Unlocking Platform Technology Translation

In the United States, federal agencies use tax dollars to fund most university-based research. Increasingly, Congress insists that the public derives benefit from federal agency funding of basic science research. Entrepreneurship-training programs, such as the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps), aid researchers in translating research for commercialization and public benefit.

Central to these programs, is the development of a business model. To find the appropriate business model, I-Corps requires high-volume and narrowly segmented customer discovery—typically 100 customer meetings over six weeks. This customer-discovery helps to inform researchers` decision to proceed with a startup, as well as next steps in research design and validation.

At Georgia Institute of Technology’s VentureLab, customer discovery-focused processes surfaced other areas for improvement in translational work. Typically, when faculty initiate new research, literature searches are required, but patent and market searches are not. There has been a cultural resistance in academia to allowing the marketplace to influence the direction of research. But with funders` greater emphasis on commercialization, faculty are more open to examining the patent landscape before initiating new research.

Yet, there are real-world challenges to market searches, given that many of the world’s largest companies conduct proprietary research and only release discoveries through patent disclosure. Further, initial patent processes frequently are not broad enough to strategically protect potential future applications within a platform technology. Faculty must become more adept at patent and market searches, recognize when they have a platform technology, and use patent-informed research and disclosure processes to protect it.