If

… you’re a tech company seeking new innovations, where do you look?
… you’re a company seeking new technology partners and/or innovation inspiration, where do you look?
…  you’re an innovator with just the right solution, and need customer guidance to tailor the final best direction, where do you  find it?
… you’re an investor looking to get in on the ground floor with new emerging technologies, where do you look?
… you’re a service provider, a coach, a mentor – how do you find just the right company to spend your time on and help grow?

The MI Innovation Alliance, its national and international collaborators, and its innovative “Call For Innovators” search processes, can help answer those “Ifs” with the right resources:

  • Channels to seek out specific technologies around the globe.

  • Tech-specific forums, co-branded with key partners, to bring people and technologies together.

  • Public judging and selection of the best innovations to address company technology needs.

  • Dedicated resources and programs to help facilitate strategic introductions, and then enhance the actual commercialization and implementation processes

Innovation Categories

Our forums reflect the voice of the marketplace and our corporate partners.  We work with our industrial channel partners to identify their areas of greatest technological gap – both current and future – and then work with our growth partners to seek out the technologies to address that.  With the greatest part of our awards to the GAMIC winners coming in the form of in-kind commercialization services, we are laser-focused not on “nice to have” technologies, but on “companies need to acquire” technologies.

For the 2016 – 2017 program year, our programs are oriented around three segments of technological innovation:

  • Transportation & Mobility – Advances in on-vehicle, process, communication and business models. Conducted through GAMIC – the Global Automotive & Mobility Innovation Competition

    • Category One – Vehicle electrification, V2X and advanced mobility

    • Category Two – Advanced materials, sensors, actuators and manufacturing processes

    • Category Three – Infotainment, auto consumer / value-add, value chain/ business model and security

    • Category Four – New high value and disruptive technology innovations

  • Digital Health & Medical Devices – Physical, digital and process systems to enhance personal medical care, safety and improved data utilization

    • We hope you’ll join our Strategy & Development team to define the exact platform to meet your needs

  • Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) / Cyber-Security – manufacturing communication systems, processes, strategies and safety

    • We hope you’ll join our Strategy & Development team to define the exact platform to meet your needs

Participate

MI Innovation Alliance is a multi-channel, open-source collaboration.  Some of the channels we use to find and source technological innovation include:

  • Working with, through and for a global confederation of accelerators, incubators, entrepreneurship supporters, MIT Enterprise Forum chapters and MIT Alumni Clubs, research parks, etc.

  • Our technology-focused partners (such as SAE) leveraging of their own extensive communication channels to spread awareness of and need for specific technologies.

  • Continually building new partnerships to take advantage of unexplored cross-over technology opportunities such as SAE with NASA Tech briefs, MEMS Journals and mobility, and global on-line start-up communities in the US and Europe.

Our goal – the widest possible search for innovation, and making sure that innovators both know about us and seek us out as THE platform for growth and assisted commercialization.  Click to learn more about our focus on Market Acceleration, and our ideas for an Acceleration Lab.  For more information on our current innovation platforms, how to bring new needs and ideas to us, or even how to volunteer – just Contact Us.

Successes

To date, over twenty emerging technology companies have been selected as Award Winners in MI Innovation Alliance-sponsored programs.  Among the most successful to date are:

  • 2008 1st-year winner EmiSense Technologies, which has secured $3 million in funding for clean technologies to digitally measure oxygen and nitrous-oxide with better cost and accuracy, and whose products are going into vehicle production in 3Q2016, for the 2017 vehicle model year.

  • 2014 6th-year winner Covaron Advanced Materials, which has raised $2 million in funding and obtained several partners for their cold ceramic molding products.

  • 2015 7th-year winner SiNode Systems, which has been awarded $4 million to develop advanced battery materials for electric vehicles.

More detail on a couple of their journeys can be found at GAMIC Stories.