Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Leeds School of Business—Meet Tanner and Rebekah, two visionaries from Leeds who are reshaping how we think about healthy snacking. The idea for Better Bites sprouted from Tanner’s personal health and wellness journey. They’ve competed in the New Venture Challenge's (NVC) General Competition and Women Founders Competition.

College of Engineering and Applied Science—Rajshekar Guda Subhash, a computer science master's thesis student, is using brain signals to interact with augmented and virtual reality, potentially eliminating the need for physical actions. His work has been accepted to the flagship conference in computer-human interaction, CHI 2024.

2023 was another tremendous year for innovation at the University of Colorado Boulder. Campus researchers and inventors created a strong crop of 162 breakthrough technologies this past year. These spanned the breadth of CU Boulder’s research expertise, with innovations in climate tech, biotechnology, quantum science, optics and aerospace, to name a few. CU Boulder's commercialization arm, Venture Partners at CU Boulder, supports a groundbreaking pipeline translating research into real-world impact, as highlighted in their 2023 Annual Report.

The 2024 New Venture Challenge (NVC) culminated in a final showcase on April 17 in front of a live audience cheering on the University of Colorado Boulder’s next big innovations. At an event filled with great ideas and even greater entrepreneurial spirit, five teams competed for $165,000 in prize money.

CU Independent—Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder are working to make the moon habitable. And they are focused on one of the most difficult challenges to lunar living: dust. Xu Wang, a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at CU Boulder, was one of the winners of NASA’s 2023 Entrepreneurs Challenge.

Popular Mechanics—Scientists from CU Boulder have created an atomic clock using lasers and strontium atoms that is incredibly accurate—only losing one second every 40 billion years. Roughly twice as accurate as the previous record holder, this clock could (theoretically) tick with accurate time for nearly three times the universe's age.

College of Arts & Sciences—A group of seven physics students, staff, and faculty were recently awarded funding from the College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Innovation Fund for their proposal to improve undergraduate research for underrepresented and minority groups in STEM disciplines. The grant will support two key initiatives including an undergraduate research expo and a research fellowship fund.

The Intermountain West innovation ecosystem came together at the sixth annual Destination Startup Investor Showcase hosted by Venture Partners at CU Boulder. In a highly competitive field, twenty-two select ventures from the region’s research institutions presented at the showcase.

The New Venture Challenge (NVC) and Deming Center for Entrepreneurship teamed up to present the NVC Women Founders competition, awarding $10,000 to groundbreaking new ventures.

The New Venture Challenge (NVC) and Venture Partners at CU Boulder teamed up to present the NVC Deep Tech competition, awarding $53,000 to groundbreaking new ventures.