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The University of Pittsburgh is a city campus complete with a 4-year accredited undergraduate program, which is complemented by numerous prestigious graduate programs such as the School of Medicine, School of Law, School of Pharmacy, and School of Business. The University of Pittsburgh receives $760 annually to fund its various research endeavors. These research dollars have cultivated an environment that has fostered the growth of an incredibly young yet impressive entrepreneurial landscape. Pitt is a giant in life science innovation, partnering its engineering and business programs with the international conglomerate UPMC has yielded a plethora medical device inventions and innovations in addition to numerous patents, start-ups, and licensing opportunities. This success is trickling down through the ranks allowing students to become instrumental in large entrepreneurial pursuits. Programs such as the Coulter Program and CMI fund medical innovation and are beginning to recognize the untapped potential of undergraduate innovators. In addition, opportunities like the Randall Family Big Idea Competition help support any venture at the university .Through special project funds and micro grants these programs are giving students a chance to contribute to Pitt’s entrepreneurial success. Undergraduate funding is an incredibly new standard for our entrepreneurial faculty and the overwhelming success of the pilot groups of undergraduate teams has ensured the sustainability of undergraduate funding for years to come.
Update 2016: All of the programs and oppurtunities listed above continue to play a large role in the I&E landscape today. Coulter and CMI are powerful programs that continue to be relevant today, and DesignHub, a project based student organization, has leveraged a partnership with CMI to generate project teams to solve medical device problems at UPMC. The Big Idea Competition has grown from two years ago, and is now a huge, university wide event. The engineering and business schools are increasingly pushing funding and students towards I&E. We have come a long way over the past two years, and more and more undergraduates are becoming involved in the movement. At the same time, faculty are increasingly realizing the power of cultivating a community of innovators.
= Faculty Innovation and Entrepreneurship =