Our Portfolio
Impact Investments, Grant Initiatives, and Advocacy Investing
How We Support Change
Impact Investments
Michelson 20MM is dedicated to improving the educational opportunities and career prospects of current and prospective college students, college graduates, and other potential innovators.
This is a key goal of Michelson 20MM’s founder, Dr. Gary Michelson, and his wife Alya Michelson, who believe in driving progress in education to reflect the new economic reality created by our modern digital world.
Our impact investments provide a structured vehicle for us to deploy intelligent, patient capital to entrepreneurs and for-profit, social impact startups. Our investments create opportunities and develop the necessary skills that help innovators bridge the gap between talent and success.
Initiatives
Our foundation provides a limited number of grants to support nonprofit organizations with new or existing programs that address our impact goals.
We are especially focused on three key initiatives:
- Access to free or affordable student textbooks.
- Educating students and startups in intellectual property, and the value of IP laws and rights as an economic engine and source of enormous opportunity.
- Educating the same groups in statistics, another key area that heavily affects modern enterprise but isn’t widely understood or capitalized among budding innovators.
Advocacy
All Michelson 20MM impact investments strive to support and publicize research that informs current and future public policy recommendations.
It is widely understood among both policymakers and businesses that existing policy has not kept pace with the rapid technological innovation of recent decades. Our new economic reality is not adequately served by the policy frameworks in place today.
By supplying empirically substantiated policy recommendations to policymakers at all levels of government, Michelson 20MM is creating new economic opportunities for underserved students from low-income communities.
Our Initiatives
Textbook Affordability: OpenStax
OpenStax, a nonprofit open textbook publisher based out of Rice University, provides free college textbooks and low cost learning materials for students around the world.
With a catalog of 30+ books, 1,100+ course adoptions worldwide, and millions of users, OpenStax has generated over $390 million in student savings as of 2019. Michelson 20MM is proud to be a founding funder of OpenStax.
Intellectual Property Education: Michelson IP
Inspired by our founder Dr. Gary Michelson’s robust career, Michelson 20MM created an in-depth intellectual property video series, as well as an online course on IP, and our flagship IP textbook, The Intangible Advantage. Each of these resources was developed with the guidance of highly regarded experts to address critical gaps in the world of IP education. These resources are completely free to all learners.
We believe any young person who does not understand the basics of IP—and its value and role in science, business, and the arts—will find themselves at a distinct disadvantage in the world of tomorrow.
Learn more about Michelson IP and our other foundations that support higher education.