Explore key findings, action opportunities, examples, and a readiness guide informed by an April 21, 2026, workshop at Duke in DC during DC Climate Week.

When Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina in 2024, it damaged hundreds of bridges and other critical connections. FEMA had new legal authority to support lower-carbon materials in disaster recovery—materials that often match or exceed conventional alternatives in durability, resist corrosion better over time, and, in many cases, cost less over a structure’s full lifespan.

The opening existed. But when the moment came, the market was not ready. Those materials were not yet standard, easy to validate, or simple to buy at the speed disaster recovery requires.

Communities rebuilt with what they already knew how to buy—not always the most economical, environmentally sound, or resilient option available. Better options existed in labs, companies, and research programs. They just were not ready to be found, approved, and delivered at disaster speed.

That gap—between an effective solution existing and a community being able to use it—was the focus of an April 2026 workshop co-hosted by Duke University and Tailwind Futures at Duke in DC as part of DC Climate Week.

The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA)’s 2024 National Resilience Guidance defines resilience as the ability to prepare for threats and hazards, adapt to changing conditions, and withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions. Better materials are one piece of that. So are the dozens of other technologies and approaches sitting in university labs and early-stage companies that communities urgently need but cannot yet easily access.

Universities are producing useful science and technology. Investors and companies are paying more attention. Why is it still so hard to move that work from the lab to the places that need it, and what would it take to change that?

The workshop attracted a range of stakeholders interested in these questions—university innovation leaders, investors, accelerators, federal agencies, and resilience practitioners from across the country—spanning institutions including Stanford, Princeton, the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, the University of Miami, the University of Chicago, federal agencies, the New York Climate Exchange, and a range of venture capital and impact investment firms focused on adaptation and resilience, including Azolla, Factor[e] Ventures, Global Adaptation and Resilience Investment Group, Halcyon Venture Partners, Prime Coalition, Resilient Earth Capital, and others.

The central finding was that resilience innovation does not stall because the ideas are weak—it stalls because the handoffs are weak.

Universities are producing more relevant work than the world can see or find. Philanthropists, governments, and investors are ready to back good solutions. Communities need them. What is missing are the people, processes, and pathways that bring all three together. Building those connections is the practical work that remains.

Key Findings About the Lab-to-Implementation Gap

1. Adaptation and resilience is not one sector. It is a way to look for useful solutions.

Resilience solutions come from many fields: water management, grid reliability, materials science, data tools, health, agriculture, buildings, insurance, coastal systems, and nature-based approaches, among others. This breadth is a strength, but it also makes the field hard to organize.

For universities, the practical question is simple: which research helps people, places, infrastructure, or businesses prepare for, withstand, or recover from climate stress? A technology may be highly relevant even if the researcher does not label it an adaptation or resilience solution.

2. Universities are already building pieces of the resilience market, but those pieces are hard to see from the outside.

The university discussion made clear that research institutions are not passive research factories. Participants described different ways to move research into real-world solutions: seed and de-risking funds, translational research programs, commercialization fellowships, industry engagement models, and investor-facing pipeline work. Examples included Michigan's Accelerate Blue Fund and pipeline approach, Duke's donor-driven capital and angel funding network, UVA's seed fund, and Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures—a commercialization hub that goes beyond traditional technology transfer to actively support startup creation, investor readiness, and corporate partnerships.

Universities collectively have an opportunity to make these assets easier to navigate.

When a single university has—as most do—several technology transfer offices, entrepreneurship centers, accelerators, partnership offices, and faculty networks, a potential investor, company, utility, or public agency does not know where to start. Researchers can face the same problem inside the institution: They may not know where to go next—which university offices, programs, funders, investors, or industry partners can help move their work from research into real-world use. This is where coordinating offices, such as the Duke Office for External Partnerships, can help navigate a complex university system.

