The University of California (UC) Davis, US, has created an environment where research and industry join forces to develop innovations in the food system, driven by the university’s Innovation Institute for Food and Health (IIFH). University start-ups are vital in creating “challengers to legacy companies” and disrupting the food system, says Justin Siegel, IIFH’s faculty director and a professor in Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine, the Genome Center and entrepreneurship.
When Siegel joined UC Davis, the university generated almost no start-ups, even though universities have a long history of start-ups, which he says are crucial for innovation. “Innovation is fundamentally defined in the sense of new technologies, creating new marketplaces or disrupting marketplaces,” he tells Nutrition Insight.
“We were generating phenomenal first-in-class, best-in-class talent and first-in-class, best-in-class talent knowledge and knowledge transfer, but there’ve been zero start-ups in this space, zero commercial products in this space.”
Therefore, Siegel joined a group of faculty members with a vision and strategy to obtain a significant portion of the US$1 billion the university spends on R&D annually for the food system and to build commercial enterprises.
