Last month saw the publication of WIPO’s new bi-annual IP report, entitled “The Direction of Innovation”. The report is packed with insights, bringing a combination of powerful observations that really hit home backed by data-driven analysis that look deeply into how and why innovation flows.

A key perspective of the report points to the split of economic benefits which go to society (social benefit) vs. returns to private sector investment (private benefit). Spoiler warning: a clear example is the lightning-paced work occurring from the time Chinese scientists sequenced and released the mapping of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in January 2020, to Covid-19 public vaccinations – barely a year later. While many may point to big pharma’s eye-popping profits, the WIPO report shows that the quantifiable portion of the economic benefits to society are roughly 900x those of the revenue earned by the private sector!

The best laid plans… how global crises affect innovation ecosystem participants

On 7 April 2022, WIPO’s IP and Innovation Ecosystems Sector (IES), hosted a short conference to present summary findings of the report, accompanied by a lively panel discussion. Marco Alemán, head of WIPO’s IES, introduced the key concept of how dependent major innovation outcomes are on the influence of each participant in the ecosystem: nations, institutional scientific and engineering research, and private sector investment. However, major events beyond the control of public policy makers shape outcomes, usually via crises, such as war, pandemic and natural disaster. Those crises have enormous impact on research and innovation outcomes. Look at how penicillin development rose in direct response to battlefield infections.

Reflecting academia, industry & government, panel’s views on setting of the direction of innovation

In introductory remarks and presentation of the panelists, Dr. Carsten Fink, head of the IES Department of Economics and Data Analysis, provided illustrations of the change in pace and focus of innovation since the industrial age. As society made its lunge forward in technology in the 20^th century, it did so in recognizable big waves, i.e., engine/transport > pharma > ICT > digitalization, today.

And some funny things happened on the way to the IP forum. A most recent example is digital-related innovation: it has grown 172% faster than all patents over preceding five years.

Lively panel discussion

Introducing themselves and their work, each panelist drove home the reality of innovation acceleration. The panelists included Victor Aguilar, Procter & Gamble’s Chief R&D and Innovation Officer, Dr. Xiaolan Fu, Professor and Founding Director of Oxford University’s Technology & Management Centre for Development, David Kappos, Partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and former Director of the USPTO, and Caroline Ylitalo, Division Scientist at 3M. Here a few items that resonated with me:

Views from academia, industry and public sector

• Dr. Fu highlighted the case of under-the-radar innovation taking place in developing economies, and how digitalization is changing adoption patterns into and out of LDCs. But it’s not only permeability and diffusion that are changing, it’s also about the impact on labor and the growth in services from disembodying know-how and delivering expertise digitally.
• From the corporate side, 3M’s Caroline Ylitalo spoke of major challenges and trends we face as society. She highlighted the impact of crisis and the opportunities they may arise from it, shown in the surge in demand for N95 masks, and visible also in the utility gains from the digital world’s access to masses of technical information, along with the advent of ideation tools and collaboration platforms.
• P&G’s Victor Aguilar drove home the point of digitalization’s impact for P&G’s goal of improving life, ranging from AI’s contribution to retailing optimization, to its role in designing smart toothbrushes, and to the increasing importance of identifying relevant innovation arising outside P&G.
• Cravath’s David Kappos highlighted how dependent the realization of huge economic output and the delivery of the benefit to society are on making sure ecosystems’ participants do what they do best (per their respective missions)
  • Private sector develops suitable commercially defensible applications,
  • Inventors and their institutions need access to the tools – including collaborative networks – to help convert their innovative insights into invention disclosure and products
  • Governments alone needs to provide money and structure of well-reasoned incentives to grow and make accessible the bounty of fundamental research;the private sector’s need to provide returns to owners makes investment in basic research prohibitive.

Public and private motivations: even if not aligned, good neighbors enable a productive existence

The role of government policy and its ability to create a fertile bed of fundamental research is a topic receiving significant attention. And well it should. Thoughtful and economically supportive public policy for fundamental research can produce huge big social benefits. Once they’re convinced of the business potential prospects, the private sector gets busy converting discoveries from a trove of basic research into commercialized inventions. That’s not all, as “de-risked” innovations come into focus, industry dramatically increases its share of development expense.

Beginning in the 1950s, the space race led to the creation of NASA in the US and its enormous role in driving aerospace research and creating in the process a rich network of public-private collaboration. Sponsored research was involved of course, but government purchases of innovation-based products from the private sector – there was no other buyer – were also a critical factor in clearing a path to commercialization of those space-age inventions.

