Invent2026 Information

Invent2026 began in the Summer of 2016 as an initiative to join the Midwest’s community of entrepreneurs with our region’s centers of applied research to jointly solve our nation’s most urgent challenges. In 2026 the United States will celebrate its 250th Birthday. These next nine years will mark a period of American renewal. Let’s renew the Midwest region by driving innovation in strategic sectors. Invent2026 is providing and executing a strategy to assert the Midwest and Rust Belt’s leadership in advanced industries, build a Midwest innovation corridor, and effectively transfer technologies from laboratories to entrepreneurs. By consolidating our region’s lab-to-product value chain and demonstrating an ability to solve national challenges through entrepreneurship and applied research, Invent2026 will bring added investment into the region, grow new business starts, and support regional economic growth. The 2026 team has created TNEBULA, an interactive platform that enables laboratories to inventory intellectual properties, present these IPs to entrepreneurs, and gain a rich understanding of commercial potential and pathways. TNEBULA will launch in the summer of 2017. Together Invent2026 and TNEBULA will form the connective tissue between our region’s many incubators, accelerators, and co-working spaces, our national and university laboratories, and businesses both large and small, so that collaboratively we can drive innovation and introduce real products into the market.