Western Medical Innovation Fellowship
Innovation fellowship programs have been developed in the United States to immerse highly talented young scientists, engineers and clinicians in training and research environments that build innovation leaders and create novel medical technologies, instilling a culture of entrepreneurship in them. Fellows begin in the classroom, learning topics relevant to business and technology commercialization, prior to being immersed in clinics, where they identify market needs. They then develop and prototype solutions by working with researchers, clinicians and technology transfer offices to generate new intellectual property. Alumni of these programs have become leaders in industry, research and health care, and many have formed new companies.
Through our mandate to diversify Canada’s economy and foster an entrepreneurial spirit in a generation of trainees, Western’s BrainsCAN initiative has committed more than $3.5 million to this program. We see it as an opportunity to make a substantial contribution to training the next generation of innovation catalysts, fostering both innovation and the skills to capitalize on it. As one of the possible locations for clinical immersion, BrainsCAN hopes to leverage these Fellows in collaboratively developing new and novel medical technologies to address areas of clinical need in cognitive neuroscience.
How can BrainsCAN Researchers Benefit?
The Western Medical Innovation Fellows program is a unique opportunity to engage with an elite team of highly entrepreneurial clinicians and scientists with experience in medical commercialization. For BrainsCAN researcher led clinical/research immersion, the entrepreneurial team will examine a medically relevant process and the proposed problem. The Fellows’ objective is to identify needs with strong commercial potential, providing a detailed market analysis on proposals with an identified need. The high potential needs can lead to valuable IP and generation of spin-off companies by the Fellows. IP ownership depends on the researcher’s willingness to be involved in the innovation lifecycle from identifying needs during the immersion phase to prototype development and testing, and their contribution to the IP creation.
The training and experience the Fellows receive will serve to reduce the risk of commercialization/start-up paths by equipping them with knowledge, connections to mentors, industry partners and investors, and having already identified and tested markets for their innovations.
For more information, see the Western Medical Innovation Fellowship program’s own website - http://medicalinnovation.ca
Contact Information:
For more information regarding the Western Medical Innovation Fellowship program, please contact:
Sarah Hutchinson,
Program Director
WORLDiscoveries, Western University
Telephone: 519-661-4192
sarah.hutchison@uwo.ca
For questions regarding alignment with BrainsCAN specifically, please email brainscan@uwo.ca.
