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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The year 2020 has made many commercialization professionals re-evaluate how they communicate and collaborate, and placed new demands on making online methods and forums count. From ensuring better Zoom meetings to developing an entirely new virtual marketing strategy, understanding various online tools and platforms can be daunting.

Tech transfer at universities and other research institutions has been adapting to the rapidly-changing digital ecosystem. But one thing that hasn’t shifted is the need to get important research and technology seen and into the market. 

At SeedSprint, we specialize in making online connections and collaboration between technology providers and corporate research sponsors, licensees, collaboration partners, and investors as simple and straightforward as possible. And our platform is free of charge for TTOs, research departments, and startups. 

So how can you use SeedSprint to your TTO’s advantage?

Upload to SeedSprint and update easily from your TTO’s database

Whether you use a proprietary system, an Excel spreadsheet, your own relational database, or a comprehensive IP management system, our goal is to make it easy for our members to upload and update technology summaries. That way, you can get them in front of potential industry partners – easily and efficiently.

We have an API that can be mapped to the fields of your relational database. And if you use a system such as Inteum’s Technology Publisher, we’ll do the mapping for you either into our API or using your RSS data feed. Both methods are easy and can be implemented in about a day! 

SeedSprint integrates easily with Inteum, helping your office consolidate and manage your IP and marketing strategy. Once uploaded, your NCSs will automatically update along with changes to Inteum’s Technology Publisher.

Learn more about how to create and manage profiles on SeedSprint.

SeedSprint’s industry database helps you connect with new partners

Once your technologies are uploaded, search SeedSprint’s database of corporate profiles to find commercialization partners suited to your technology. Message and send your technology profiles to them to get your technology seen without leaving your desk. You can search by firm name or technical terms. Once you’ve found some good matches, use keywords to direct the message and profile to the right person on the corporate side.

Learn more about how to message prospective industry partners on SeedSprint

Put your whole ecosystem to work: include startup and lab profiles to widen your net

If you think about it, industry is also looking for new partners. One of the best ways to demonstrate why your institution is a good fit is to show how your research and your startups bookend your IP portfolio and make it shine.

You can invite PIs to profile their labs and projects, and invite your spin-outs and startup licensees to profile themselves. Your institution is hyperlinked to any profile affiliated with you, which raises the visibility of your institution’s ecosystem.

Ready to put SeedSprint to work for your institution’s ecosystem? You can learn more here or check out our comprehensive User Manual for TTOs. Happy seedsprint-ing!

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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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Over the past couple of months, we’ve attended a number of virtual events focused on how open innovation is evolving in response to the health crisis. One of these events, AUTM’s webinar on “TTO Roles during COVID Rapid Response on Campus,” highlighted how TTOs have shifted their attention to COVID-19 therapeutics, diagnostics, and preventive strategies, and to projects that address other problems the virus has brought. To further understand how the health crisis is affecting the technology transfer community, we recently polled our institutional members. Read on to learn what our TTO members had to say! 

When we asked whether you expect changes to the tech transfer landscape beyond the short term, 58% of you said yes and 42% of you said no. We also wanted to hear your thoughts on the specific changes you expect in both the short-term and the long-term. We asked about changes like ‘work from home’ policies, business travel, budget changes, and your use of online tools during this time. Unsurprisingly, over 93% of you expect to be working from home in the near-term, and 62% believe this trend will persist beyond the next few months. As far as business travel, 91% of you say that you don’t expect to travel over the next few months, though 81% expect travel to resume later this year. In the same vein, 54% of you expect delays to the first meeting with prospective corporate partners, but 86% do not expect these changes to continue beyond a few months. During this period where so many of us are working from home, 33% expect to see reduced program offerings for university entrepreneurs, while only 14% expect this trend to persist beyond a few months. While the economic response to the health crisis is underway, reduced budgets are a concern for about half of you, both in the short- and longer-term. 

