UNM Rainforest Innovations

UNM Rainforest Innovations does not invest capital in the traditional allocator sense; it commercializes intellectual property. CEO and Chief Economic Development Officer Lisa Kuuttila leads the organization, while Director of Commercialization Arlene Young and the innovation managers shepherd individual technologies to market. The independent board of directors provides governance.

Its pipeline is fed entirely by University of New Mexico faculty, staff, and student inventors, who are required to disclose inventions before public presentation or publication. Innovation managers in life sciences and engineering proactively work with researchers to identify patentable work, a process that turns campus R&D into the organization's exclusive proprietary stream.

Neither. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit technology-transfer organization wholly owned by the University of New Mexico Board of Regents. While it creates startups, it does so to commercialize university-owned IP rather than by deploying a fund. The startups it launches are third-party companies built around UNM patents, not portfolio investments of the organization.

The organization maintains dedicated innovation managers for life sciences and for engineering and physical sciences, reflecting the dominant research output from UNM labs. Recent inventor spotlights include work in electrical and computer engineering, while ancillary focus across occupational therapy and other applied disciplines also surfaces technologies for market transfer.

The entity is a separate 501(c)(3) nonprofit formed and wholly owned by the UNM Board of Regents. It operates at arm's length with its own board of directors but exclusively serves UNM's research community, functioning as the university's official technology-transfer and economic-development organization designated under New Mexico's University Research Park and Economic Development Act.