Over 20 years ago, when Michael Dixon started his career in tech transfer, innovation from Nebraska’s universities often had one path to the outside world: being licensed to a company that would turn early-stage research into viable products.

New disease treatments, medical devices and other technology reached people in need through that pipeline, which rarely included startups. But roughly a decade ago, that started to change.

Research and development costs increased for businesses. In turn, they were more wary of the effort to incubate university ideas. But businesses were willing to buy in again — if universities took their own risks to develop early research for commercial use.

Today, “if we want to see these technologies grow into things that help people, we need to … put together startups,” said Dixon, the CEO of UNeMed, the tech transfer organization for the University of Nebraska Medical Center and the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Startups, with tech transfer support, can “do the necessary pieces to raise money, bring in the talent and put together that plan to de-risk the technology,” he said. “To build it into a product — so ultimately it can be acquired by a company.”

That trend is growing Nebraska’s entrepreneurship ecosystem, including in medtech and healthtech, UNeMed’s specialty. Startups such as Carecubes, University Medical Devices and RespirAI are helping to make a name for the state.

But across Nebraska and the Midwest, the industry shift is also pushing tech transfer to be more nimble, more in tune with industry needs and more hands-on to help innovation leave the university orbit. Like any change, it comes with growing pains.

“The Midwest has seen this culture shift to, ‘There’s a lot of startups that can spin out of universities,’” said Nichole Mercier, an assistant vice chancellor who oversees tech transfer at Washington University in St. Louis.

“I would ask the question of, well, what kind of startups do we want to put out there?” she said. “We can form a startup. I can (create) a paper company tomorrow. But is it going to be one that grows and scales? That’s the kind that I’m interested in.”

A bigger lift

Supporting startups means tech transfer has to do more with less. Most offices lose money on operations, including in Nebraska. Some have also lost staff, like UNeMed, which went from roughly 18 to 11 over the past decade while managing more innovation and entrepreneurship.

But that’s a bet tech transfer needs to make. Tight budgets and unstable federal research funding leave few other options to get money reinvested for researchers and students.

Where traditional licensing offers upfront revenue, startups put tech transfer in a similar position to venture capital: waiting years to recoup costs — which may not happen if the startups don’t grow.

It’s a complex balancing act, “making sure we can provide a win on both sides,” Dixon said. “So that the universities … have some ability to put revenue back into innovation, and that the companies that are commercializing this can generate revenue.”

One of the biggest challenges is finding the right leadership. Not every researcher is cut out to be a startup CEO, and it takes an entrepreneur with experience and patience to work with tech transfer.

That’s something Taylor Korensky, CEO of VisionSync, a strategic planning software startup, has seen up close. The startup is supported by UNeMed and the UNeTech Institute, a university startup incubator.

“I’ve seen tech transfer startups that rotate CEOs because it’s hard to inherently make someone (outside of academia) passionate about something that they just learned about,” Korensky said. “It’s been a hell of a career challenge for me, in a good way.”

Korensky previously founded Appsky, a software development studio that largely works with startups. But VisionSync is based on enterprise software that spent a decade in development and use at UNMC. Since the startup’s founding in 2024, Korensky has spent much of his time working to just understand the product he’s in charge of.

Still, the need for outside founders and entrepreneurship support is also an opportunity to build relationships with the broader startup ecosystem, said Joy Eakin, the entrepreneurship program manager at NUtech Ventures, the tech transfer office for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Likewise, the ecosystem should pay more attention to universities, Korensky said. “Tech transfer is underutilized in Nebraska, and it’s a hidden gem of really cool intellectual property … (university startups) have real legs behind them, but they just take somebody championing them all the way through.”

Devil in the details

VisionSync ended up being somewhat of a guinea pig for Nebraska’s tech transfer evolution. Early on, it agreed to pay a “royalty cut on revenue every year” for licensing IP from UNeMed, Korensky said. “We just wanted to get the company going.” 

But potential investors didn’t like that arrangement. License fees can seem like a liability dragging down a startup. So Korensky and UNeMed changed the license structure to one that is becoming more common for university-affiliated startups: Upfront equity for UNeMed and a larger cut of royalties on future revenue.

That allows VisionSync time to scale without bleeding capital to license fees. It also eases investor concerns and lets UNeMed make money if the startup exits. 

But Korensky still runs up against the other big challenge for tech transfer startups: Investor hesitation and lack of knowledge about spinning out university innovation.

“It is just a different style of doing business,” he said. “We’re not the only tech transfer startup in Nebraska that has run into those problems, too, especially when you add in FDA approval, long medical sales cycles, things like that.”

Part of the issue is that investors and industry partners alike can view tech transfer as being slow-moving and full of red tape. Working with or investing in a startup, let alone sponsoring university research, can be a tedious process. So offices have focused on being more streamlined.

“Taking too long to get contracts out the door, it’s not acceptable,” said Cheryl Horst, executive director of NUtech Ventures, the tech transfer office for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “We need to do better and be faster.”

In 2025, NUtech introduced an express license for UNL researchers to quickly launch their own startups and start fundraising. Designed much like the agreement VisionSync and UNeMed came to, it has no upfront license fee, delays royalty payments for several years and offers two equity options.

In time, Nebraska may see a level of success already happening in other parts of the Midwest. About 15 years ago at the University of Minnesota, tech transfer doubled down on entrepreneurship — and now spins out a new startup practically every other week.

The new era of tech transfer is “definitely higher touch, definitely a lot of custom work, definitely ecosystem building,” said Rick Huebsch, the University of Minnesota’s associate vice president for research and innovation.

“We’ve got some startups that we worked on seven to 10 years ago that are going to start blossoming,” he said. “Those are the ones that will hopefully pay the bills for the others.”

Lev Gringauz is a Report for America corps member who writes about corporate innovation and workforce development for Silicon Prairie News.