The majority of you also agree that new methods for identifying and connecting with industry partners and for other key tech transfer activities will become increasingly important. Some examples include heavier reliance on online open innovation tools, video-conferencing replacing in-person meetings, and relying on email more than in the past. 71% expect to use these new methods in the short term, and 61% expect these changes to persist in the long-term. As far as industry collaboration, over 90% of you expect collaborations with new and existing corporate partners to grow in both the short- and long-term. When it comes to patents, 41% of you expect fewer patents to be filed in the next few months, but only 14% expect them to slow down beyond this period. 

As a whole, the open innovation landscape is certainly shifting in response to the health crisis, in some ways, for the better. You can see the full results of our “2020 tech transfer landscape” survey displayed below. As we continue to adjust and come up with creative ways to forge ahead, we are curious to see what open innovation and technology transfer will look like a year or two from now! 

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The NIH recently added close to 2,000 NIH technologies to seedsprint’s platform using an API that enables automated posting and updating. Those technologies come from a couple dozen plus of the institutes and centers (including the CDC) that make up the NIH.

We recently caught up with Ajoy Prabhu, Head of Tech Transfer Marketing for NIH, to find out how things work there and what kinds of challenges he and his team are working on.

seedsprint: Ajoy, how do you and your licensing officers manage the marketing for so many institutes and centers?
Ajoy: A few years ago, the NIH began operating tech transfer with a dual-function outreach process.

seedsprint: What does that mean and how does it work?
Ajoy: In [2016] we de-centralized the marketing for inventions from our 27 member institutes and centers, with each institute becoming responsible for marketing their own technologies on an individual basis—we refer to these as “case-by-case technology marketing.” Licensing managers of the respective institutes and centers work with PIs and other research personnel to execute marketing strategies for a specific patent family to potential licensees. Secondly, we at the central Office of Technology Transfer do market research for the various institutes and help them market closely-related technologies as a bundle.

seedsprint: So what does that mean for your office centrally?
Ajoy: Since our de-centralization, we’ve shifted our efforts to deliver three core services:

• market analysis and guidance,
• transaction support and
• marketing of technology bundles or clusters, often covering more than one institute.

In the first two cases, we provide market analytics and assessment to all offices via shared databases, internal newsletter-type communications, along with one-on-one consultations with licensing and research personnel from our member institutes and centers.

Transaction support can be pretty broad and ranges from helping with industry contacts and industry suggestions for potential licensees at the front-end to support on valuation and negotiation at the back-end.

The last piece—technology cluster marketing—relates to our business development directed to commercializing multiple, related technologies.

An example of this could be two or three patent families whose research might have cut across two or more institutes. For example, say a given biomarker and receptor pair have promising applications both in diagnostics and therapeutics. Furthermore, related IP includes composition-of-matter and process patents all of which related to that biomarker-receptor pair but involve three different NIH operating units.

To help find the highest and best value, you not only need an overview of what the individual portfolio components are and how they fit together, but you also need to be able to look at the global biopharma and diagnostics markets and access the right contacts.

The international thing might not seem like much of a problem because of how international things are on the research side and on the industry side for life science research tools, medical devices and therapeutics. Well, surprise: our scientists and researchers do come from all over and many are plugged in all over. However, the institutes and centers are not fundamentally marketing organizations—they are investigative teams and do an outstanding job at their research. The upshot is that my colleagues in clinical development might have great access to a regulator in France or Thailand, but it doesn’t mean they know which business development person to contact to tee it up with a licensing manager at NIH covering the technology. That’s our job—to identify and execute marketing strategies for technology clusters.

seedsprint: Okay but other big state university systems—as in California or Texas, for example—they see a lot of related emerging technologies from different campuses—how’s that different from the NIH?
Ajoy: That’s a really good question. There are differences of substance and form—and each is significant.
Here is one example: In a US multi-campus university setting, where several PIs have come up with complementary IP, there’s impetus often to help it coalesce into a company to be spun out, with PIs being at least advisors with an equity interest, or even key executives in NewCo. Not an option for us—federally-funded PIs can’t do that for historical and practical reasons. But forgetting the merits, what does it mean for us?
It means we need to look for potential partners that appreciate the prospects in the cluster—and critically, have the financial wherewithal to close a deal.

