This project will accelerate the University of Central Florida’s (UCF’s) contributions to the regional and global innovation ecosystem centered in the Central Florida area. UCF is part of a strong and supportive innovation ecosystem primed for research translation. UCF has partnerships and collaborations with the sectors of space, aerospace, health, defense (optics and lasers, AI/ML/computer vision, digital twin, simulation, and modeling), energy, and many others. Accelerating UCF research translation will create an enormous economic development opportunity since UCF already produces high levels of fundamental research. This project will create the infrastructure needed to connect to industry fundamental research produced by UCF and to train diverse talent to meet the needs of the Central Florida ecosystem and the nation’s ecosystem.  Because of the industry sectors (space, aerospace, defense, and energy), and the global nature of the companies involved, this project will have national and global positive impact on economic growth, societal wellbeing, and national security.

The goal of this project is to enhance the research translation capacity of UCF by building missing components and by leveraging existing infrastructure with the assistance of our mentor, Georgia Tech, high research translational institution. The project has the following key objectives: (1) enhance research translation capacity by creating a Venture Lab to directly support translation, and by reorganizing entrepreneurial support organizations to follow a more advanced model similar to our mentor institution; (2) expand the educational and training opportunities for students across campus with reprograming and expansions of evidence-based entrepreneurship education at the colleges of engineering and computer science and business; and expand the pathways graduate students can pursue after graduation to include startup development and industrial research and development; (3) Recruit, mentor, and support seven seed translational research projects with the goal of accelerating technology commercialization via licensing to new startup companies or to existing industry partners. (4) Create, expand, and sustain a network of entrepreneurship and innovation ambassadors from industry and community partners in support of the project objectives 1-3.