Funding Resources

The CoMotion Innovation Fund is a partnership between CoMotion and the Washington Research Foundation to provide up to $1 million per year for applied research. Our mission is to fund and support projects that have a high chance to have impact but are unlikely to get there without gap funding. The Innovation Fund program is intended to help technologies get across the "valley of death" between the conclusion of academic research grants and the level of development at which they can attract seed stage investment.

Seed stage investment could come from commercial investors, but also from investors looking for social rather than commercial impact.

For more information, please click here.

The Business Plan Competition (BPC) is a platform for student-led ventures. The competition provides student teams with mentoring from entrepreneurs and investors, the opportunity to tell their stories to the Seattle startup community, and the visibility they need to get going. More than 3,730 students have participated in this annual new venture competition since its inception in 1998, and the Buerk Center has awarded 139 teams with over $1.2 million in seed funding.

The Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship at the Foster School produces the annual Alaska Airlines Environmental Innovation Challenge in partnership with the College of Engineering and the College of the Environment, sponsored in part by CoMotion. Interdisciplinary teams of business and engineering students are challenged to develop products that address up-and-coming market conditions and show potential to generate revenue while enhancing environmental sustainability. In 2014, CoMotion-sponsored Korvata won the $10,000 grand prize for their cutting edge alternative energy product that allows companies to mitigate their environmental impact by replacing the use of nitrous oxide as a whipped cream propellant. Learn more at the Buerk Center website.

New in 2016, the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship launched the Health Innovation Challenge, providing an exciting opportunity for student teams from across the Pacific Northwest to develop good ideas that will improve treatments and systems in the healthcare space. New medical devices, global health solutions, fitness apps, informatics, business models and more are topics the interdisciplinary teams bring forward. They produce a simulation or prototype, along with a business summary, and have the opportunity to pitch their ideas to a room full of expert judges from the community. This challenge is in partnership with the College of Engineering and supported in part by CoMotion.

Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) promotes university-industry partnerships by making project funds or fellowships/traineeships available to support an eclectic mix of industry-university linkages. Special interest is focused on affording the opportunity for:

• Faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and students to conduct research and gain experience in an industrial setting;
• Industrial scientists and engineers to bring industry's perspective and integrative skills to academe; and
• Interdisciplinary university-industry teams to conduct research projects.

Solicitation for these grants tends to emphasize high-risk/high-reward research, with a focus on fundamental research, new approaches to solving generic problems, development of innovative collaborative industry-university educational programs, and direct transfer of new knowledge between academe and industry. GOALI seeks to fund transformative research that lies beyond that which industry would normally fund. Learn more.

The overall objective of the Partnerships for Innovation: Accelerating Innovations Research-Technology Transfer (PFI:AIR-TT) program is to provide funding that will enable research discoveries to be translated onto a path toward commercial reality while engaging faculty and students in entrepreneurial and market-oriented thinking. The PFI:AIR-TT solicitation supports research to overcome technology barriers/knowledge gaps in the translation of NSF-funded fundamental science and engineering discoveries toward market-valued solutions. It provides an opportunity for investigators to conduct the necessary research to develop a proof-of-concept, prototype, or scale-up of the prototype that addresses real-world constraints and provides a competitive value in a potential application space. Learn more.

CoMotion provides assistance and, in some cases takes the lead, in writing applications for these federal programs as part of the commercialization strategy for UW researchers. SBIR and STTR grants are particularly valuable for UW start-ups in supporting product development, translational research, and applied projects. SBIR Phase I awards start at $150,000 and Phase II awards start at $1M and can increase to as much as $2M.

Through these two competitive programs, the US Small Business Administration (SBA) ensures that the nation’s small, high-tech, innovative businesses are a significant part of the federal government’s research and development efforts. SBIR and STTR programs provide more than $2.5 billion in grants and contracts each year to small businesses and start-up companies to develop new products and services based on advanced technologies. Some participating agencies have a hard ceiling for their awards. Learn more here.

Contact us for more information on applying for SBIR/STTR grants.

The mission of the WRF is “to increase the value of intellectual property arising from research institutions across the state.” WRF makes strategic gifts to research projects, and its associated venture capital arm invests in university start-ups.

WRF gifts have supported the creation of more than 100 endowments for chairs, professorships, research fellowships and graduate stipends in science, medicine and engineering. Educational programs created and supported by WRF include the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (UW Foster School of Business) and the Program for Technology Commercialization (UW Bioengineering). WRF was a founding supporter of CoMotion’s Innovation Fund program and gap funding programs at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Washington State University. The gifts to Washington State research institutions are targeted to projects with commercial potential. Learn more.