North Carolina is replete with entrepreneurs and businesses large and small which have started on the path of developing high potential new products, but have not been able to find the time or the resources to take those great new ideas from concept to launch. To help address this challenge and to get more new innovations successfully supported and launched in Eastern North Carolina, Fayetteville State University is sponsoring an Innovation Pathways and Partnerships event on Friday, October 3rd on the FSU campus.   This unique event is designed to connect those engaged in new product development with a broad ecosystem of resources in real time, ready to explore collaborations to accelerate progress in bringing new products to market.

Key participants are expected to include:

• Entrepreneurs and business product development innovators
• Faculty from Fayetteville State University and other universities in the region, with expertise in the sciences and in business
• Students, ready to work in faculty-led teams to help fill gaps—whether in business planning or systems design
• Funding sources, representing public funding as well as private sources of capital
• Military innovators, providing a sense of new directions in acquisition priorities
• Potential business partners who may be interested in exploring opportunities to collaborate in designing, building and/or marketing new innovations.

Co-Sponsored by NCInnovation, the Broadwell Gift Fund Endowment at FSU’s Broadwell College of Business and Economics, and FSU’s Center for Enterprise Resource Planning and Advanced Analytics (CERPAA), this event will be offered free of charge. However, to be assured of a seat pre-registration is strongly recommended at the link provided below. The agenda will include:

• 8:30: Breakfast
• 9:00 - Noon: 
  • Introductory Remarks and Overview of Resources
  • Introduction of Participants and Real-time Collaboration Discussions 
  • Pitch Competition (top prize: $1500)
• Noon: Lunch
• 1:00:  Product demos 

This upcoming October 3rd event represents the second installment of Innovation Pathways and Partnerships; the inaugural pilot event was held in April 2025. The first place winner of the Pitch Competition at that event was InfraTech, a start-up developing a device which cools high performance processors in computer servers. They are collaborating with FSU Materials Science faculty to explore the possibility of improving the performance through incorporation of unique nanomaterials. FSU has also already provided assistance to InfraTech in submitting a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant application to the National Science Foundation (NSF). The second place winner at that April event was a collaboration established at the event between two drone companies—Geranium Geospatial and Calective. Those two companies are working with faculty and students in FSU’s Geospatial Intelligence department and with faculty who have developed devices which support AI functionality ‘at the edge’, enabling autonomous functionality for the drones.

Click here to register for the event. 

For more information contact:

• Greg McElveen, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives and Executive Director, FSU Research Corp, Fayetteville State University (gmcelvee@uncfsu.edu) 
• Alison Beatty, Director, NCInnovation Fayetteville Hub and NCI Defense Innovation Lead (abeatty@ncinnovation.org)
• Rob Patton, Executive Vice President, Fayetteville Cumberland Economic Development Corp (patton@fcedc.com)