Rotary Welcomes Harbert Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Executive Director Kathy Nugent

This week the Rotary Club of Birmingham welcomed Dr. Kathy Nugent, Executive Director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham Harbert Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Nugent explained the institute’s role in identifying, assessing and marketing commercially viable UAB technologies and fostering an entrepreneurial ecosystem that provides the infrastructure for faculty, staff and students to commercialize campus innovation.

Nugent shared that so far in 2021, there have been 127 intellectual property disclosures, $4.87M in revenue generated, 19 U.S. patents, 3 new startup companies and over 500 inventors engaged through the program. She explained how the institute works closely with entities such as Innovation Depot, Alabama Capital Network, Southern Research Task Force, Prosper Healthtech Accelerator and First Avenue Ventures Fund to recruit and identify leadership, funding sources and other support mechanisms as companies enter the marketplace.

“Tech transfer is a very complicated process,” Nugent said. “The approach we take is very proactive, very progressive, creative. We want to get every deal done that we can possibly get done and make our industry partner happy and make our faculty member happy. Ultimately, at the end of the day, what we’re focused on is doing the very best thing for the technology.”

Nugent highlighted the successful companies the institute has helped establish and she described the exciting promise of emerging technologies such as Zorroflow, Resilience and Offloading Boot.

“We’ve really focused on the startup companies because we think that’s part of the key to economic development in Birmingham. We have so many great resources here already. We want to make sure that we’re tapping into them and we’re leveraging everything that we have and that we’re allowing our community to leverage everything it has too so that we can really lift all these boats at the same time.”