UC Venture Lab graduates its 10th cohort

“We are very excited about the innovation ecosystem that continues to flourish here at the Cincinnati Innovation District,” said UC Chief Innovation Officer David J. Adams. “As we develop our startup community and accelerate novel ideas through the Venture Lab pre-accelerator program, we are realizing record-breaking numbers — 23 start-ups since our inception. These phenomenal outcomes will continue to progress as the Cincinnati Innovation District continues to meet its mission of solving the talent crisis.”

The Venture Lab’s 10th cohort of 10 teams is the third to graduate in 2020, and the second to present virtually for its graduation day. It’s also one of the program’s strongest cohorts to date, with a heavy focus on emergent technologies to improve efficiencies and outcomes in the fields of medicine, engineering and information technology. These business ideas have the potential to improve the detection of and response to forest fires, empower consumers to control the data they generate and who gets it, and combat the spread and impact of the novel coronavirus pandemic. 

Ideas brought to the Venture Lab are often refined through the seven-week process. For Knowvention LLC, developer of safer athletic equipment for concussion prevention, Venture Lab’s process helped the team identify intellectual property issues that would have become major barriers to getting to market if they hadn’t been detected earlier.

“Ultimately, we found some intellectual property that is currently blocking our primary idea,” said Knowvention co-founder Kevin Harper. “This early information helped us to not go too far down the path of an idea that was not as open for our own intellectual property. It is always better to ‘fail’ early rather than later. We can reevaluate and redirect our efforts better now.”