The University of New Haven is partnering with two nonprofits to help students commercialize their inventions, and to offer student inventors tuition-free education.
UNH announced it will work with commercialization specialists FORGE and NextMinds, formerly the Connecticut Invention Convention on the initiative.
The collaborative framework, called Connecticut Invents, will offer selected student inventors from NextMind’s invention convention program full tuition at the University of New Haven.
FORGE will contribute commercialization expertise, including product development advisory services for the students, introductions to prototyping and manufacturing resources and industry strategy.
The University of New Haven said it will assume responsibility for IP maintenance, legal protections and business support for the selected students’ inventions, also supplying entrepreneurial resources, research facilities and faculty mentorship.
NextMinds will guide the most marketable of its more than 10,000 annual inventors toward the program.
The partnership was conceived by Paul Lavoie, Connecticut’s former chief manufacturing officer and now vice president of Innovation and Applied Technology at University of New Haven.
