{"id":7030140,"date":"2026-08-06T12:11:21","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T12:11:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/angel-investor\/building-the-campus-innovation-flywheel-%e2%94%82-dealum-blog\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T12:11:21","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T12:11:21","slug":"building-the-campus-innovation-flywheel-%e2%94%82-dealum-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7030140","title":{"rendered":"Building the campus innovation flywheel \u2502 Dealum Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"


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ICAN<\/u><\/a>, the International Collegiate Angels Network, connects investors with campus-born ventures. This means startups founded by current students, faculty members, or recent alumni, where the idea emerged through coursework, research, or campus activity. ICAN operates globally and mobilizes capital for this promising \u2013 but often overlooked \u2013 asset class.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The network aims to solve two problems at once: founders can access early capital from investors who understand university innovation, and universities can participate in long-term value creation without directly holding equity. As a way to keep the flywheel turning, ICAN returns 10% of any realized gains to the campuses where the ventures originated.<\/p>\n

A path to campus innovation \u201cthat just kind of happened\u201d\u00a0<\/h2>\n

ICAN was founded by Tom Duening, an entrepreneur and educator with more than 35 years of experience in early-stage startups and university innovation programs. Tom\u2019s path to founding ICAN was neither planned nor conventional. He started his first company in 1984 while he was a graduate student, despite having no formal business education. \u201cI\u2019d never been in a business classroom in my life,\u201d he says. The experience nonetheless set the direction for what followed.<\/p>\n

After completing a PhD in education, he was recruited to become assistant dean of the 6000-student University of Houston College of Business Administration. At the same time, the college was launching one of the first campus-based entrepreneurship programs in the United States. Because he had started a company, he was a natural fit as a founding faculty member in the program, even though he wasn\u2019t an entrepreneurship scholar and had never studied entrepreneurship. \u201cI kind of fell into entrepreneurship on campus. It just happened, unintentionally,\u201d he recalls.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From that point on, Tom\u2019s career repeatedly combined entrepreneurship, education, and early-stage investing. He started a few more companies, including an ed-tech venture in India, and worked with universities to develop entrepreneurship programs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At Arizona State University, he saw a clear gap in the local startup ecosystem. Despite being part of a metropolitan area of nearly nine million people, the Phoenix-Tempe metroplex had no strong, dedicated angel investor group. \u201cI said, well, let\u2019s just start one on the campus,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n

In 2005, Tom founded an on-campus angel group at Arizona State University known as Arizona Tech Investors and built it organically through personal networks and referrals. The idea was unique for that time. \u201cWe just sat around and thought \u2013 what does the campus need and how to make it happen,\u201d describes Tom.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They quickly realized there wasn\u2019t enough deal flow, so they expanded the group to the wider region and, eventually, the entire state. Within a few years, it became the most active angel network in Arizona. Two decades later, it is still operating and investing, long after Tom stepped away. \u201cI take a lot of pleasure in the fact that it\u2019s still operating today,\u201d he says. \u201cAnytime you do the startup thing, it\u2019s just really, really hard. There\u2019s a lot of politics, and I\u2019m not good at politics; I\u2019m good at ideas. But I\u2019m willing to go through all the pain and negativity, because I\u2019m a startup guy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Launching a grant-based startup attraction program<\/h2>\n

From Arizona, Tom moved to the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, where he was appointed a chaired professor. A smaller community turned out to be more politically complex than he expected: \u201cMy personality is a little bit impatient. I try to get things started that I believe are right. But I ran into pushback and political challenges I\u2019d never encountered before.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tom \u201cretreated\u201d to being a traditional academic for a while, but then stumbled upon a program in St Louis, Missouri. \u201cIt was an economic development program where they gave $50,000 grants to companies that would relocate to the downtown area of St Louis. It was called the Arch Grants, named after the great Gateway Arch in St. Louis. And it was hugely successful. So I said, I’m going to do the same in Colorado Springs.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

He created a similar grant-based startup attraction program, named the Torch Grants after the headquarters of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee in Colorado Springs. The program, now in its fifth year, was designed to bring early-stage companies into the local ecosystem and support their growth. \u201cWe give them fifty thousand dollar grants to do that, and they have to set up shop for at least one year in the community,\u201d explains Tom.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Seeing the systemic gap<\/h2>\n

Tom\u2019s career had always focused on economic development and very early-stage startups. And with his energy, it was no wonder that when he officially retired, he couldn\u2019t step away from his mission entirely. \u201cI can\u2019t retire,\u201d he thought. \u201cI\u2019ve got to find something else to do.\u201d Using his decades of experience building campus-based entrepreneurship and investment programs, he began working on what would become ICAN: a global network designed to help campuses connect their startups to early-stage capital and to benefit from the long-term outcomes of that innovation.<\/p>\n

ICAN was the result of repeated patterns Tom had observed over nearly four decades. Campuses consistently produced ideas, research, and founders capable of building viable companies, but lacked two critical elements: a reliable source of early-stage capital and a mechanism for the university to benefit from the value they helped create. Arizona group\u2019s success made the picture especially clear \u2013 the problem was not a lack of investor interest, but the absence of a clear entry point and ongoing deal flow for early-stage innovation.<\/p>\n

ICAN was created to bridge that gap \u2013 on a global level. The initial idea behind ICAN was direct: help campuses establish their own angel investor groups focused on ventures emerging from their institutions. Tom had done this before and knew it could work. He began reaching out to universities worldwide, offering hands-on support, proven structures, and tools to help them set up campus-based investor networks. The response was almost nonexistent. \u201cI sent out all kinds of emails to campuses all over the world,\u201d he says. \u201cAbsolutely zero response.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lack of traction did not surprise him \u2013 Tom was well aware of how difficult it is for academic institutions to adopt new, riskier models. \u201cThey just don’t know how to respond to inbound messaging from somebody that looks like they’re trying to sell them something \u2013 even though they\u2019re actually trying to enable,\u201d describes Tom. Rather than abandoning the idea, Tom reframed it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pivot to a global deal flow network<\/h2>\n

Tom shifted his focus from institutions to deal flow. He created a dedicated ICAN deal room explicitly for what he called \u201ccampus-born ventures.\u201d To qualify, a company had to be founded by:\u00a0<\/p>\n