seedsprint: Sounds like a call-out to industry rather than VC.
Ajoy: Often, that’s the case. And, as you know, strategic partners have a somewhat different set of concerns from those of financial investors – even for VC with LT life-science plays.

seedsprint: But you’re the NIH—if you have something that makes sense, you call somebody up and they say “let me see what time the next plane to DC is.”
Ajoy: Would be nice, but I don’t live in that world. Industry is inundated with information from inventors. We don’t get extra credibility credits for being the NIH. I have the same problem my colleagues have at academic institutions. It’s all about “fit”, but to show the fit, we need to get their attention. Once that happens, it’s simply a question of how fast we can move to deep-dive.

So, even with the 360 degree-view that we have here at NIH OTT, along with the cooperation we get from our PIs, we in marketing continually face the problem of getting the message out quickly and briefly and the need to expand and refresh our network continuously.

seedsprint: Ajoy—sound like your office has a pretty decent view of the landscape. What would you like to see from industry colleagues—across the aisle?
Ajoy: Oh that’s easy two things: (1) quick responses, and (2) if a “no” is looking probable, then “why”.

seedsprint: Thanks so much for your time.
Ajoy: Sure – thanks for your interest in what we’re doing.

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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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Technology transfer is a gateway to technological progress and innovation; however, even in the information age, there can be a disconnect between a technology’s value to society and its ability to reach those who can benefit from it most.  Enter seedsprint, the platform that makes it easier for emerging technologies to forge relationships with corporate partners. These relationships can help expedite product testing, in-kind resources, market entry assistance, and more.

Here at seedsprint, our goal is to understand pain points in the tech transfer process, and build software to make it easier. In 2018, we administered a survey to academic institutions, research labs, startups and others operating in the tech transfer space. The survey attracted over 100 responses primarily representing academic institutions in the United States or Canada. Here are some of our findings!

Licensing, new ventures, and more

• 91% of respondents said licensing was part of their professional responsibilities. We asked what activities were the most time-consuming, and here’s what we learned:

• 60% said negotiating licenses
• 40% said working on other legal agreements
• 36% said new university research-based ventures
• 35% said reviewing invention disclosures

Technology summaries

• 74% of respondents were personally responsible for creating and maintaining technology summaries and generally updated technology summaries on a quarterly or yearly basis. We wanted to know what was the most time-intensive aspect of creating these summaries:
  • 61% said collecting information for technology summaries
  • 42% said writing technology summaries for their website
• Almost 52% of respondents said their institution’s invention disclosure process does not yield all the information they need to create technology summaries for marketing purposes. Of these, most (69%) indicated that it is a moderate to heavy burden to gather this additional information.

Showcase your ecosystem & build better business relationships

Our survey results confirm that tech transfer professionals invest a great deal of time creating and updating technology summaries, identifying prospective licensees and industry partners, and maintaining these relationships. seedsprint streamlines networking and relationship management and helps you market your technologies more efficiently. With our easy-to-use API, you can upload your non-confidential technology summaries into industry-vetted profile templates in just a few clicks.  You can use our keyword search function to search for industry partners who are looking for the tech in your portfolio or message corporations you’re interested in partnering with directly.  Think you’ve made a match? Use our integrated workflow tools for due diligence to negotiate an NDA and share confidential information in our encrypted, auditable data room.

Networking: bridging the gap in the age of information

So you’ve uploaded your technologies to seedsprint and you’re already making new connections with prospective licensees and even have an NDA negotiation in the works.  What are the best ways to maintain these relationships?

