Innovation center inks deal with UW

BOULDER – The Innovation Center of the Rockies, an entrepreneurial support organization, has inked an agreement with the University of Wyoming to help boost commercialization of intellectual property resulting from faculty research.

The deal is the Boulder-based center’s first with a school outside Colorado.

The innovation center works with colleges and universities on a fee-for-service relationship to commercialize intellectual property. The organization already has contracts in place with the University of Colorado, Colorado State University, the University of Denver and Colorado School of Mines.

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“For us, that’s a pretty big step from our standpoint,” the center’s executive director Tim Bour said of the first out-of-state deal.

The center connects university faculty groups and their technologies with a customized advisory group of industry professionals who can understand the merits of the research and have a good idea of what customer problem it might be able to solve. It’s a subset of advisers from one of those groups that generally would form a startup.

Bour said the center has aided in the formation of at least 13 startups, including Tusaar Corp., Ion Engineering LLC, LineRate Systems Inc. and Flashback Technologies Inc., all of which came from technology developed at CU or the CU medical school.

The relationship the center has with each university is custom-crafted to suit each school’s needs as far as how many projects they want the center to work on. The center does not disclose the amount of its fees.

“The ICR’s low-cost model has proven effective, and we look forward to working together to bring Wyoming inventions to market,´ said Jon Benson, chief executive of UW’s Wyoming Technology Business Center, a 30,000-square-foot on-campus business incubator program.

The Innovation Center of the Rockies recently made it easier to connect with its network of 1,500 advisers around the nation, adding high-end conference-room video infrastructure to aid in bringing the right mentors and business partners to the table to evaluate and commercialize research. That capability will help as the center looks to add relationships with other universities, federal labs and research institutions outside Colorado.

“Now we’re getting what we think are the best domain experts from around the country,” Bour said.