In the Spotlight: NH Business Review Feature

Last Updated on Monday, October 24 2011 13:30

Idea Greenhouse is excited to be featured in this week's NH Business Review!

NHBR is a vital publication for NH entrepreneurs and their supporters, and we're humbled by the very accurate and positive front pager by super-journalist Mike McCord.

Here's a tease, or read the entire article over on the NH Business Review website. We should all thank NHBR for not succumbing to the "pay wall" mentality taking over NH's online newspapers. For now, all their stories are available for free online.

Elliott said he was able to launch the Idea Greenhouse so quickly because of the quick involvement by UNH, which rented 30 percent of the space.

The UNH "partnership helped provide the Idea Greenhouse with much of the financial support we need to get off the ground, while at the same time adding an impressive group of innovators to interact with our other members," Elliott said.

Jan Nisbet, senior vice provost for research at UNH, called the partnership "a great example of thinking outside the box. We want to promote the intellectual property of the UNH community as well as foster partnerships between UNH and the business communities in Durham, in New Hampshire, northern New England, the nation and the world. This is another opportunity for UNH to contribute to job creation in the state."

Marc Sedam, a former biotech executive who last year became executive director of the university's Office for Research Partnerships and Commercialization, said the goal of the Idea Greenhouse partnership was to make informal creative space available for UNH entrepreneurs and offer an "ecosystem of innovation."

In particular, it would be a small but important avenue to get professors and researchers out of their academic office to focus on their ideas - and boost UNH's commercialization efforts.

"This partnership was one of my first priorities when I joined the university," Sedam said.

He described the space on Jenkins Court as "a creative commons," where researchers don't have to worry about using official university time and resources before knowing whether an idea will succeed.

Read the whole piece, and be sure to get to know NHBR.