StartUp Lounge created at University of Texas Arlington

University of Texas Arlington has launched a meeting place for students and staff to discuss ideas that may move towards becoming inventions, products or processes.

Called StartUp Lounge, the meeting place is a collaboration between the Shimadzu Institute for Research Technologies, the College of Business, the College of Engineering and the College of Science at the university and TechFW, a US-based technology startup initiative.

Joe Barrera, director of the Shimadzu Institute for Research Technologies, said: “If you have one person from the University of Texas Arlington Research Institute, someone from the Office of Research Administration and three or four people on campus, the StartUp Lounge offers those people a centralised location where they can share or advance ideas. This could include anything from vetting and refining ideas to forming management teams to take technologies to market.”

However Barrera was quick to point out that the StartUp Lounge isn’t an incubator. He said that the Lounge is to help entrepreneurs before they get to incubator stage.

The StartUp Lounge will host seminars from TechFW. In 2013 TechFW it agreed a multi-year partnership to commercialise research from the university.

Barrera, said: “We’d love it if local business people and entrepreneurs used the new facility as their meeting place if they wanted to pick some of the great minds we have on this campus.”