by Charles Litton, UNeMed | December 22, 2025
It’s that time again when we keep with tradition and look back at 2025 to reflect on some of the more popular and important stories, events and developments.
1. Innovation Week
When I looked at our traffic numbers form the previous year, no single Innovation Week element led the site in views or clicks or whatever metric you choose. But four of our top 10 most visited pages, and eight of our top 20—a full 34 percent of all traffic to those pages—were dedicated to Innovation Week and its pinnacle event, the Innovation Awards. And no singular element seemed to shine above the others: news stories covering the Awards ceremony itself; announcements detailing schedule of events, PDFs of the Awards programs from multiple years, and static pages detailing the history and purpose of the event were all popular stops. And that is as it should be. We produce and celebrate Innovation Week with one, over-arching goal: To celebrate University of Nebraska innovations and the people who create them. This website aspires to many purposes, and adding volume to the efforts and accomplishments of our innovators is chief among them.
2. Idea Pub: Morning Edition
It’s clear that the Idea Pub: Morning Edition coverage is a fixture, and we should all get used to seeing more of it. Our top overall news story of 2025 announced the first-ever meeting for this group in the new Omaha Catalyst building in the EDGE District. The monthly showcase and networking event for University of Nebraska innovators, entrepreneurs and the local startup community has drawn steady numbers online and in person at the events. A quick count showed at least 20 Morning Edition-related stories pulling down high traffic numbers, including the story announcing Catalyst’s grand opening, which clocked in at our eighth-most read news story of the year.
3. UNeMed releases 2025 Annual Report
To the shock of no one, UNeMed’s annual report is another regular feature in these annual reviews, but not usually in such rarefied air as the top three. The 2025 annual report did break from custom in size, orientation and design style, even if its reporting of core metrics and recent success stories remained constant.
4. UNeMed launches startup incubator ‘The Furnace’
Perhaps the most pleasant surprise was a recently published story announcing UNeMed’s startup incubator program. With the help of our friends at UNeTech Institute, The Furnace will nurture a handful of very early-stage faculty startups to prepare themselves to navigate the treacherous road of raising capital and building a strong foundation for a new biomedical business. We hope to announce the first of several cohorts this coming spring.
5. Design Thinking workshop tackles patient falls
In November we coordinated a two-day workshop that uses an interesting approach to developing new ideas to persistent problems. The Design Thinking method gathers a group of people together who are challenged to solve a specific problem. In this case, it was patient falls, a potentially fatal problem for elderly and other ailing people in hospitals everywhere. The story details how Design Thinking works and hints at what might become of ideas that were developed during the workshop.
6. Boot Camp
For the first time we hosted the annual Technology Transfer Boot Camp in our new digs in the Omaha Catalyst building in the EDGE District. Our new classroom setting proved to be the perfect location for us, which had sometimes been a struggle on a very busy and crowded campus. With our own dedicated learning facility, we expect to move more quickly forward with our plans to expand the program.
7. VIC featured in Fast Company
Our startup Virtual Incision continues to land among the top stories. The Lincoln-based surgical robotics company, built on a UNMC-UNL collaboration, followed up its FDA approval headlines from 2024 with more news in 2025. The most well-read among them was its No. 8 listing on Fast Company Magazine’s annual list of most innovative medical device makers in the world.
8. Nebraska ranks No. 82 in world for U.S. patents
A cornered technology transfer professional, upon threat of torture, will likely tell you that patents aren’t a great measure for success in the industry. However, they are a great tool, and a decent indicator to the level of innovative ideas we see from faculty, staff and students at the University of Nebraska. It’s no small feat to be listed No. 82 among the thousands of global academic institutions that were issued a U.S. Patent in the previous year.
9. SPN: MicroWash product launches nationwide
It was a great year for our startups with yet another grabbing headlines. This time it was University Medical Devices landing in the pages of regional news outlet, Silicon Prairie News, for successfully launching its first product, MicroWash.
10. BIRD Grant
Another success story about one of our startups, this one built on a UNO-UNMC collaboration that intends to make COPD a lot less deadly. RespirAI, who we named our Startup of the Year at our most recent Innovation Awards, landed a coveted BIRD grant early last year, and will use the additional funding to expand its Omaha presence and further develop an AI-powered home monitoring platform for managing chronic pulmonary conditions, starting with COPD.
Classics:
Several posts from previous years remain popular and relevant, particularly those that focus on day-to-day operations and legal issues associated with intellectual property.
- The Importance of Technology Transfer
- Five important aspects of copyrights that you should know
- Veins and arteries are just pipes, right?
- How to determine who is an inventor on a patent: Unraveling inventorship vs. authorship
- Innovation, entrepreneurs abound at UNMC nursing
- Technology Transfer 101: Defining Research Commercialization
