Enhancing Enterprise Creation, Entrepreneurship and Industry Engagement at CMU
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
Dear Faculty and Staff Colleagues,
Carnegie Mellon has always thrived by anticipating change and positioning ourselves at the forefront of discovery, creativity and innovation.
In that spirit, I write today with an important update — and offer a short summary below, followed by the full message.
Here are four key takeaways from this message:
- In fall 2023, I convened a Presidential Advisory Board to evaluate enterprise creation, entrepreneurship and industry engagement. Over 18 months, the group engaged 150 stakeholders and delivered a set of recommendations to strengthen CMU’s leadership and reduce friction in discovery, translation and impact.
- The PAB’s final report highlighted four priority areas: (1) more integrated, strategic industry engagement; (2) renewed approaches to technology transfer and commercialization; (3) modernized research support systems; and (4) expanded support for entrepreneurship and enterprise creation across the university.
- CMU has already begun implementing many of these recommendations, including selecting a new enterprise research support system, reimagining research support staffing structures, streamlining industry partnerships, benchmarking IP policies, and expanding support for research-based start-ups.
- Looking ahead, CMU will roll out a fully integrated research support system, update IP and licensing policies, align industry and federal partnerships, and strengthen the Swartz Center’s role as a university-wide hub for entrepreneurship — all in alignment with our Strategic Framework and long-term research priorities.
To help CMU maintain its edge in a rapidly evolving environment, in the fall of 2023, I convened a Presidential Advisory Board (PAB) on Enterprise Creation, Entrepreneurship and Industry Engagement. I charged the PAB with assessing CMU’s current strengths, identifying areas where we must be more agile and effective, and proposing strategies that will allow us to better support discovery, translation and a broader impact. Co-chaired by Vice President for Research Theresa Mayer and trustee Ron Bianchini, the PAB included faculty, staff, alumni, trustees and external partners. This group spent 18 months on a rigorous process that combined quantitative benchmarking with qualitative engagement, including interviews with 150 internal and external stakeholders. The result is a set of reflections and recommendations that provide a roadmap for strengthening our research and innovation ecosystem.
PAB Recommendations
I believe a great university shows its strength through a relentless pursuit of excellence, never resting on past achievements but continually adapting and improving. The PAB was designed in that spirit — to push us forward and build on CMU’s remarkable success so we are ready to lead as the pace of innovation accelerates. Importantly, the Advisory Board acknowledged the many things CMU is doing right — from our world-class research and entrepreneurial ecosystem to the collaborative spirit of our faculty and students — and urged us to build on these strengths as we look to the future. Today, the current political headwinds and shifting industry dynamics have made the PAB’s recommendations even more relevant and urgent.
In its final report to me, the Advisory Board shared thoughtful reflections and recommendations across four areas:
Industry Engagement: The Advisory Board acknowledged progress but also emphasized that industry today expects deeper, more holistic relationships with universities, and that these partnerships must operate at the speed of business. To attract investment from major companies and amplify our impact, CMU must develop a more integrated model for industry partnerships, reduce silos between colleges and central units, clarify roles, and address long-standing barriers such as in contracting and licensing.
Technology Transfer and Commercialization: The Advisory Board highlighted that CMU’s once-pioneering models now need renewal to remain competitive in a fast-moving innovation economy. To reduce friction and disincentives for technology transfer and startup creation, we should adapt our intellectual property (IP) frameworks — including licensing, equity and royalty-sharing terms — to better align with sector norms and investor expectations.
Research Support Services: Stakeholders interviewed by the PAB pointed to outdated systems and overly complex processes as barriers to collaboration and agility. To remain competitive, CMU must modernize with best-in-class enterprise systems, streamline processes to reduce administrative burden for faculty and staff, and recruit, develop and retain an industry-leading workforce.
Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Creation: The Advisory Board singled out the important role of our Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship as a campus-wide resource and recommended a more integrated approach that allows the center to better connect to, and coordinate across, CMU’s centers, programs and resources. The PAB encouraged us to expand end-to-end support to launch and grow investment-ready start-ups from high-potential research, and to establish a university-wide alumni mentor program to support campus entrepreneurs. The report also underscored the impact of the Swartz Center in fostering a vibrant regional innovation ecosystem.
