By: Fatema Fatakdawala
Today’s Growing Your Business Breakfast with the Experts session will focus on the interesting but elusive topic of Leveraging Your Research Dollars. To provide a better understanding of this area for our entrepreneurs, let us turn to Michael G.H. McGeary et al.’s publication on how to leverage non federal research dollars.
In this publication, the authors have separated how to leverage research funding into two strategies based on the characteristics of your company. The first strategy is as follows. The startup enterprise would pay a portion of the costs of the project in a matching funds process. This cost sharing approach is commonly used for technology development oriented projects and often involves industry-academic collaborations.
The second strategy is termed voluntary co-funding. Some agencies such as NIH or CDC have mechanisms for accepting private dollars to leverage appropriated funds. These types of ventures are formed one by one as federal agencies as well as nonfederal funders see opportunities to leverage their funds by collaborating. This is common in programs that support basic research and that are conducted by individuals or small research teams.
Overall, collaborations are unpredictable and take time to organize. Furthermore, since each case is different, federal agency officials spend a great deal of time and effort per partnership. Therefore, there should be a significant potential benefit for each party to be able to commit their time and resources when implementing these strategies.
Fatema joins the RIC team as the Communications Officer responsible for marketing, social media, event and web management. She is a graduate student pursuing her final year in the Master of Biotechnology program at the University of Toronto Mississauga.
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