Universities, labs take innovations to market

With three major research universities along the Front Range and numerous federal laboratories calling Colorado home, it should be no surprise that a lot of innovation and new technologies come out of these organizations every year.

To handle the inventions, each organization has a technology-transfer office that takes a hard look at every new idea that crosses their paths and determines if it is something that deserves a patent or could be licensed to a commercial organization that already specializes in similar technology.

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Technology transfer has come of age in the last decade, said Todd Headley, president of CSU Ventures, the tech-transfer arm serving Colorado State University. To put it in perspective, Headley said that CSU has about 300 active license agreements and 620 active patent and patent applications.

During the past decade CSU has seen 1,064 invention disclosures, 1,381 patent applications, 218 issued patents, 369 license agreements and 49 startup companies, Headley said.

“In the last 10 years, since the creation of CSU Ventures, there have been more license agreements, more startups, more patent applications, more inventions and more revenue than in the past 40 years,” he said.

CSU has been in a major growth mode the past decade because of increased research expenditures and a heightened focus on technology transfer, he said. The next 10 years probably won’t look anything like the last 10.

Most technology-transfer offices operate the same way. What makes CSU Ventures stand out is that it is part of the CSU Research Foundation and is therefore a 501(c)3 separate from the university.

“It’s not uncommon throughout the country, but in Colorado we are the only one set up that way,” Headley said. “Fundamentally, it allows us to act like a small business in that we have 12 to 13 people.”

It also allows the organization to move with more agility.

The organization has people dedicated to licensing, patent management, creating and starting new companies. It sees about 100 new ideas coming from the university every year, and it is up to CSU Ventures to evaluate and look at the potential commercial outcomes of every one of them.

All tech-transfer offices look at the patentability of an idea and the market for an invention.

“Simply getting a patent on it doesn’t mean commercial success,” Headley said. CSU Ventures markets different ideas to companies that are in the space and potential licensees.

“We want to get feedback from the market about what people think of the idea,” he said.

Most ideas developed in a lab or at a university need to be scaled up for commercial use, and that’s not their forte. That’s why they partner with industry on their ideas to bring them to market. Not every idea is a hit. Some ideas that the technology-transfer office believes will be successful get panned by those already in the business.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden saw about 172 innovations last year.

“Part of our goal with the Department of Energy is to get renewable-energy technology out to the marketplace. That is a strategic goal the DOE has for NREL, so it is a natural fit for technology transfer to be part of that,” said Kristin Gray, director of technology transfer at NREL. The one thing that makes NREL’s tech-transfer program unique is that it combines its own technology licensing with its sponsored research group.

Many companies come in and sponsor research. In return, they hope to get first crack at any innovations that come out of the joint research with NREL. But NREL researchers are also coming up with their own intellectual property, and it is the tech transfer office’s job to find markets for those innovations as well.

Gray’s office looks at the marketability, commercial viability and patentability of all innovations that come out of the lab.

Bryn Rees, director of technology transfer for the University of Colorado’s Boulder and Colorado Springs campuses, said that technology transfer is always evolving. He believes that a technology-transfer office in Boulder should not operate in the same way as a tech-transfer office in California.

Boulder is a very entrepreneurial community with a large number of business-accelerator programs and numerous individuals looking to create new ventures, Rees said.

“I think it is no secret that Boulder is one of the top places in the country to start a business. Our technology transfer has to be in alignment with that,” he said.

In the past, technology transfer was more transactional. Here’s an invention; get a patent on it; and find a company to license that patent.

“I think that model maybe worked well in the ‘90s, but I think it has had its time, and what we’re looking at more now is rather than doing asset transactions or intellectual-property transactions, we are really looking at development of our faculty and their research programs and engaging with the entire community network as a way to bring a project forward,” Rees said.

The old way of doing things neglected the tremendous amount of work that goes into an invention before it is ready to be presented to the marketplace for investment.

“We really need to have a pipeline of resources that are both at the university and also in the community to develop the technology,” he said.

The faculty themselves are a huge asset when trying to reach potential markets with an invention. They are always speaking at conferences and making industry connections through their research, he said. Many times, they know which companies will be interested in their innovations.

CU has two tech-transfer offices. The second one serves the University of Colorado Denver Anschutz Medical Campus. Together, the offices see about 250 inventions a year.

Paul Zielinski, director of the technology partnerships office for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, handles technology transfer in both Boulder and Gaithersburg, Md. NIST is under the umbrella of the Department of Commerce, along with NOAA and NTIA. The DOC is also responsible for coordinating technology-transfer activities across federal agencies by coordinating the Interagency Workgroup for Technology Transfer. NIST also hosts the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer, which provides a forum for federal labs to develop strategies and opportunities for linking technologies and expertise with the marketplace, according to the latest DOC annual report.

NIST’s mission is not to generate dollars, Zielinski said.

“We are part of the government. Our mission is to help promote economic growth, the diffusion of innovation and measurement science. We want to get people to use technology. That’s the real goal, to get technology out of the labs and into the hands of someone who can use those technologies and make them available to the public,” he said.

NIST doesn’t just look at traditional ways to transfer technology. It publishes papers. It transfers information. It has standard reference material. It also has cooperative research agreements and hosts conferences and workshops where people come for training.

NIST is involved in everything from natural disasters and high-end physics to nanotechnology, communications supporting technology, cybersecurity and advanced manufacturing.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is operated by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, has spent the past 30 years developing applications and transferring that technology to whoever is sponsoring the development of that work, said Bill Mahoney, deputy director of the Research Applications Laboratory at NCAR.

The organization, which is a not-for-profit that is funded by the federal government, will license or patent information it wants to continue to have access to in the future, but typically it makes its research available free to the public. In the past, there were organizations that took advantage of NCAR’s research being in the public domain to get patents on it and block the agency from using the technology in the future.

To protect against that, NCAR has become more savvy.

Even if other groups contribute funding to the research, NCAR owns the intellectual property, Mahoney said.

“We can build technologies tomorrow from what we learned today and yesterday. We can’t do work for hire,” he said.

While federal laboratories and universities such as CSU and CU focus on STEM discoveries, the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley has launched a new technology-transfer program aimed not only at STEM but also at other types of innovations.

UNC offers robust programs in education, business, nursing, music and other disciplines. The university last year launched IDEA — Innovation Development and Enterprise Advancement —a program aimed at “turning creative ideas into marketable products or services.”

IDEA is headed by director Kristin Rencher, who is helping develop the program first launched in 2015. She said the fact that UNC is not a research-intensive university doesn’t mean that marketable innovations don’t exist.

“We really don’t have a large research engine from the standpoint of federal funds,” she said, adding that UNC is in the “missing middle” among universities in the United States, with many innovations that are “just completely untapped.”

Examples of innovations include software and app development of educational tools. A biology professor is working on novel ways to reform biology curriculum. A chemistry professor — who also is a brewer — has developed a device to improve the brewing process, an inline brewing sensor.

Many of those innovations can generate revenue faster than other types of discoveries, she said.

Christopher Wood contributed to this report.