Johnson & Johnson donates $250,000


Applications opened Wednesday for the Johnson & Johnson-USC Translational Innovation Progam.

The program, a collaboration between Johnson & Johnson and the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation will foster health science and medical technologies research. Johnson & Johnson’s Corporate Office of Science and Technology will contribute $250,000 to the program over a span of two years.

Translational Innovation will serve as a mentoring program between USC faculty members that have developed ideas and employees at Johnson & Johnson.

“Each team will match up with one of the top people over in Johnson & Johnson,” said USC Director of Communications Ian Murphy. “The mentors will be people who know how to raise $5 million or who have already started five companies.”

The Stevens Institute’s Ideas Empowered Program, an existing initiative that helps bring ideas to the market place, initiated the effort to discover and support the intellectual property of those at USC. The goal of the new program is to make an impact outside of USC’s campuses through marketing and funding, according to the institute’s website.

“We saw a lot of success in [the] first year of Ideas Empowered, not just seeing a full start up company in a year of the program,” Murphy said. “Other people who took part of it say they have a better understanding of the market and how to research.”

The Translational Innovation Program has the same intentions.

“Typically there is a valley of death between academia and market,” Murphy said. “Faculty is amazing at research, not the best at understanding how the market works or how a business works … we want to bridge the gap.”

The deadline for submitting an idea is Oct. 20.

USC and Johnson & Johnson will have a joint review committee oversee submissions. Finalists will be chosen Nov. 15, and the idea that will receive funding will be revealed  Dec. 6.