Kuali Foundation, Inc.
Community Source Systems by Higher Ed, for Higher Ed
Contact: Jennifer Foutty, Executive Director
http://www.kuali.org
In just five years, the Kuali Foundation, Inc., a not-for-profit organization, has proven to be an effective coordinating organization to leverage cash and staff resources across multiple higher education institutions of all sizes, to collaborate on system design, and to deliver comprehensive administrative systems for higher education, by higher education, as an alternative model to “home grown” or expensive “vended solutions.”
Partners collaborate on system designs that can serve the needs of all Carnegie Class institutions – large or small, public or private. The projects develop enterprise-scale applications that are distributed as freely available software to anyone, without licensing fees or restrictions on reuse (e.g., Educational Community License 2.0). The Kuali Foundation evidences best practices through a community where resources across institutions are efficiently combined, influence and control of systems reside within higher education, and licensing, implementation and maintenance costs for large systems are minimized through shared development of code, while simultaneously building functional expertise within higher education.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Venture Mentoring Service (VMS)
Fostering Innovation: Bridging Academia and Industry
Contact: Sherwin Greenblatt, Director
http://web.mit.edu/vms/
The MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS) harnesses the knowledge and experience of volunteer alumni and other business leaders to help prospective entrepreneurs in the university community bring their ideas and inventions to market. Entrepreneurs receive practical education through an un-biased, hands-on, team mentoring process that builds a trusted long-term relationship. This experiential learning increases the innovation output of the institution through greater commercialization of ideas and university technologies.
The VMS program is effective, adaptable and replicable. VMS has created an “Outreach Program” to proactively disseminate its practices, experiences and methods to other universities and economic development organizations across the US and worldwide. The principal Outreach activities include: presentations to organizations worldwide to evangelize VMS practices, annual workshops to present basics, custom training programs as well as a 3 day Immersion Course, and a user group to exchange learning and practices with those implementing mentoring.
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