Enormous productivity flowed from that inventive output which created social benefits many times those of the gains for the private sector in a broad array of fields, such as energy storage, photovoltaics and nuclear energy.

The grand challenges facing us and the need to pay attention to the direction of innovation

As the world faces climate change, ongoing food insecurity, the need for higher levels of education and the preservation of privacy rights, to name some big ones, government can play an important role. While the public sector can’t do a great job of predicting private sector winners, it can do things to even out the playing field through incentives, such as by purchasing from innovative smaller firms willing to take the risk of developing emerging technology.

There is so much inside this report, I am moved to invoke lyrics from OMC’s 1995 hit single, How Bizarre, but with a twist: you don’t need to “buy the rights”, WIPO grants you a free readership license, so download their great Intellectual Property Report 2022: The Direction of Innovation – and enjoy its valuable insights.

BTW, keep an eye out for a future SeedSprint blogpost where we’ll get more into the weeds on a topic WIPO cares a lot about: increasing the efficiency of the critical interplay between innovation-seeking large enterprise on one side, and technology providers on the other, i.e., institutional intermediaries such as TTOs, along with risk-taking micro and SMEs (MSMEs) in the private sector.

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Last week, we presented in one of Inteum’s high-focus customer webinars. 

In case you are not familiar with Inteum, the company is one of the world’s leaders in intellectual property (IP) management software and services. Hundreds of technology transfer offices at universities, federal labs, and research institutions in 27 countries use Inteum’s comprehensive software solutions to manage their patent portfolios and other IP assets. 

The topic of last week’s webinar was using Inteum’s Technology Publisher feature to prepare and manage non-confidential summaries (NCS) of an organization’s IP assets for marketing purposes. SeedSprint was a natural fit for this topic. After all, we help universities, other research institutions, and startups covert their NCSs into our easy-to-read profile format and make them discoverable by potential industry partners who are actively seeking such technology.

We make it simple for technology-providers to connect with industry technology-seekers, typically large corporations that invest heavily in external R&D. On SeedSprint, each side can search, identify, and communicate directly with each other about licensing, joint-development, and other types of collaboration.

Accommodating variety in our members’ file formats using Inteum’s Technology Publisher

Universities, federal labs, and other organizations order and format their data in different ways. These formatting differences can make it tricky to capture the right information and reflect it properly in another format. It can be especially difficult to convert descriptive text that may not be well-structured with tags. 

Our team can work with just about any well-structured relational database files our members use. However, we find that Inteum customers’ data is especially easy to work with via their Technology Publisher service. Technology Publisher helps us automate NCS imports and convert them to accurate, well-populated SeedSprint profiles.

SeedSprint members using Technology Publisher with RSS data feed don’t need an API

When a new institutional member using Technology Publisher onboards with SeedSprint, we map their data at no charge. We understand Inteum’s file structure well and can convert the data to SeedSprint profiles quickly. Even when we need to tweak the parsing, we can usually import their NCSs in a single day.

For Inteum Technology Publisher users that produce RSS data feeds, we don’t even need to use our API to keep their NCSs updated. Once we have imported the data to SeedSprint, Inteum customers can update their SeedSprint profiles automatically when they update on Technology Publisher.

Efficiency leaves more time for core marketing, including using SeedSprint’s industry partner database

By avoiding time-consuming interface and updating issues, technology commercialization professionals can use SeedSprint’s industry database to identify companies that are a potential fit. SeedSprint members can search by keyword or company name. When they are ready to reach out, they can send their profile with a direct message to the company or companies they identify as a potential licensee or partner. 

We also provide our members with deal-flow tools, such as online NDA negotiations and management and data rooms with encryption. The best part? SeedSprint is free of charge for universities, other research institutions, and non-profits. We are available to industry and technical service providers at a flat annual fee. 

Not on SeedSprint yet? Get started!

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Often, technology transfer offices (TTOs) at universities and other research institutions license promising technologies to spin-off companies. Spin-outs, sometimes referred to as spin-offs, are companies formed by university researchers—faculty, students, postdocs, and others—and are typically based on a university license of intellectual property (IP). IP can include patents, trade secrets, copyrights, and trademarks. Spin-outs may also be startups engaged in joint research projects with the university. If you’re a researcher and think your research could provide a disruptive solution to a critical problem with commercial applications, here’s what you need to know before you spin out your company! 

As a spin-out, you are usually the first mover in your market. Your company is research-intensive in the first place because nobody has ever implemented your technology before and because you and your team have valuable technical know-how. As a first mover, the market is wide open, so you do not have to fight for users until the first follower arrives. You also have an inherent understanding of the technology that a copycat company might miss while trying to mimic your successes.

