Enabling Innovation: "Creating and Funding High-Impact Startups" is an initiative of the National Council of Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer (NCET2) in colloboration with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to explore avenues to accelerate the innovation process by bringing together leaders from universities, the investment community, industry and government. The Series aims to assemble the leaders in the innovation process in order to encourage entrepreneurship and enhance the transformation of discoveries made in university and federal laboratories into innovations that create jobs and benefit society as a whole. The conclusions and recommendations of the participants will be summarized in a Final Report on "Creating and Funding High-Impact Startups" that will be posted on the NSF website in 2008.

The Deans-VCs Summit scheduled for July 25, 2007 is the first event of the Series. It is also the first forum of its kind to bring together high-level university decision-makers and members of the venture capital (VC) community together to discuss enabling the innovation process in this way. The goal of this Summit is to initiate the much-needed dialogue between the academic and financial enablers of university-based innovation in order to increase the flow of great ideas from universities into our nation’s economic engine. As part of this initial conversation we want to cover the issues faced both by VCs and universities that are currently hindering sustainable startup creation and funding based on federally-funded, university-developed R&D.

The July Summit will be followed by a conference in October 2007 and online events in 2008. During each of these subsequent gatherings we will expand on the knowledge gained during the previous ones and involve more investors, both large and small industry representatives and university officials from around the country into the exchange. The ideas and suggestions from all who participate in the dialogue will be incorporated into the Final Report.