Alicia Löffler, Ph.D.
Associate Provost for Innovation & New Ventures, Associate Vice President for Research, and Executive Director, Innovation & New Ventures Office, Northwestern University
Dr. Alicia Löffler is the founding Executive Director of the Innovation and New Ventures Office (INVO), Associate Provost for Innovation and New Ventures, Associate Vice President for Research, and Adjunct Professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
INVO was founded in 2010 to enhance the transfer of innovations to the market and nurture a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation at Northwestern University. INVO oversees translational, transactional and commercialization activities at a number of centers and initiatives across NU. Since 2010 INVO generated approximately $1.5 Billion net income.
Since 2010, Dr. Löffler and her team have transformed the culture for commercializing innovations at Northwestern. She developed short and long-term strategies to address immediate process improvement needs and long-term culture changes and implemented new knowledge systems focused on transparent data-driven decisions. Some of the INVO initiated programs include Commercialization Clinics, the Innovation-to-Commercialization Fellows Program (I2C), Center for Device Development (CD2), and the Entrepreneur-in-Residence Program. Dr. Löffler led the building Northwestern’s entrepreneurial hub called The Garage. The Garage, launched on June 2015, is the hub of entrepreneurial activities at Northwestern University. She also founded the two Northwestern venture funds launched in 2016: N.XT and NUseeds.
Dr. Löffler received a BS from the University of Minnesota, a PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and had her post-doctoral training at Caltech. Dr. Löffler was named one of the Tech 100 stars by Crain’s Chicago Business, and received the “Women in Black” I-Street Award and the 2011 Innovator Award presented by the Chicago Chapter of the Association for Women in Science (AWIS).
