not as a threat. A year and a half ago, in the wake of ChatGPT’s enormously popular release, instructors at every educational level rushed to understand how the coming onslaught of artificial intelligence might transform their field, even disrupt it.

The universities cultivate fertile ground for budding entrepreneurs to grow their ideas into businesses. Many future founders arrive on campus the first time just like the rest of us, unsure of which major they’ll declare, let alone whether their startup idea could be a billion-dollar business. The commitment to building a company—the confidence that takes—appears only once they’re immersed in college life.

As we move from ambition to action on climate, realities are starting to hit. Many companies that have set climate targets are struggling to meet them—particularly when it comes to their scope 3 supply chain emissions. We need to rapidly limit deforestation—but we need new forms of finance to do so.

Following the first cut in the Federal Reserve’s benchmark interest rate in more than four years, Denver real estate broker Bret Weinstein has advice for would-be homebuyers looking to capitalize on the move. “People, if they want to buy, realistically should buy right now,” said Weinstein, founder and CEO of Guide Real Estate. The Fed lowered its rate last week to about 4.8% from 5.3%.