Is a $100M university venture capital fund coming to Ohio?

Ohio State University officials are talking up an idea for a $100 million venture capital fund that'd be structured as a partnership between the state's public universities and private industry.

Ohio State University officials are talking up an idea for a $100 million-plus venture capital fund that’d be structured as a partnership between the state’s public universities and private industry.

Plans for the fund are in the early stages, so details remain sketchy. But the idea has one prominent and vocal backer: Ohio State University President Gordon Gee.

Since Gee publicly floated the idea to the Dayton Daily News last week, it’s received a warm reception from officials at several other public institutions in the state, including Ohio University, the University of Dayton and Wright State University.

Gee often has complained that Ohio State hasn’t done enough to commercialize university research to spur economic development, and the proposed venture fund would be designed to remedy that — not just for Ohio State but for a number of other public universities in the state, the Columbus Dispatch reported.

Geoffrey Chatas, Ohio State’s chief financial officer and a former executive with JP Morgan Chase, joined Ohio State in February in part to bring researchers and business people together.

Chatas said it’s too early in the planning stages to say what the fund would look like or how it would work, although it’s likely most of the funding would be private with the universities contributing only a small amount of cash. “The idea is, investors get access to our ideas, and we get access to their expertise,” he told the Daily News.

Ohio State has performed rather dismally in its efforts to commercialize research, and suffers in comparison to the much smaller Ohio University.

Ohio State spent $716 million on research last year but brought in licensing revenues of just $1.7 million. OU, on the other hand, garnered headlines earlier this year when spinoff company Diagnostic Hybrids Inc. was sold for $130 million. OU pulled in $8.2 million in licensing revenues in its most recent fiscal year.

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