Towson University, situated in Baltimore County, Maryland, has always had the furtherance of teaching and learning at the heart of its agenda. When founded in 1866, the training of a new generation of qualified, skilled teachers was its remit, and by the early 20^th century it was playing a crucial role in meeting the burgeoning demand for degree-holding educators.

A little over 150 years later, Towson is still Maryland’s leading teacher-training establishment, and is still seeking to remain at the forefront of pedagogical development, having fostered a highly successful incubator – the majority of whose companies are focused solely on the edtech sector.

The Towson Global Business Incubator was founded in 2007, at which point it harbored five companies only, and – as the name suggests – had no specific focus on educational technology. The shift in focus began around 2014, when TU – recognizing the rapidly-expanding edtech startup market, and the relentlessly-increasing demand for effective, innovative edtech solutions – began making a concerted effort to invite edtech companies onto campus for collaboration.

The successes of this incubator are manifold. The initiative has exponentially expanded, from five companies in 2007 to 30-plus concurrent member companies, with over 80 companies passing through since inception. The incubator and its official member companies have offered $150 million in economic impact to the Greater Baltimore Area and the State of Maryland, have created over 1,000 jobs, and have raised over $30 million in external capital.

In addition, 2017 saw 75% of the incubator’s member companies working in the edtech sector – indicative of their attempt to remain at the forefront of regional, and statewide, economic development. Their current cluster of edtech ventures is the largest in the Mid-Atlantic Region, and incubator participants benefit from the expert attention offered by an incubator who, uniquely among Maryland’s 25 incubators, are uniquely designed to support innovators in the education sector.

Like the Reimagine Education Steering Committee, those behind the TU Incubator are seeking to acknowledge and reward proven pedagogical pioneers. October’s EdTech Innovation Showcase saw 19 of the region’s top edtech entrepreneurs invited to showcase, offer two-minute lightening pitches, and set up product demonstrations for the region’s academic faculty, educational administrators, and K12 teachers.

Reimagine and Towson also share a commitment to exploring innovation across the entire educational spectrum. The EdTech Innovation Showcase featured offerings from a wide range of individual disciplines and focuses, including: assessment, learning enhancements, admissions, funding, professional development, project-based learning, and student engagement.

The shared mission espoused by both parties is perhaps best manifested by the edtech companies who have succeeded both as TU Incubator member companies and applicants to the Reimagine Education Awards. The first of these is vocabulary instruction e-learning program Infercabulary. Selected for TU’s latest cohort of edtech startups, and among those presented at the EdTech Innovation Showcase, it also received a Reimagine Education Bronze Award in 2017’s Educational App category. Judges recognized Infercabulary’s innovative, novel form of vocabulary instruction, Semantic Reasoning; and the insight provided by highly qualified speech pathologists with the capacity to ensure that expert, evidence-based knowledge was incorporated into Infercabulary’s design.

Even more successful was Mindprint Learning, who were 2017’s Gold Award Winner in the Learning Assessment Category, and also presented at 2017’s EdTech Innovation Showcase. Attempting to bridge the gap between innovations in neurocognitive assessment and low attainment, Mindprint offers teachers an online program that can establish executive functioning, memory, reasoning skills, and student speed. Results from this online screening program are used to automatically generate personalized learning plans for every student in math, reading, writing, and study skills that include evidence-based strategies based on that student’s unique strengths and needs.

At Reimagine, we believe that the success of TU Incubator companies can partly be attributed to the incubator’s provenance within a university. Among the hundreds of edtech applications to last year’s awards, both Infercabulary and Mindprint gained the particular approval of our judges because of their explicit, evidence-based capacity to improve learning outcomes – and we believe that close relationships between universities, incubators, and edtech companies can only be conducive to more effective, evidence-based edtech solutions; and, in turn, a higher level of edtech entrepreneurship emanating from universities.

Other universities are seeking to offer similar initiatives. The University College London’s EDUCATE project, based at the UCL Knowledge Lab and organized in partnership with the British Educational Suppliers Association, Nesta, UCL Engineering, and F6S, is offering start-ups, SMEs, entrepreneurs and educators the opportunity to develop, evaluate and improve their products and services with the use of research evidence.

In similar vein, the University of Pennsylvania – whose Wharton Business School are co-organizers of the Reimagine Education Awards & Conference – helped their Graduate School of Education to launch EDSi, or the Education Design Studio, Inc. At the time of its inception – 2013 – EDSi purported to be the “first startup incubator in the world solely focused on education”, and, like TU Incubator, matched entrepreneurs with investors, industry experts, and GSE faculty advisors to help foster effective educational innovation.

Such initiatives are spreading around the world. Though not explicitly focused on edtech innovation, IIT Delhi in India has sought to encourage entrepreneurship by allowing its PhD students to try and convert their theses into startups. The prestigious Indian Institute of Technology – existing at a moment where concerns exist about the opportunities available to Indian graduates in a highly-saturated job market – will create a space where selected graduates can receive the seed funding and mentorship typical of any incubator, and the academic assistance and working space necessary to unite theoretical, research-based knowledge with entrepreneurial success.

We’re invariably keen to explore any opportunities for closer, more fruitful collaboration between edtech startups and academia – it’s one major reason for pursuing this initiative. We invite anyone who has a similar story to reach out to us, and also hope that all startups who have achieved incubator success will engage with our competition, and network, this year.

Anyone wishing to learn more about the TU Incubator can email the team at [email protected], or find them on Twitter at https://twitter.com/@TUincubator.