However, first movers also face challenges, most notably, actually developing the technology for the first time, navigating the business world as a researcher-turned-entrepreneur, and protecting your IP. Without careful protection, a copycat could jump in and duplicate your successes without having to go through the hard work of the research that made your technology possible in the first place. 

We recently spoke with one of our TTO members, who noted that many spin-outs make research talent and equipment a high-priority line item, but do not include IP costs in their funding strategy. Your company is staffed by world-class researchers and stocked with state-of-the-art equipment and if you want to reap the full benefit of your R&D, protecting your IP should be at the top of your funding to-do list.

The university has licensed the initial research patent to your company, but you will need to protect further research progress. As the technology comes closer to maturity, new findings building on the original discovery will need protection. If you hope to work internationally or at least prevent a foreign company from benefitting from your findings, patents will need to be filed in other countries too. Even this alone can rack up expenses in the range of $100k.

Despite the cost though, the consensus among experts like patent lawyers and startup advisors is clear: it’s always best to file sooner rather than later. So, if you’re thinking about spinning out a company based on your research, how can you ensure that you have the funds you’ll need to protect your IP? 

Try to anticipate IP protection costs as early as possible during fundraising. While it’s easy to overlook these costs amid the excitement of technology development and market exploration, a few hours of research on filing costs and an extra line item on your investor pitch deck can make all the difference. Not only will you abate the possibility of being short on funds in a critical time, but some of your prospective investors may be impressed by your foresight. While you may be prepared to pay your scientists well, be prepared to pay your patent lawyers, too!

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One of the greatest challenges that tech transfer office (TTO) and new ventures staff at universities face in commercializing university technology is cultivating business savvy among their researchers-turned-entrepreneurs. TTO staff dedicate significant time and resources to empowering and coaching researchers interested in commercialization to design product features that resonate with the needs of their prospective customers, price their product appropriately, gain the confidence to pitch their product to prospective business partners, and expand and nurture their networks. Investing in university researchers and empowering them to think like an entrepreneur in the tech transfer process is critical to commercialization success.

Our team attended the 2019 AUTM Annual Meeting in Austin, TX in February, where we learned from thought leaders in technology transfer on topics ranging from strategies for forging successful industry-university partnerships, to the benefits of creating funds for early-stage proof-of-concept development, to tactics for helping scientists develop essential business skills.  One of the sentiments echoed throughout many of the sessions was that though the barriers to commercialization are very real, there are methods and resources available for overcoming these barriers. So if you’re a TTO or new ventures professional looking to coach your researchers: what are some key steps you should take when helping your researchers transition from the bench to the business world?

1. Educate your researchers to think of their tech as a product tailored to their customers’ wants and needs.

More startups fail from lack of customers than from product failure. While the tech may provide a solution to the world’s problems, it won’t go anywhere if the market isn’t ready to receive it. Conducting customer interviews is critical to business success. By interviewing the people who will ultimately use the product, researchers can find out what their prospective customers actually want and need.

It’s important to be specific about what the product does and what problems it solves. Researchers should be able to answer these questions to identify product-market fit:

• What specific problems does the product solve?
• What is the specific product or service provided?
• Does the value proposition match what the customer needs?
• How will the future startup get, keep, and grow its customer base?

2.  Once they have developed a product people want, help your researchers develop the confidence they need to cultivate business relationships.

In research, ideas are kept close to the chest to protect intellectual property. This often leads to information silos, which are not conducive to the idea-sharing nature of commercialization. However, in the business world, networking is king.  Companies are looking to collaborate with universities and young startups—sometimes, all you have to do is start the conversation.

3. “Build it and they will come” doesn’t apply—a well-honed pitch is the ticket to forming the right partnerships. 

Prospective investors want specific, measurable outcomes and plans. Vague proposals willlose investors’ interest. Both the product and the pitch have to demonstrate exactly what results all parties can expect. Researchers must look beyond the scope of their immediate work to describe why their offer matters.

With our high-impact, industry-vetted profile templates, seedsprint makes it easy for both TTO professionals and researchers to put technology on display for the right people to see and securely communicate with potential partners. We know how important it is to keep intellectual property secure, which is why we provide encrypted data rooms and NDA negotiation tools.

Educating researchers to think about their tech as a business is critical to transforming it into a life-changing product or service that can make the world a better place. seedsprint is a great first step in helping your tech reach a wider audience and we’re happy to be part of the process!