• Keep your technology profiles up-to-date. Have a new technology in your portfolio that’s sure to change the world? Use our API to upload it to seedsprint and share it with prospective partners you think would be interested via our secure messaging feature.
• Stay engaged with prospective partners both online (via email LinkedIn, or seedsprint) and offline (via phone calls and in-person meetings). Starting the conversation may seem daunting but reaching out could lead to a deal or longstanding partnership. 
• Attend networking events with potential partners.This includes conferences, using local university alliances, and actively engaging with alumni communities to identify potential licensees.

See you on seedsprint!

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Though open innovation is the gold standard for forward-thinking corporations to maintain a competitive edge, both providers of emerging technology (startups, universities, and other institutions) and technology-seekers (corporations) still face many roadblocks. As the tech-holder, you face the problem of marketing and sharing your idea without giving up intellectual property rights. As the tech-seeker, you face a limited network in a globalized world.

Tech-Providers Maximize Returns

As the inventor, you might know everything about particle physics or quantum mechanics. However, it’s unlikely that you’re an expert on patent law or intellectual property rights. In fact, commercializing your idea may be more difficult than pursuing your scientific research.

First, you have to find out how to get your tech to market. In order to market your tech to potential investors and collaborators, you need to show potential investors how your tech works and its potential market applications. You risk exposing valuable trade secrets. To avoid this problem, a smart tech-holder has a valid and effective non-disclosure agreement (NDA) in place. Even with a powerful NDA in place, you probably wouldn’t share your patent with someone you hadn’t met or worked with.

You shouldn’t share your ideas with abandon, as many countries do not respect international patent laws. For that matter, many domestic companies may be able to reverse-engineer your patent to come up with a slightly different version. Given all of this headache, it might seem like it’s not worth putting your patent through the commercialization process.

Enter seedsprint, a networking platform that makes tech transfer easy. With seedsprint, you can make valuable industry connections. Through our network, verified individuals can view details of a particular technology in a secure virtual data room and you can immediately request that they sign an NDA.

Further, our platform serves as a virtual innovation district.  Like a city with the proper infrastructure to support open innovation, seedsprint supports all aspects of commercialization. This starts with the research and ends in patent licensing, an industry-university partnership and commercialization. Further, the more content you have on our platform, the greater your ability to take your entire research ecosystem to the next level. You can build your institution’s ecosystem on the platform by adding technologies for license, and also by inviting affiliated startups and research projects. Putting your institution’s entire tech ecosystem on display gives you access to more opportunities within a global open innovation network.

Corporations Find Emerging Technologies

As a corporate tech scouts, your goals are often aligned with those of tech-providers: you want to find the best tech for your company, increase efficiency and profits, and gain access to global markets. Current methods for doing this can be limited in scope. If you are interested in developing an industry-university partnership, for instance, how can you gain access to more than a handful of the world’s universities?

Even as a powerful corporation, your network may be geographically limited. Many companies engage in tech transfer only in European and North American markets. Should you happen to be located in an innovation district, there is still a good chance that the district does not have all the tech you seek. For example, you may be based in the Americas but want to connect with tech in China, the Middle East, or sub-Saharan Africa. Tech transfer research limited to North American and European markets is likely to miss out on some of the fastest growing sectors of the global economy.

You could spend an enormous amount of time and energy researching global tech and flying around the world to meet with prospective candidates, or, you could join a virtual global innovation district like seedsprint. Our platform can help you form industry-university partnerships, identify and access global tech, and keep your business up-to-date on cutting edge developments in science-based technologies.

Fast-track Your Open Innovation Pipeline

Open innovation works best in an unrestricted environment. At seedsprint, we understand this. We have built a user-friendly network, based on the simple idea that global collaboration is the key to maintaining a competitive edge in a rapidly-innovating world.

We will be at the 2019 AUTM Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas to showcase our platform and give prospective users the opportunity to explore its ability to make open innovation easier than ever. As you understand, the hardest aspect of commercialization is matching tech with companies ready to assist with commercialization goals. With seedsprint, a global database of patents and willing collaborators can be at your fingertips. Our network creates a secure and collaborative environment, which makes the process of open innovation and commercialization more efficient and competitive.

