Cure
Overview
How a resource-constrained university built a top-15 translation engine — and what other institutions can learn from it.
IU Indianapolis ranks 177th in federal research spending and 15th in market translation — a gap between research investment and commercial output that places it atop the Cure Innovation Index's Punching Above Their Weight category. That didn't happen by accident.
This case study goes inside the structural decisions that built one of the country's most effective translational operations on a mid-tier research budget: a rewritten tenure code that gave faculty a professional reason to commercialize, a $250 million infrastructure build anchored by a new industry accelerator in the heart of Indianapolis's biomedical cluster, and a technology transfer office that spent two decades brokering relationships with Eli Lilly, Cook Medical, and Roche Diagnostics rather than waiting for industry to come to it.
IU Indianapolis moves significantly more science to market than institutions with comparable research budgets — and the structural decisions behind that performance are specific enough to replicate. For TTO leaders and university administrators looking for a model that doesn't require a massive endowment, the IU Indianapolis playbook offers something concrete to examine.