Before describing the progress made and work ahead, I wish to acknowledge the extraordinary leadership of Theresa Mayer and the collaborative engagement of colleagues across our schools and colleges. The deans and associate deans of research have been indispensable partners in this work, helping to shape priorities and ensure that changes are responsive to faculty and student needs. I am also grateful to our Board of Trustees for its partnership, endorsement and continued guidance as we move this work forward.
Progress to Date
With the benefit of the Advisory Board’s recommendations, we have already begun to strengthen the foundation of our research enterprise.
- We have made significant progress on enhancing research support services. The Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) has reorganized to improve alignment and better serve faculty, and we have selected a new enterprise system that will streamline proposal and award management and compliance, as well as provide greater visibility into research portfolios.
- We have pursued a more strategic approach to industry partnerships, increasing collaboration across schools and simplifying engagement pathways. These efforts have already led to growth in campus-wide industry partnerships.
- We conducted both internal and external stakeholder interviews and completed a comprehensive analysis of licensing terms and IP policies, benchmarking against 20 top-tier universities. We are currently formulating more creative models that facilitate transfer of knowledge and technology from our research labs.
- We have increased support for research-based startups, including early-stage ventures in AI, robotics and other deep tech. We consolidated Swartz Center’s Entrepreneurs-in-Residence program to better serve faculty and students and launched new events such as Lab-to-Market to bring together CMU founders with investors.
- We launched a faculty- and college-driven effort to meet rapidly evolving computing and data needs, including a successful pilot investment in a large cloud-based GPU cluster, which significantly expands our computing capacity and capacity for AI applications.
Next Phase of Work
We are entering an exciting new phase of this work. After a year of preparation, supported by countless faculty and staff in the schools and colleges, we are beginning the implementation of a new, fully integrated enterprise research support system that will streamline pre-award proposal submissions, award negotiation, regulatory compliance and post-award grant management. Vice President Mayer will share more details in the coming days about this system, as well as a comprehensive effort to upgrade the processes and structures that support our research enterprise. This work will not be easy, but tackling this will allow us to respond more quickly to opportunities, reduce administrative friction and enable deeper interdisciplinary collaboration across our research community. Vice President for Finance Angela Blanton and Vice President for Information Technology Stan Waddell both have been critical to developing this roadmap in partnership with the OVPR, and I am grateful for their contributions.
A number of strategic efforts inspired by the PAB are also underway:
- We are aligning industry engagement with federal partnerships, recognizing that our ability to partner effectively with both sectors will be critical to advancing national priorities and strengthening CMU’s impact. We are taking steps to be more strategic in how we coordinate across these channels — including examining how positions and functions might be enhanced — so that our industry and federal partnerships reinforce one another and maximize CMU’s impact.
- We are adapting CMU’s licensing terms to better reflect the evolving expectations of different industries and to take a more creative approach to how we structure agreements — ensuring we are both facilitating the transfer of technologies while preserving the interest of CMU researchers.
- We have assembled a university-wide task force to work with the Faculty Senate on updating our IP policy, which has not been revised in 40 years. This process is necessary to remain competitive, especially in an increasingly open-source environment.
- We are taking steps to strengthen the role of the Swartz Center in start-up creation and to enhance its impact as an integrated and campus-wide engine for entrepreneurship. These long-term strategic actions include expanding alumni mentorship networks, proof-of-concept and start-up gap funding, and faculty and student engagement.
These efforts are deeply connected to the goals of our Strategic Framework, which calls on us to expand the frontiers of research and discovery, become the partner of choice across sectors and industries, and strengthen CMU’s agility and resilience through aligned systems and empowered people.
This work is complex, and there is still much to do. But each step we take is strengthening our university — making CMU better prepared to lead the future of research and innovation. Once again, I wish to thank the Presidential Advisory Board and the Board of Trustees for their dedication and insights. Their contributions have been invaluable in charting a path forward for CMU.
Warm regards,
Farnam Jahanian
President
Henry L. Hillman President’s Chair