Market-driven new technology and innovation leads to new products and new jobs. Creating jobs in innovative Maryland companies is what the Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) program has been doing since 1987: bringing the inventive minds and extensive laboratory resources of the University System of Maryland (USM) to bear on creating the new products that feed the growth of Maryland businesses. Since the program’s inception, MIPS–enabled products have generated sales of $48 B.  MIPS is nationally recognized by the U.S. Small Business Administration as a model program for best practices in transferring technology and is a proven program that contributes significantly to job creation and high-tech product development in Maryland.

Companies look to Maryland’s public universities for help in solving critical problems in developing new products, while the universities are expected to contribute to economic development and job creation.  MIPS projects are not basic research, but rather are translational work that leads to new or improved products. These are products of any Maryland company willing to create jobs, including but not in any way limited to, products based on the universities’ intellectual property.

MIPS provides funding, matched by participating companies, for university-based research projects that help the companies develop new products. The program is administered at the flagship campus at the University of Maryland, College Park, and works throughout the 12 member institutions of the University System of Maryland, plus Morgan State University and St. Mary’s College.  In these academic-industrial, public-private partnerships, MIPS connects the resources of the Maryland public universities to businesses from all parts of Maryland.

With MIPS matching funds, companies can leverage the facilities, resources and expertise within Maryland’s public universities to create new products and opportunities. In the years since the program started, MIPS has engaged 488 different faculty researchers to work with more than 685 Maryland companies to help develop new products. MIPS-supported products have enabled Maryland companies to directly create more than 8,600 new, high-paying, long-term, high-tech jobs throughout the state.
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