Kym Verhovshek Follows the Questions that Connect Research with Opportunity
By Michelle Fiscus, Senior VP & Chief Communications Officer
For Kym Verhovshek, helping an idea move forward starts with understanding it. What problem does it address? Who experiences that problem? What would make the idea useful to them? Across a career in business development, entrepreneurship and commercialization, those questions have helped her identify the people, resources and relationships an opportunity needs next.
As NCInnovation’s Hub Director working with Western Carolina University and UNC Asheville, Verhovshek brings that approach to university research and the communities surrounding it.
“My career has been centered around building connections between good ideas, people, and opportunities.”
Her career began in media and communications, working with television stations, advertising agencies and media companies. That work introduced her to customer discovery, developing offerings and building partnerships. As her career increasingly focused on growth and business development, she moved into diagnostics and health and wellness, including international business development at Genova Diagnostics and global growth work with Nordic Naturals.
Working with teams and distributor partners across markets gave her a broader understanding of how companies grow, where they encounter challenges and which relationships can help them move forward. She later brought those experiences together through consulting work focused on growth strategy, partnerships, commercialization and organizational development.
Her work as an NCI entrepreneur-in-residence created an opportunity to apply that experience earlier in an idea’s development. Working with university researchers, she helped examine potential customers and markets, assess commercialization opportunities and connect projects with relevant expertise.
That experience led her toward the Hub Director role and the opportunity to build connections across Western North Carolina.
“The part of the work I find most rewarding is building the relationships and connections that make the ecosystem stronger.”
Verhovshek sees complementary strengths at Western Carolina and UNC Asheville. Western Carolina contributes engineering, applied research and health sciences expertise, including its RAPID Center and relationships with local industry. UNC Asheville brings interdisciplinary learning, faculty-mentored research, entrepreneurship initiatives and collaboration across the sciences, arts and humanities.
She is interested in what can happen when those university strengths connect with the needs and experience of people throughout the region. Listening to manufacturers, entrepreneurs, investors and community partners helps identify where research could address a practical challenge.
At Western Carolina, she points to the mosquito spectroscopy project led by Dr. Brian Byrd and Dr. Scott Huffman as an example of that process. Their work connects a regional challenge involving mosquito-borne disease with applied research and potential commercial application. Understanding who faces the problem, how it is addressed today and the value a faster or more accurate tool could provide helps clarify the pathway forward.
At UNC Asheville, she highlights the collaborative approach to NCI’s Pipeline Program, involving university leadership, deans and faculty in identifying promising research. Student participation connects classroom learning with projects that require researchers to consider application, audience and impact.
Those experiences also inform her interest in workforce development. She sees opportunities for community college faculty and students to contribute hands-on training and expertise alongside university research, helping connect education with the skills emerging technologies and businesses may need.
Across that work, Verhovshek wants the hub to reflect Western North Carolina’s particular strengths and priorities. Advanced manufacturing, healthcare, environmental and natural-resource industries, and the outdoor economy all offer possibilities to explore where regional needs and university expertise intersect.
“I see the hub as a regional expression of NCInnovation’s statewide mission.”
Her vision is a place where faculty, students, businesses and community partners can bring an idea, challenge or opportunity and find help exploring it. Connecting those conversations with NCI’s statewide resources can give research developed in Western North Carolina a pathway toward applications within the region and beyond.
For Verhovshek, that pathway takes shape through the work she has returned to throughout her career: listening, asking questions and helping people find the connections that allow an idea to move forward.