Since its launch four years ago, a University of Wisconsin-Madison program has been working with students, faculty, and staff at the school to turn their ideas into startup companies.
But now the program, known as Discovery to Product (D2P) has nearly exhausted the $2.4 million “Igniter” fund D2P has used to invest in entrepreneurs in recent years, said interim director Andy Richards. He said there’s some “concern” that fewer people will come to D2P for help advancing their ideas because, at least for now, they won’t be able to get funding from the organization. However, Richards said, D2P will continue to provide entrepreneurs hands-on support, while also focusing on coordinating entrepreneurship-related activities across the university.
“The Igniter funds are going away,” but D2P is not, Richards said Tuesday during a presentation at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. D2P will continue to function as a “portal, the starting place for campus entrepreneurs,” he said, and will now seek to do more to “help facilitate the coordination of resources and planning with [those] resources in our community and on campus.” Read the full story here.
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