VentureWell Membership Renewal
By Maria Gonzalez
RIO GRANDE VALLEY - The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Division of Research and the Office of Technology Commercialization is pleased to announce our university’s VentureWell membership renewal to deliver growth opportunities for innovators from a variety of fields and industries.
VentureWell is a higher education network that helps faculty and student innovators cultivate skills to solve the world’s more pressing challenges through workshops, training, funding, access to networks and awards. The non-profit organization seeks to foster collaboration among faculty and students from labs, classrooms and beyond to advance innovation and entrepreneurship education.
According to their website, over the past 25 years, VentureWell has trained more than 3,000 early-stage innovation teams in fields such as biotechnology, healthcare, sustainable energy and materials, and solutions for low-resource settings and helped launch over 850 ventures that have raised close to $1 billion in public and private investments.
Faculty grantee Dr. Noe Vargas Hernandez, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at UTRGV was awarded a faculty grant for his project titled, A Curricular Exoskeleton to Develop Innovation Skills.
Vargas' project mission focused on developing innovation & entrepreneurship skills in underrepresented engineering students at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and catalyzing change in higher education to impact the world through invention.
VentureWell is a higher education network that helps faculty and student innovators. (courtesy photo)
“The main objective was to promote innovation and entrepreneurship skills in engineering students through the InnoVaqueros Innovation Challenge,” Vargas said. “In this competition multidisciplinary teams of students are presented with a real-life challenge, and over a weekend of work they must present a comprehensive solution that includes a technological design and explain other considerations such as social context, environmental impact and business model,” he said.
The InnoVaqueros Innovation Challenge competition has since then run every year during Engineering Week in the spring semester in both UTRGV Edinburg and Brownsville campuses. This VentureWell funded opportunity has been a partner in Vargas efforts to promote innovation skills and an entrepreneurial mindset in engineering students.
“The immediate impact is on our students developing skills and an entrepreneurial mindset; this mindset helps students identify opportunities of value in any setting they decide to pursue as grad students, working for a company, creating a startup, among others,” Vargas said.
“The longer-term impact is the contribution to the development of an Innovation & Entrepreneurship ecosystem for UTRGV and the RGV region where students will play an important role with their technological solutions and innovations,” he said.
Vargas expressed his gratitude to VentureWell and encouraged others to learn more about the educational network.
“I encourage the UTRGV community to learn more about the opportunities, events, and resources available at VentureWell. VentureWell can be a strategic partner if you share their vision of a world in which science and technology innovators have the support, training, and access to networks and resources they need to solve the world’s most difficult problems,” Vargas said.
VentureWell Faculty Grants provide up to $30,000 to help fund and support faculty with innovative ideas to create new or renovate existing courses and projects to help students develop innovative, STEM-based inventions and gain the necessary entrepreneurial skills needed to bring these ideas to market.
“We've seen a few researchers obtain good results from it, and it may be time for UTRGV to expand its participation,” Fernando Gonzalez, Director of Technology Commercialization said. “So far, the investment each year has easily paid for itself in grant funding alone, but the mentorship and entrepreneurial networks have yet to be tapped.”
For more information about VentureWell, visit https://venturewell.org/.
ABOUT UTRGV
The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) was created by the Texas Legislature in 2013 as the first major public university of the 21st century in Texas. This transformative initiative provided the opportunity to expand educational opportunities in the Rio Grande Valley, including a new School of Medicine, and made it possible for residents of the region to benefit from the Permanent University Fund – a public endowment contributing support to the University of Texas System and other institutions.
UTRGV has campuses and off-campus research and teaching sites throughout the Rio Grande Valley including in Boca Chica Beach, Brownsville (formerly The University of Texas at Brownsville campus), Edinburg (formerly The University of Texas-Pan American campus), Harlingen, McAllen, Port Isabel, Rio Grande City, and South Padre Island. UTRGV, a comprehensive academic institution, enrolled its first class in the fall of 2015, and the School of Medicine welcomed its first class in the summer of 2016.
