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About Us

IREO Vision, Mission & Motto

Vision: To be recognized as a premier office in supporting faculty efforts to translate their research and scholarship to the public benefit.

Mission: We grow private support and create opportunities for faculty engaged in creative activities, research and scholarship. To these ends, we design and support economic development activities that position and enhance faculty and students’ work products, utilities, and impacts to help build, support and grow businesses through awareness, connection, and translation.

Connect, Collaborate, and Create
IREO Motto

The IREO Mindset

Acting with an entrepreneurial mindset is a core organizational value within IREO and is something we work to propagate across the WSU research enterprise.

Faculty are entrepreneurial people who manage groups and secure the resources needed to fill gaps in knowledge.

Entrepreneurial people think differently about problems, viewing them instead as opportunities. They are resourceful, resilient, and recognize that cultivating opportunities requires hard work and the ability to adapt. Collectively these attributes transcend any one discipline or activity and instead represent an operational philosophy for how individuals approach a challenge.

IREO supports policies and practices that serve to manage organizational risk while developing, supporting, and sustaining a robust entrepreneurial culture at WSU.

IREO Goals and Strategies

IREO serves to support faculty, student and staff engagement with the private sector relating to innovative research and business development.

The specific goals of IREO efforts are to grow private support for research at WSU while enhancing the impact of our research products.

We accomplish these ends through four distinct but interrelated strategies:

Targeted Faculty Outreach: We work directly with faculty and leadership to develop connectivity to alumni in relevant industries, and other external advocates to help build and expand research focused partnerships at WSU.
Institutional Improvements: We work with leadership and administration to develop business friendly practices; initiate activities that facilitate, grow and diversify external partnering; and work to develop and implement policies and practices that provide professional incentives for faculty engagement.
Innovation Programming: We provide training for faculty and students on how to evaluate engagement opportunities associated with their innovations in research and scholarship to support the associated outreach.
Tactical Business Resources: We provide business development support and counseling to both aspirational and operational small businesses across the state to help fuel growth and support regional economic development.

We collaborate closely with our colleagues in the Office of Research, Government Relations and External Affairs, Corporate Relations and the WSU Foundation to develop and mature opportunities that grow faculty, student and staff engagement with the communities we serve. The collective effort seeks to deploy WSU student talent and faculty expertise in support of the development of a next-generation land grant approach to developing meaningful returns on public investments in research and higher education.

Please contact us at innovation@wsu.edu to learn more or to start partnering!