Guarding Your Property

Innovation is the lifeblood of universities, and owning the rights to your ideas or selling your research capability can be a lucrative income from any university’s primary resource: innovation. For years a select few British institutions have been actively working with commercial giants, but increasingly this dark art is becoming an essential part of business for all institutions.
Income from contract research increased to £536 million in 2006 (from £363 million in 2001) and the number of patents granted more than doubled in the same period, from 250 in 2001 to 577 in 2006. The money made from licensing agreements also rocketed to £58 million, proving that there is very real money to be made from ideas and research.
Coller IP Management is working alongside the universities of Durham, Southampton and Newcastle to make commercialising their IP a reality.
With backing at the very top from the pro-vice chancellor, Newcastle University is optimising its approach to commercialisation. But what’s the first and best step to beginning the process? CEO of Coller IP, Jackie Maguire explains:
“For many universities this is almost like finding hidden treasure, many have intellectual property and other additional wider capital, but it’s crucial that this is not just about patents. It’s about developing the broader value within the university that makes the most of the innovation.”
The pressure on universities to help ease the purse strings of Education Ministers is only going to grow: Current key areas for growth and research are Stem Cells and Human Genetics, Ageing, Cancer, Cell & Molecular Biosciences, Energy, the Environment, New Electronic Materials.
The first step to releasing the value of your research is getting an idea of the status of the IP itself. The Council for Industry in Higher Education (CIHE) is publishing in collaboration with the Centre for Business Research (CBR) at the Judge Business School a paper University Business links in the UK: Boundary Spanning, Gate keepers and the Processes of Knowledge Exchange. The work has been funded in the UK by ESRC, and the Sasakawa Peace Foundation (SPF) and will also form part of a four-country global research paper published in October.
Phillip Ternouth of CIHE comments on the findings: “The findings build upon our previous work, published in 2006. What they reveal is that the ways in which businesses derive benefits from and deliver benefits to universities are far more involved and complex than the conventional technology paradigm would reveal. In fact IP, by itself , generated by universities is much less important than the breadth of interactions involved in knowledge transfer.”
It his opinion that research outcomes including IP have more commercial traction when the creation is the result of an partnership between the university and its business partner. “The business needs to be active in formulating the problem to be addressed,” says Ternouth. “Intellectual property is most likely to have commercial attraction if it’s developed in close contact with the market, even if an existing company is not involved and a spin-out is contemplated. If IP is developed and protected around a specific application it’s likely to be worth more to the market.” Furthermore, Ternouth is keen to point out the perils of a taking a purely short-term commercial approach: “To go down a commercial path and drive universities to patent and seek only a commercial return through metrics may
pervert behaviour away from cooperative relationships, which have more long-term
value for the university.”
The joint report suggests reasons why a close partnership with industry is potentially more valuable than an autonomous commercial endeavour. Ternouth goes on to suggest that by sharing the IP – and importantly the creation of IP – with a commercial partner, universities stand to gain in more diverse and ways than a financial reward: “The report reveals that not all results are metrically quantifiable in financial terms even to the companies but nevertheless their evaluations demonstrate value to the business. Universities also benefit from the research outcomes and publications that can arise from working with companies.” In conclusion, Philip Ternouth says: “It is the relational aspects of the interaction that really deliver value to business not the transactional aspects.”