The vision and foundational strategy for the Global Hemp Innovation Center (GHIC) are proving to be successful on many fronts. The recent $10M USDA award establishes GHIC’s university-wide and external charter to build the scientific foundation to address ways to create sustainable supplies of hemp materials for use in the manufacture of food, feed, personal care, pharmaceutical products, building products, and advanced materials.

The GHIC foundational strategy fulfills the Land Grant University (LGU) mission to promote economic, social, cultural, and environmental progress for all people of Oregon, the nation, and the world. GHIC was founded and supported by the College of Agricultural Sciences (CAS) in June 2019 and leverages the efforts of many colleges and faculty across campus as well as other universities, state and federal agencies, and private sector partners. GHIC’s approach is outward-focused, interdisciplinary, and expressing the tripartite education, research, and engagement mission of a 21st Century land grant university.

The Hemp-based Carbon Economy (HCE) initiative, currently in development seeks to discover an optimal model that will accelerate GHIC advancement in enabling faculty creativity and entrepreneurship to help serve and grow the hemp sector through OSU innovation. The HCE core team focus is to define the best growth opportunities to create an innovation landscape of designed genetics with value-added advanced materials and application domains in mind; identify suitable early-stage commercialization models to attract investment; and enable practices to accelerate center progress. The team will determine the best structure and approach that is most attractive to advance ideas by leveraging internal OSU capabilities and resources in its engagement with industry expertise and perspective.