3. The word ready means different things to different people.

A researcher may consider a technology to be ready when the science works and the results can be published. An investor hears ready and expects customer demand, a strong team, a clear business model, and clean rights to use the technology. A public agency needs to know whether the product can be bought legally, explained publicly, and used safely. An industry partner cares most about reliability, delivery timelines, service support, supply-chain strength, and whether the solution fits existing systems.

When those expectations are not made explicit, people can spend months talking past each other—researchers pitching science to investors who need customer evidence, entrepreneurs seeking pilots from agencies that need procurement-ready solutions, or public and industry buyers exploring technologies that are not yet validated enough to adopt. The result is not just confusion; it is wasted time for everyone involved.

This is more than a language problem. In many cases, researchers, public agencies, investors, and industry partners may agree on the problem and the promise of a solution—and still be unable to use it because it is not ready in the ways implementation requires. In a field where climate risks are moving faster than institutions, that wasted time is its own form of risk.

To address these issues, the workshop produced “A Practical Readiness Guide for Researchers, Investors, and Buyers” found later in this brief.

4. Many technologies get stuck after the lab but before regular customers are ready.

The hardest gap is often not the research discovery itself or the final large-scale rollout, but in the stage between. This is where teams need first customers (buyers willing to take a chance on something new), field testing, cost reduction, buying pathways, operating plans, licenses, and funding for the unglamorous work that makes a technology usable.

This stage is especially hard for hardware, infrastructure, nature-based systems, and technologies meant for public agencies or community-scale deployment. They can take a long time to develop, cost a lot to test, and require buyers who are willing to try something new. Traditional venture capital often does not fit this stage, and university budgets cannot cover the gap.

5. The handoff problem: Every step must be built to lead somewhere.

Pilots should be designed for scale, not just for a one-time demonstration. A good pilot should point toward a next customer commitment, such as repeat purchase, broader use, a scale-up agreement, or a clear decision to stop. If a pilot only proves that something is interesting, it does not help the technology move forward.

Licensing also matters. University contracting and licensing terms should protect the university and public benefit, but they should not make a new company impossible to fund or sell. Investors need clear rights and terms they can understand.

One critical and often missing link is the connection between researchers and entrepreneurs. A researcher with promising technology and an entrepreneur who can build a company around it are two different people, and they do not always find each other. University programs, accelerators, and spinout support can help make that match, but it rarely happens automatically.

Finally, universities need outward-facing technology champions. These are people who know what is being developed across the institution, understand what customers and investors need, and can build relationships before there is a specific deal to close. This work takes time and relies on building trust. It cannot simply be added to faculty workloads or left only to offices focused on patents and licenses.

Opportunities for Action to Advance Solutions

The workshop did not point to one silver bullet, but to set of practical opportunities to make the path from research to use simpler, clearer, and more repeatable. These are not generic calls for collaboration. They are places where specific actors can help more university research move into real-world resilience impact.

1. University leaders can bring in people who have taken technology to market.

Universities that want resilience research to become real-world solutions can benefit from people who have successfully built, funded, sold, scaled, and/or deployed technology. This is different from being an excellent faculty member, a patent expert, or a general entrepreneurship adviser.

These leaders can work with faculty, spot promising technologies, explain them clearly to customers and investors, and help decide which opportunities are ready to move forward. They can also help universities manage the cultural divide between academic research and market execution while maintaining the university's public mission.

Action: University leadership designates senior commercialization roles—or brings in experienced practitioners through fellowships and industry engagement programs—who are empowered to work across departments, build external relationships, and operate with the same urgency as a market actor, not an administrator.

2. University commercialization teams can make promising technologies easier to find and actively connect them to the right partners.

The goal is not to create another passive list, database, or website. Investors and customers rarely act just because they stumble across a technology online. Universities need to actively scan their own research portfolios, identify technologies relevant to adaptation and resilience—even when that work isn't labeled as such—and bring it to the right people.

