Kevin Ward, a professor in emergency medicine at the University of Michigan, has been named the institution’s executive director for medical innovation.

Ward will head up the Fast Forward Medical Innovation Initiative at the university, which will aim to combine research and entrepreneurialism with an eye to increase commercialisation activity stemming from the medical school. Part of this activity will include creating ‘Innovation Strike Forces’, which will join up promising ideas with researchers, clinicians, and businesses.

Currently, licenses and patents linked to UoM Medical School’s innovations attribute for $11.1m of the UoM Office of Technology Transfer’s overall annual income of $14.4m.

Ward said: “The new innovation program is to help faculty think in different ways about their ideas and to provide them with an innovation road map so that we can get their ideas to impact through product development much earlier. We’ve got a top-ranked Medical School, College of Engineering and Business School, so one of the strategies will be to blur the lines between them.”