Innovation at the University of Chicago has a powerful history. Companies generated from the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship have been far and away the most successful university start-ups in Illinois, according to a February survey on campus entrepreneurship from the Illinois Science & Technology Coalition. The survey found that since 1996, 20 of the 23 university start-ups that have experienced successful “exits,” or purchases, have come out of the University of Chicago.
Two of the most successful are Grubhub and Braintree, fast-growing companies that began less than a decade ago as student projects funded by the Polsky Center’s New Venture Challenge. GrubHub, a restaurant ordering service, held a successful initial public offering of stock in early April and is now valued at more than $2 billion. Last year, Braintree, a mobile payment platform with more than 40 million customers worldwide, was acquired by eBay for $800 million.
Since 2001, UChicagoTech, the University of Chicago Center for Technology Development and Ventures, has been at the forefront of commercializing faculty research dedicated heavily to science and technology. “What we do is probably 10 to 20 percent of the innovation activity on campus; it’s a specialized corner,” says Alan Thomas, the center’s director. “When it works, we create drugs or devices that have massive impact, and sometimes very significant revenues.”
One of UChicagoTech’s biggest coups has been in commercializing cutting-edge breast cancer detection technology, pioneered by radiology professor Maryellen Giger, a leading researcher nationally in computer-aided diagnosis of mammograms. Giger’s initial innovation (called CADe) “is now mainstream,” she says, serving about 70 percent of women who have mammograms at large hospitals. Its improved early detection capability may have saved thousands of lives.
During the 1990s, CADe was licensed to the company R2 Technology, which became “one of the first, biggest, and best” in computer-aided diagnosis,” Thomas says, and was purchased by a large women’s health corporation. Since then, Giger has built on her earlier work, launching the company Quantitative Insights and its product QuantX, which offers radiologists vastly improved breast screening abilities.
Thomas says if Giger had simply published her research without exploring its entrepreneurial potential, “everyone would have said, ‘very interesting!’” But commercializing those life-saving technologies made their widespread use possible. “Taking the commercial route to market got things adopted at a much bigger scale and a lot quicker,” Thomas say.
—Prof. Kunle Odunsi
