What Is Wake Forest Innovations?

Simplifying Collaboration with Industry

What makes Wake Forest Innovations the ideal partner for supporting your research? We are your dedicated resource for navigating and simplifying collaboration with industry. Whether you are looking to develop your own idea into a medical technology or you want to collaborate with industry on preclinical or clinical research, we have the connections, experience, services and resources to help you advance your work.

About Wake Forest Innovations

Wake Forest Innovations improves health through collaborative innovation between industry and our faculty and staff. We accomplish this by accelerating the development and commercialization of inventions.

What does that mean for you? We partner with you, the faculty and staff of Wake Forest Baptist, to develop your ideas for medical technologies into market-changing innovations by guiding you along the path to innovation: ideation, evaluation, protection, development and licensing.

Wake Forest Innovations also expedites industry access to your specialized preclinical and clinical research capabilities.

How does that help you? We help you find the right industry connections that will lead to new studies by marketing your expertise to industry. We also manage the paperwork and processes through our Alliance Management team, so you can focus on the science.

We also have dedicated staff in Operations and Marketing and Communications who provide support for our customized services.

Learn more about these avenues to industry partnerships.

Why You Should Work with Wake Forest Innovations

Hear from fellow faculty members about how working with Wake Forest Innovations opened up unexpected research opportunities or helped advance their technology ideas.

A New Era of Working with Industry

Only a few decades ago, collaborations between academia and industry were uncommon. But in today’s ever-shifting health care landscape where grant funding is on the decline and medical technology development is increasingly complex, academic-industry partnerships are becoming more common as collaborations become more necessary—and more beneficial—to both parties.

As companies seek new collaborations to support their R&D needs in preclinical and clinical research and to fill their product pipelines with licensed technologies, academic researchers are learning how those partnerships can be beneficial to their work as well:

  • Researchers and industry partners can leverage each other’s unique technologies, capabilities, resources and strengths
  • Collaborators can share expertise, knowledge, risk and reward at all stages
  • Partnerships can accelerate the translation of research discoveries toward finding treatments and products that benefit society
  • Research projects focus on the real-world applications of the work, in addition to answering scientific queries
  • Interactions foster greater trust and communication, which encourages more efficient and successful collaborations

To foster partnerships that advance medical technologies and research, Wake Forest Innovations has a team with research and industry experience to support you in both developing novel technologies or creating industry research partnerships.