The Entrepreneur Connect Initiative, a project of Brown Technology Innovations (BTI), pairs seasoned entrepreneurs with faculty inventors to work on specific university intellectual properties with the goal of creating fundable start-ups. The entrepreneurs conduct customer discovery and bring a market perspective to the academic research, and the faculty inventors observe how the entrepreneurs approach their findings. 

Once the entrepreneur and inventor have brought a project to maturity, the Entrepreneur Connect Initiative markets the opportunity to interested investors, drawing on angel investors and venture capitalists from both groups’ networks. In cases in which BBII has provided financial and project management support for a research project, the BTI team offers guidance on how to achieve both scientific and business goals. 

The start-up XM Therapeutics is a good example of the initiative’s successful matchmaking. Members of the Entrepreneur Connect Initiative introduced entrepreneur Frank Ahmann to Jeffrey Morgan, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Brown who had developed a technology for making extracellular matrix particles for use in treating damaged tissue in various organs. Together they formed the Rhode Island-based XM Therapeutics; Ahmann became president and CEO.