A detailed article on FIU’s partnership with GSK – and the Innovation Challenge aimed at addressing health disparities while nurturing a more diverse talent pool for the pharma company – appears in the March issue of University-Industry Engagement Advisor. For subscription information, click here.
Although Florida International University had never previously collaborated with GSK, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, their first partnership is a biggie. In January StartUP FIU, the innovation hub at the university, and GSK launched the GSK Innovation Challenge, a 12-week program in which a cohort of 31 FIU undergraduate students will seek to identify barriers to timely and effective health maintenance and care within their communities. FIU is one of the largest Hispanic-serving institutions in the U.S. and in fact, with about 56,000 students, one of the largest public universities in the country.
How did such a major commitment develop between two entities that had never previously worked together? “It came like everything comes about in Miami; there are only two degrees of separation in Miami,” says Emily Gresham, FIU’s assistant vice president for research, innovation and economic development and co-founder of StartUP FIU. “The GSK folks contacted one of our friends in the community that runs a social entrepreneurship incubator, [saying] that they wanted to work with a university on a challenge. They contacted us, and literally within a week we had a meeting with the (U.S.) president of GSK Pharma. I didn’t believe it when they first told me. We started talking and within about two months we pulled the whole program together.”
The community partner also put FIU in contact with one of the consultants supporting GSK in its efforts to find collaborators in majority Hispanic and Black universities to help them with the challenge, adds Gustavo Grande, director of Venture Ready Programs at StartUP FIU and the primary mentor for the GSK Challenge. (Venture Ready is one of StartUP FIU’s three divisions; it supports student entrepreneurship and education.) In early discussions with GSK, he notes, the company shared that “only 3% of their staff is Hispanic or African American. They felt they needed to have a different perspective of the community — that through the students they’d be able to get that perspective around health equity and preventive healthcare.”
“They felt they needed to work with actual minority people in order to address the health disparity issues they were interested in,” adds Robert Hacker, director and co-founder of StartUP FIU, which works with over 40 faculty researchers in a year, as well as with minority small business owners in the community.
In terms of the university’s goals for the Innovation Challenge, “I’d love to see our students spark some type of creative thinking that maybe the GSK folks do not yet have — and that grows into something bigger for them,” Gresham says, “and that students look at GSK as a viable employment opportunity and that they get jobs — because they’re good jobs. And, for faculty to begin to understand what it’s like to work with industry and [become] interested in doing more of these types of collaborations.”
“The first thing I’d like to see it accomplish is that this documents to corporate America — and particularly corporate Miami — that we at StartUP FIU can be good partners for a really challenging problem,” adds Hacker. “This is a great example for students of what they call active learning, with the corporation [directly involved] in the activity. And one of GSK’s goals is to identify more minority students to be hired at GSK — they’ve set that goal from very first time we met them. The third objective is to do a repeat challenge with GSK and build it into an ongoing relationship.”
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