Find seedsprint at booth 505 at AUTM. Otherwise, feel free to check out our website to learn more about how startups, researchers, and industry giants can all benefit from joining our network.

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1. Is the technology a fit for my organization?

Finding the answer to this question is complicated and time-consuming, due to the technical complexity of most technologies. Tech scouts have to work through multiple scientific and engineering claims while working with the researcher to determine know-how requirements and more. Its not uncommon for a scout to put a lot of time into something that looks like a fit, later to find out it isn’t.

Bear in mind that while many scouts think they want the path with the fastest green light, an early red light is just as valuable, and can help them avoid misspent time and money. Alertness for “false fits” is critical to scouting efficiency – being able to say confidently, “Nope, despite the theoretical fit, it’s not for us.”

What are the key questions a tech scout must determine for fit?

• Is the research ongoing? This is a big deal for effective transfer.  The patent’s author brings critical know-how to the partnership, which is helpful for everything from getting the project off the ground to optimizing it at later stages. 
• What are the next steps of this research? Is there a meaningful summary that can be provided to me?
• Has the researcher clearly summarized what they want from the partnership? This can be difficult for a few reasons—focus, disclosure sensitivity, timing, prior practice, and so forth.
• Does this university display venture creation?

Unless non-market-based incentives distort startup formation, activity in creating spinouts and in licensing to startups are clear and positive signs that other research is likely to have not just academic significance, but commercial potential.

2. Are startups riskier as licensees?

The issue for the tech scout is – are the people with the technical insights putting their time and money into work with commercial goals? Looking at a patent description is helpful, but startups connect the dots: here’s a technology that a smart team is actively trying to commercialize.

Tech scouts view it as a great sign when the researcher is motivated by market-based solutions, not just by peer recognition of scientific leadership. So, even with a flawed process – industry insights can bring a lot.

Remember, investigators hitched to a startup aren’t just making a theoretical connection between research and marketplace: they’re betting on it. As a tech scout, I’m far more interested in getting to know a new institution with vigorous startup-stage licensing/new ventures because it shows that they have investigators interested in real products for the market.

3. License, acquire, or something else?

This question provides varied answers and they typically don’t show until you get into the deal. For example, we can really like the research, but aren’t satisfied with published IP – say, because the patent wasn’t written to protect what we needed – this happens a lot. Even with smart and successful TTOs guiding the process, patent applications can easily get written “academically” and not meet industrial licensee needs.

Do you want to take the first step and show corporate technology scouts that your research is ready?

Join the seedsprint community

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We interviewed Joy to learn more about technology commercialization and the licensing process at University of Delaware.

Jonathan Lillian: You recently spoke about getting research faculty engaged and motivated in the innovation and commercialization process.

How has OEIP’s approach to technology transfer changed in the several years you have spent at University of Delaware?

Joy Goswami: As you know, over the last few years there has been a general awareness of the importance of innovation, tech transfer and entrepreneurism in sustaining economic revival and growth.

With the decline of corporate research, universities are being asked to fill the void and play a central role in our knowledge-centric economy by the transfer of technologies originating from inventions. As a result, universities, including my own, are adapting by ‘pushing’ their faculty members to embrace research that is more translational in nature and may have better market appeal.

Many researchers believed that filing for a patent would preclude them from publishing the same work in a scientific journal… Or that if a researcher had already published their invention, they could never get patent protection for their invention.

The reality is that both of these situations may not be entirely true.

A mechanism most universities consider implementing to enable this ‘push’ is faculty incentives; which are meant to motivate them to engage in translational research. This is done by altering policy – making patenting and commercialization activities by faculty count toward promotion & tenure, providing financial rewards from royalty distribution generated from licensing of faculty’s IP, helping faculty in raising sponsored research dollars from industrial partners, or by assisting faculty with starting up businesses.

Such changes are obviously not easy to make, since they involve central stakeholders (that is, faculty members), to change their mindset and culture from their conventional academic research.