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A 2013 Brookings Institute study showed that most universities aren’t benefitting financially from their patents and licensing – and the situation hasn’t really improved today. According to Leopold Demiddeleer, our resident tech scout, many universities are not able to turn their research into significant sources of income through industrial licensing. He says that sometimes when his team found a technology interesting enough to warrant a deep-dive, “we’d really like the research, but weren’t satisfied with the published IP – say, because the patent wasn’t written to protect what we needed – it happens a lot. Even with a smart and successful TTO associate guiding the process, patent applications can easily get written ‘academically’ and not meet industrial licensee needs.”

Any corporation hoping to buy the license to an invention or discovery, whether held by a university spin-out or the university TTO, will need that invention to be properly patented and licensed. The 4 criteria for an invention to be patentable, is that is must be (1) comprised of patent-eligible subject matter; (2) useful; (3) novel; (4) non-obvious – but making a patent commercially viable goes beyond these basic criteria.

Many researchers, however, feel the pressure to publish quickly and often, with an emphasis on producing ideas rather than commercially viable products and services. But, for a patent to be viable, it needs to be developable and marketable. Researchers and university patent offices must balance a focus on commercial viability and market needs with an emphasis on an invention’s novelty to prevent others from working around the idea and competing with any company that chooses to use their work. 

So what does this mean in practical terms? It means that when you are filing your patent, you should articulate alternative inventions and features, figuring out how others might work around the patent, and patenting those inventions, too. The goal is to anticipate and protect anything a corporate partner might do with the discovery so that, when those businesses invest in you, you don’t immediately face competition. Remember, patents aren’t guarantees of the rights to use an invention, but instead, prevent others from doing so without permission. 

Writing patents with industrial licensing needs in mind can help you more effectively capitalize on your innovation, which can benefit you (the inventor), your company, and your university! Are you a scientist-entrepreneur who’s spun your research into a startup? Check out our previous post on what you need to know about licensing university patents as a startup!

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We know you don’t need to be convinced about the benefits of industry collaboration, so it’s less a question of if, and rather more about how to find the right partner to negotiate a good deal.

In trying to level the playing field, negotiating with a big company is already a challenge for any innovative, young firm. However, for young companies with IP-based emerging technology from scientific research, finding the right industry partner and working out a collaboration agreement brings additional twists in the road along on the way to achieving acceleration and market traction.

Before launching seedsprint, from extensive experience with emerging technology teams and industry we developed a number of practical insights about finding prospective collaboration partners.
In terms of initiating the dialogue, here are five important things to do that can help you get there more efficiently:

1. Map your gaps – it’s hard to fill them unless you can name them.

For a partnership between an early-stage technology company and an industry partner to really pay off, it needs to work for both sides. While that’s true for financial investors, the goals are more straightforward: they put in money and seek a 10x return, via a trade sale or IPO. But prospective industry partners aren’t looking to hand you $500K or $1 million and walk away with a $10 million gain on a sale. They’re doing it out of strategic interest, with the goal of using your technology in their products for the markets they serve, rather than for financial gains.

For both sides, the “fit” is king.

First, you need to work out the broad areas of your development plan. A financial investor wants to know what you’ll do with the funds and what your timeline is. Strategic partners want to know that too, but rather than simply financing your development, e.g., the purchase of equipment, hiring consultants or funding a lease, they can make in-kind contributions of valuable resources. These can be cheaper and faster to get than by raising money and converting it to what you need. You also gain not just physical equipment or analytical services, but initial customers, regulatory knowledge, scale-up insights, and so forth. First do yourselves a favor and do a real gap analysis and figure out what you need that a partner can bring to the table.  Below is a link to an example of a one-page results summary for an H2 storage technology company.

2. Think (and write) like an industry tech scout to present your company or technology.

Tech scouts are bombarded with technology offerings and exciting new inventions. Another densely written, 5-page technology and business description, with 10 pages of back-up slides may not get the message across in order to get a dialogue going.

Explain the product’s value proposition, the needs it fills, and what it replaces in the market

The most effective way to get tech scouts attention is to give them specific examples of how you improve on existing market solutions. Use an attention grabber – a simple statement that impresses and supports why your technology or company deserves a deeper look. Within the constraints of non-confidential information, don’t be afraid to get very technical about what makes your technology so good, and how it stands out from the competition.

