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Innovation at Princeton is thriving. After our founding in the summer of 2024, the Office of Innovation spent the early days strategically establishing ourselves as a central resource on campus and a clear point of entry for external partners seeking to engage with the University. Now in our second year, Princeton researchers know they can turn to us to help navigate opportunities and challenges in pursuing entrepreneurship, technology translation, and industry engagement, while partners outside the University can look to our office to connect with Princeton’s research enterprise in thoughtful and productive ways.
In building that stable foundation, we have made it possible for innovation at Princeton to advance meaningfully, despite a regional, national, and international landscape that is shifting rapidly and drastically. In this report, you’ll read about important milestones from across our office over the past twelve months, including advances in technology transfer, the buildout of our innovation infrastructure and programs team, and the incredible growth of our industry partnerships.
Notably, this fiscal year has been the strongest year ever for industry-supported research. Between July 2025 and June 2026, we delivered more than $28 million in new industry research awards. While “dollars in the door” are a critical marker of success, another meaningful data point is the number of my fellow faculty members who have chosen to work with industry. This number has grown by 25%, a sharp increase over all prior years. This growing level of engagement reflects the value Princeton researchers find in collaborating with industry both as a means of diversifying funding and because these partnerships have the power to supercharge ideas and discoveries into practice and purpose. Such progress reflects the University’s sustained investment in the people, policies, and infrastructure that make productive and principled industry engagement possible.
Thank you for being a part of Princeton’s innovation ecosystem. Looking to the year ahead, our focus is clear: to build on this momentum and strengthen the pathways that help Princeton ideas move from discovery toward impact. Together, we are building bridges, breaking barriers, and benefiting society.
Craig B. Arnold
Vice Dean for Innovation and University Innovation Officer, Susan Dod Brown Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
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