Yale’s entrepreneurial efforts to take on larger role under Geballe

Photo | Yale News Josh Geballe

Write a Comment

By Liese Klein

The chief job of spinning Yale’s discoveries into economic gold will go to Josh Geballe, the state’s chief operating officer, Gov. Ned Lamont announced Tuesday.

Geballe will assume the newly-created post of senior associate provost for entrepreneurship & innovation, a job that raises the Ivy League university’s business-creation efforts to new prominence. Provosts take responsibility for both academic and financial affairs in the higher education sector.

“This role is intended to help enhance and provide additional support to the faculty and the students and even people in the broader community to help them take that innovation and launch it out into the world,” Geballe said in the news conference announcing his appointment.

“This will often take the form of new startup businesses being created in and around New Haven and that will create jobs and import talent and capital and help grow the local economy and create opportunities,” Geballe continued. “It’s a really exciting role.”

Geballe will also take the job of managing director for Yale’s Office of Cooperative Research (OCR), a role which has key significance in maintaining and expanding the bioscience boom that has transformed New Haven in the past decade.

Under longtime director Jon Soderstrom, the OCR helped launch more than 75 Yale spinouts with over $3.7 billion in venture capital and 1,600 patents worldwide, according to university estimates. More than 60 of those spinouts have launched in the last six years.

Soderstrom led OCR since 1996 and announced he would retire as of last year.

Geballe will also take a key role in partnering with the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale (Tsai CITY), a campus hub for innovative projects and fledgling companies. Tsai CITY is among the key players in entrepreneurship efforts at the university that include pitchfests like Startup Yale and the Blavatnik Fund for Innovation at Yale.

In announcing his new role at Yale, Geballe stressed the positive impact of the university’s innovations on New Haven and surrounding communities.

“The amount of groundbreaking research happening at Yale and across the region has already established it as a globally recognized innovation hub,” Geballe said. “We now have an opportunity to expand and amplify this work.”

In his role at the state, Geballe used his experiences at a software startup and at Thermo Fisher Scientific to bring business principles into management of the Lamont administration's response to the pandemic.

The impact of the growing bioscience hub in New Haven has recently drawn statewide groups including Connecticut Innovations, the state’s quasi-public venture capital arm, and AdvanceCT, the state’s business-recruitment nonprofit.

Provost Scott Strobel said, “Yale has set many ambitious goals in our university science strategy and university-wide academic priorities. The experience and enthusiasm Josh is bringing to Yale are just what we need to drive these initiatives.”

Contact Liese Klein at lklein@newhavenbiz.com.