Michigan's investor-facing pipeline work is a useful model: it gives outside partners a structured, regularly updated view of startup opportunities, framed around the questions investors and customers actually ask. What problem does it solve? Who would use it? Who would pay for it? What has been proven? What still needs to happen?

Action: University commercialization offices designate resilience-focused outreach leads who maintain ongoing relationships with investors, utilities, public agencies, and potential pilot sites—and who actively pitch, not just post.

3. Technology teams and first customers can design pilot projects around the next customer commitment.

A successful pilot project needs to be more than simply interesting. It should be designed from the beginning to lead to a clear next step: either a use case or a decision to stop.

The spinout team (typically a researcher and an entrepreneur-CEO working together) and the customer can agree upfront on what success looks like, what costs need to come down, what investment is needed, and what the customer will do if the pilot works.

Action: Spinout teams and first customers co-design pilots with an explicit go/no-go commitment built in—defining the purchase, scale-up agreement, or stop decision that the pilot is designed to reach.

4. Public and philanthropic funders can support the market-building work that no single startup, university, or first customer can carry alone.

Promising resilience technologies often need support after the research is done but before customers or investors are ready to commit. This is where spinout teams and early-stage companies need field testing, standards development, cost reduction, supply-chain planning, and early projects that prove the technology can work outside the lab.

This work is often too applied for research grants, too early for traditional investors, and too risky for first customers to fund on their own. Public and philanthropic funders are well-positioned to support this shared market-building work so that later investment and customer adoption become possible.

Action: Public and philanthropic funders create or expand programs that explicitly target the market-building stage—field testing, standards development, and first customer engagement—for resilience technologies that universities and accelerators have already validated.

5. Public agencies, utilities, corporations, and community partners can help shape solutions in the places where resilience needs are most urgent.

The communities facing repeated flooding, heat, water stress, wildfire, storms, or infrastructure failures often understand the resilience problem best. They should be treated as co-creators of solutions rather than as passive test sites.

With the right safeguards, funding, and long-term partnerships, public agencies, utilities, corporations, community organizations, and local partners can help define the real-world requirements, success measures, and trust conditions that make technologies useful—particularly where they have local presence and relationships that extend to regional or national networks. This can meet urgent needs while also generating practical evidence that helps solutions scale elsewhere.

Action: Public agencies, utilities, corporations, and community organizations formalize their role as co-designers—not just end users—by building pilot partnerships and procurement pathways with universities and spinout teams working on their most pressing resilience challenges.

The innovations that will prove the biggest game changers for helping communities adapt and become more resilient will not simply be the most elegant technologies—they will be the ones that make it through the hard middle.

These successful innovations will have been turned into a real use case, tested in credible settings, matched with the right funding, and connected to buyers before the next disaster creates urgent demand.

Universities have the research. Investors, funders, and customers are at the table. What remains is the work of building the path between them.

The universities that organize not only around discovery, but around the handoffs that turn discovery into real-world use, are the ones that will change the game.

Concrete Models and Examples of Lab-to-Implementation Supports

These examples ground the findings in specific models discussed at the workshop: university funds and commercialization capacity, investor approaches, and deployment pathways.

University Models That Help Research Move Toward Use

• University of Michigan: The Accelerate Blue Fund, an early-stage fund for startups licensing University of Michigan technologies and investor-facing pipeline work that gives outside partners a clearer view of startup opportunities, including structured introductions between researchers and potential investors.
• Duke University: Donor-driven de-risking capital and an angel network that can help test whether a technology merits further development, with support for researchers navigating early conversations with funders and industry partners. The Duke New Ventures and Innovation & Entrepreneurship programs provide innovators with training, mentorship, and support.
• University of Virginia: A seed fund that evaluates opportunities with venture discipline, not university affiliation alone, helping researchers understand what investors need to see before committing.
• Johns Hopkins University: A commercialization hub (Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures) that goes beyond traditional technology transfer to actively prepare innovators for investor and customer conversations through dedicated startup support, corporate partnership brokering, and the FastForward accelerator program.