Technology description

Clearly state the development stage – proof-of concept, lab results, market-ready, and so forth. Don’t forget to mention what markets you are targeting and how large they are. It’s good to mention the advantages your technology has over the status quo and competitors. Note regulatory requirements to be met, if any, to bring your technology to market. State achieved milestones, including any funding or awards received and any important publications – they are great proof of your commitment and help validate your concept and business model. Don’t be shy!

Make your collaboration goal clear, put that gap analysis you did to work for you.

Finding the right industry partner for an emerging technology company is much more like dating than finding VC money, and don’t forget why: prospective industry partners are interested in long-term strategic benefits from the technology. Make sure they know what makes your technology special, and what you want from an industry partner. Though it may be obvious to you from your gap analysis, it won’t neccesarily be obvious to them.

You can talk about the funding you’re looking for, but unless you connect it to development tasks so that a tech scout can understand it – you’re missing a huge opportunity. Keep the collaboration goal simple to reflect what you want to achieve from the partnership – look at the gap analysis you did, e.g., seeking a partner to test integration of your product or material into finished good.

Limit your text

Be merciless with editing text: make your message lean and mean – and make sure it fits on just one to two pages.  No one has the time to read through lots of text – especially if they’re not yet sure about the potential fit. Stick to bullet points whenever possible (and not six lines long!), and make liberal use of tables, graphs and images.

3. Compile your potential partner list.

Most startups can produce an overwhelmingly long list in 20 minutes; the trick is to put those companies in order of likeliness of a fit. If you’re not sure and it’s a guess, go with it. Then take your list and do some research on each of their websites. It’s not just hard factors like areas of interests, targeted markets, key innovation resources, but also their vision and culture that are important factors to include which sometimes get overlooked.  See where they have research relationships, or from where they have licensed in technology. It will not only be easier to collaborate with people who share your values, but you might also avoid potential misunderstandings.

4. Protect your IP.

Trust is a very important part of every successful partnership, but at the same time you need to make sure that your IP is properly protected. Never disclose any sensitive information before signing an NDA. If you’re affiliated with an institution, ask the Technology Transfer Office if they have a ready-to-go form or use our free two-way NDA.

5. Figure out the best way to reach them.

Tech scouts come in all stripes, but they are often very hard to get in touch with. Use any common point you have, shared contacts via LinkedIn, industry associations, academic connections and so forth.

When a partnership has been launched regular meetings should be scheduled to allow strong two-way communication between you and your industry partner. Follow-ups and feedback is a best way to avoid failure of the partnership you spent so much time establishing. We’ll post more on this later. Any questions? Just drop us a note.

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Fortunately, inventors and research institutions have technology transfer staff to help guide them.

Inventors at universities and other institutions need to know the basics about intellectual property management in order to work with technology transfer staff and protect their inventions.

The Basics: Intellectual Property and Research Institutions

1.  Invention disclosures

Research institutions encourage faculty and students to share new discoveries via an “invention disclosure” form. Researchers are asked to summarize the invention, and often to suggest potential commercial applications. In the United States, the norms for this process were established after the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act.

The process for submitting invention disclosures varies by institution. The document is held in confidence by the technology transfer professional who receives it.

Technology transfer staff use invention disclosures to assess whether the discovery had commercial potential, and to inform patent prosecution.

2. Patent prosecution

If an invention has market potential, the next step may be to begin pursuing a patent. A technology transfer office typically guides this process, which can be complex. A patent is a set of exclusive rights that patent owners are granted, based on the sharing of information about an invention.

Ownership of intellectual property varies case by case and depends on the employment status of the researcher, use of the institution’s resources in the research, prior agreements, the source of funding for the research, and other factors.

The technology’s licensee will often contribute monetary resources to help secure patents.

Interested in viewing large enterprise partners that are seeking patented technologies? Sign up for a free seedsprint account.

3. Copyright registration

Certain types of inventions, especially software, may be eligible for copyrights rather than patents. Books, video, and software code are all candidates for copyright protection.

4. Licensing

Technology developed at research institutions is usually transferred to a third party using a licensing agreement. The third party may be granted exclusive or non-exclusive rights to a technology. The most common licensees for university technologies are established companies or new startups.

Sometimes, researchers will make arrangements to leave their institutions or adjust their workload in order to become a founder of a new startup based on the technology they invented.

5. Commercialization

Commercialization is the journey that a technology takes from the lab (or garage) to the market. The process often involves assessing real-world applications, brainstorming products and potential paths to market, designing products, conducting pilots and tests, and securing sales and distribution channels. The licensee may wish to work with the inventor to assist with the commercialization process.

Interested in licensing technology or exploring market applications for your technology? Learn more about the free seedsprint community.

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