Accelerating Impact: The Michigan Model in Action
By Kelly Sexton, Ph.D.
Associate Vice President for Research – Innovation Partnerships and Economic Impact
University of Michigan
Researchers at the University of Michigan are some of the most brilliant experts in their fields, producing new discoveries every day that have the potential to improve and even save lives, strengthen communities and grow our economy.
And as a university with a mission to serve the public, it’s critical that this potential is fulfilled.
Enter the Michigan Model, our university’s approach to closing the gap between breakthrough ideas and real-world application. It brings together business mentorship, industry partnerships, entrepreneurial talent and early-stage investment to support research teams as they move toward impact.
We have built this intentional framework to support the translation of university research while contributing to our local and regional economy through startup-fueled economic growth.
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By Alana LaRoche
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The office I lead, Innovation Partnerships, serves as the university’s research commercialization arm. Our vision is to redefine how world-class university research can fuel a region and help solve the world’s greatest challenges.
What we’re building here can become a national model, because the challenges we face in Michigan (namely, access to entrepreneurial talent and early-stage venture capital) are shared by most university communities outside of the coastal entrepreneurial hotbeds.
Across the university, the Michigan Model is fully operational.
At the Weil Institute for Critical Care Research and Innovation, for example, interdisciplinary teams are developing novel tools that can diagnose patients earlier, treat them more effectively and extend care beyond the walls of the hospital. The work has resulted in multiple FDA-approved technologies, successful startups and a robust pipeline of innovations poised to transform critical care.
One Weil Institute startup, Precision Trauma, LLC, licensed and donated hundreds of life-saving Turn-I-Kit devices to Ukraine to support the care of wounded patients in hospitals and on the battlefield.
The same principles are at work across our campuses.
HistoSonics, a startup founded in 2009 by a team of engineering and medical researchers, commercialized histotripsy, a noninvasive technology that uses focused ultrasound waves to destroy tumors.
After receiving FDA clearance for destruction of liver tumors in 2023, HistoSonics’ Edison System has now been used by more than 4,000 patients worldwide, and in 2025, the company announced a $2.25 billion acquisition, becoming the second-largest venture capital-backed medical device startup exit in history. Today, HistoSonics is continuing to push the frontiers of noninvasive treatment from their Advanced Research Center in Ann Arbor.
From our College of Engineering, Ambiq Micro launched in 2010 and was built on federally funded research into ultra-low-power computing. Today, Ambiq’s chips are embedded in 270 million commercial devices, ranging from Fitbit and Garmin wearables to medical devices. Additionally, the company launched its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in 2025, resulting in a $110.4 million raise for the company.
A critical component of this approach is our close partnership with the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, which helps align university innovation with statewide economic development priorities while providing essential support for research commercialization and our statewide innovation ecosystem.
Through support for programs such as the Michigan Translational Research and Commercialization program, which enables translational research, and the Technology Transfer Talent Network, which provides business mentorship and entrepreneurial connections, this partnership ensures that promising discoveries are paired early with the resources and expertise needed to move forward.
And the university’s Accelerate Blue Fund helps to power the entire engine, providing early-stage capital that enables promising U-M startups to move from concept to product and attract follow-on investment. We recently launched the Accelerate Blue Foundry to help us connect startup founders from across the country with promising U-M technologies to facilitate startup company formation. By bringing together transformative technologies, entrepreneurial talent and risk-tolerant capital, we are facilitating startup company formation with the goal of bringing the benefits of U-M’s research enterprise to the public through research translation and commercialization.
What makes this work possible is not any single program or partnership, but the cumulative effect of an ecosystem built with intention. When researchers have access to early mentorship, entrepreneurial talent, translational funding and industry connection from the earliest stages of discovery, the distance between a promising idea and a product that reaches people shrinks considerably.
The Michigan Model is designed to make that pathway navigable across disciplines and career stages. Stories like Turn-I-Kit, HistoSonics and Ambiq offer us clear examples of what can happen when discovery, collaboration and purpose come together with a sense of mission and urgency, as well as serving as a reminder of why getting research out of the lab and into the world is so important.