Investor Models Represented in the Room

• Tailwind Futures: Dedicated adaptation and resilience venture capital firm and market research platform focused on adaptation and resilience needs and investment opportunity, including the Resilience Game Changers research series.
• Prime Coalition and catalytic capital models: Philanthropic and catalytic capital for technologies, companies, or fund managers traditional venture may not yet back.
• Factor[e] Ventures: Emerging-market investment focused on agriculture, water, energy, and other resilience needs.
• Azolla Ventures: Impact-first climate investing, including a $239 million blended fund combining philanthropic and market-rate capital.
• Halcyon Venture Partners: Very early-stage climate, health, and equity investing.
• Resilient Earth Capital: Climate angel investor community model investing in U.S. startups advancing net zero, resilience, and adaptation solutions.
• Joules Accelerator: Regional commercialization accelerator model climate technology startups with utilities, industry partners, capital providers, and pilot customers.

Public Funding and Other Deployment Models to Watch

• Targeted federal programs with clear mission alignment, such as water security, defense needs, rapid deployment, or state and local priorities.
• The New York Climate Exchange, a Governors Island–based, cross-sector nonprofit with a campus planned to open in 2029; a model for real-world pilots and knowledge transfer.
• Breakthrough Energy Ventures and other accelerators, utilities, and industry partners that can define what technologies must prove before broader use.

A Practical Readiness Guide for Researchers, Investors, and Buyers

Workshop participants repeatedly noted that the same words—especially ready and validated—mean different things to different actors. The following tables are not final standards. They are starting points for clearer conversations about what has been proven, what remains uncertain, and what needs to happen next.

Table 1. What Different Actors Often Mean by Validated

Table 2. A Simple Readiness Ladder

Acknowledgments and More Information

The workshop was hosted by Duke University and Tailwind Futures, with support from the Duke Climate Commitment and as part of Tailwind’s Resilience Game Changers research project, funded by the Quadrature Climate Foundation. It was organized across Duke’s schools and offices, including the Office for Translation & Commercialization; the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability; Pratt School of Engineering; the Nicholas School of the Environment; and the Office for External Partnerships.

Authors and Affiliations

• Victoria Salinas, Climate Leader in Residence, Duke University
• Jesko Von Windheim, Ph.D., Chair, Business and Environment, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University
• Zachary Widel, Ph.D., Assistant Director, Office for Translation & Commercialization, Duke University
• Sharlini Sankaran, Ph.D., Director of External Partnerships, Office for External Partnerships, Duke University
• Natalie Ambrosio Preudhomme, Principal, Market Insights, Tailwind Futures
• Sara Oliver, P.E., PMP, Director, Climate and Sustainability Engineering Master’s Program, Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University
• Sujay Dhanagare, M.E.M. ’26, Duke University Research Assistant and Azolla Investment Fellow

Use of Artificial Intelligence Tools

Artificial intelligence tools, including Claude and ChatGPT, were used during the development of these proceedings to synthesize meeting notes from multiple individuals, assist in drafting, and refine language and structure. Consistent with Duke University guidance on responsible AI use, AI-generated outputs were treated as provisional and subject to verification. All analysis, strategic direction, conclusions, recommendations, and final editorial decisions were led by the authors. This document reflects a human-led development and review process informed by practitioner insights shared during the convening, interdisciplinary collaboration, and responsible use of AI-enabled tools.

Citation

Salinas, V., J. Von Windheim, Z. Widel, S. Sankaran, N. Ambrosio Preudhomme, S. Oliver, and S. Dhanagare. 2026. Turning University Innovation into Investable Climate Adaptation and Resilience Solutions. Durham, NC: Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability, Duke University. https://nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/publications/turning-university-innovation-investable-climate-adaptation-and-resilience-solutions.