When I arrived, our approach was slowly evolving from a classical model. Many faculty investigators did not understand the significance of the knowledge-centric role, and the importance of invention, disclosure and patenting process and its role in technology commercialization. So, we made it our mission to educate our faculty and dispel any misconceptions through outreach efforts within campus.

JL: But Joy, UDEL has standard written procedures for disclosure and royalty sharing on the university policies, right? I would assume that this would mean that the incentivizing process is clear to faculty. What kinds of misunderstandings did you find? 

JG: Yes, technically you are right. The information is available, but not necessarily well understood due to common misconceptions regarding various aspects of the commercialization process.

For example, regarding patent protection, many researchers believed that filing for a patent would preclude them from publishing the same work in a scientific journal… Or that if a researcher had already published their invention, they could never get patent protection for their invention.

The reality is that both of these situations may not be entirely true.

Similarly, another misunderstanding that exists among investigators is that once a technology has been licensed to a company, they will be excluded from doing further research on it, which is almost never true.

“The quantity and quality of invention disclosures are on the rise. We have also seen an all time high in faculty startups this year, which is heartening.”– Jaideep (Joy) Gaswami, University of Delaware

Among others, we find that the distribution of royalty from a licensed technology may not be well understood by simply reading the policy and often has to be further explained to pertinent investigators.

JL: How do you go about remedying these misunderstandings?

JG: Most of the misunderstandings are clarified through our periodic outreach efforts within campus and one-on-one discussions with researchers.

Regarding and inventor getting research access to technologies that have been licensed to companies for example: We explain to them that our standard license agreements have a carve-out clause for continued use of the patent for non-commercial purposes, including ongoing research. We also explain that in addition to the carve-out for use in future research, most industry licensees actively seek – or even need – access to the investigators for their invaluable know-how of the technology.

From the university’s perspective, granting access to know-how as part of the license, and adds value to the license itself. Furthermore it allows us to provide assurance to the inventors that they would likely stay in continued contact with their invention and improvements if permitted by the corporate partner.

We are careful to avoid unintended consequences arising from misunderstandings of royalty sharing.

We make it explicit that, unless altered upon mutual consent, the default distribution of all royalties is in equal proportion amongst all inventors listed in the invention disclosure or patent. The inventors appreciate the fact that while they are not obligated to pay for any expense related to legal expenses or fees associated with the patent filing, and they get rewarded with royalty payouts upon the receipt of license revenues!

JL: So, did these programs motivate your faculty researchers who have shied away from commercialization or entrepreneurship in the past?

JG: The response has been fairly positive so far. Our office tracks our performance on a periodic basis and we are seeing a significant improvement on various metrics.

The quantity and quality of invention disclosures are on the rise. We have also seen an all-time high in faculty startups this year, which is heartening.

We hope that the trend continues and the word regarding our performance spreads throughout the University research community to motivate additional investigators visit our office and share their innovations.

Joy Goswami is the Assistant Director of the Office of Economic Innovation and Partnerships, where he oversees and manages technology transfer activities and corporate relations for the University of Delaware. Among his other roles, Joy is actively involved in managing intellectual property, assisting in establishing start-up and spin-off companies and bringing forth university-industry collaborations & partnerships.

Joy has more than eighteen years of experience in the field of business development and a career that has produced highly regarded commercialization strategies and outreach practices of novel technologies in the biotechnology, agriculture and bio-medical sector.  He is a Registered Patent Agent for the US Patent & Trademark Office and has assisted inventors to successfully obtain numerous US and international patents through issuance. He is also a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR/STTR) reviewer for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a Howard Bremer Scholar, conferred by the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM). He is a regular speaker, author and trainer at various technology commercialization seminars and workshops. He is currently an active member of The Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) and the Licensing Executive Society (LES).  Joy earned his Bachelor’s and Master of Science in Biology from Delhi University South Campus, and his MBA from the Herberger’s College of Business, St. Cloud State University, Minnesota.  He earned his Registration as a Technology Transfer Professional (RTTP) from the Alliance of Technology Transfer Professionals.

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