UCR and Blackstone LaunchPad will conduct a workshop on February 14, 2022, at the Creat’R Lab (Orbach Library). It’s a hands-on workshop where participants can learn by doing. It includes things like:

• The ideation process
• The power of free-thinking
• How can we master ideation even if we don’t think we are very creative

You can register for the event here.

We Covered this in our Weekly Wire Roundup

UCR’s Role in the Innovation Economy of Inland Empire

UCR is the leading institution supporting local innovation and the startup economy. It has spun-off startups and partnered with ecosystem partners to bring ideas to life and scale them beyond the local market.

SmartBot360: A UCR Spin-off Company; Chatbots are expected to make up a market size of more than $1 billion in 2021. Based in Riverside, CA, SmartBot360, a UCR spin-off company & part of Riverside ExCITE, lets healthcare companies create, manage and share AI chatbots. Through its AI-chat bot technology specifically for the healthcare vertical, SmartBot360 wants to reduce mundane and manual tasks like answering FAQs, making appointments, collecting feedback, sending reminders, or making sale pitches.

UCR Scientists Get $1.5M Emergency Grant to Tackle Florida’s Citrus Greening Disease:

You’d hardly come across news regarding emergency funds being released for tackling a disease that impacts plants. However, this is exactly what happened when the University of Florida and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service provided $1.5 Million in emergency funding to UCR scientists to tackle Citrus Greening Disease — also known as Huanglongbing, or HLB.

UCR Launches Beyond Brilliant: A $50M Fundraising Initiative for Students: the University of California, Riverside (UCR) launched a new fundraising initiative to support students — especially those from low-income families. The UCR initiative aims to raise $50 Million in the next five years to support things like:

• Scholarships and graduate fellowships
• Experiential learning opportunities
• Health and wellness resources

OASIS: An Initiative by UCR to Foster Innovation for Social Good: Opportunities to Advance Sustainability, Innovation, and Social Inclusion, or OASIS, is an innovation park by UCR. It will serve as a hub of innovation, incubation, and research in clean energy, social mobility, intelligent transportation, agriculture, and natural resources management.

UCR is making OASIS in close collaboration with Riverside County, the City of Riverside, the Riverside Chamber of Commerce, and several on- and off-campus stakeholders.

The innovation hub will provide appropriate training to the next generation of researchers, entrepreneurs, and business leaders; create high-paying jobs and new start-up companies; and help invigorate the region’s economy.

OASIS Innovation Park

This shows UCR is helping to build a 360-degree innovation economy in the form of:

• Incubating and funding startups through Office of Technology Partnerships (OTP)
• Partnering with national and local startup incubation and acceleration centers
• Channeling grants to science-based startups capable of having a worldwide impact in their field

Our goal at Startempire Wire is to act as a megaphone to connect the dots between the best startups, events, and people in the Inland Empire. Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel and like/follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.