UTEP
The University of Texas at El Paso sits on the US–Mexico border at the western tip of Texas, where two countries and three states meet on the Rio Grande. It is an R1 research university, a status it first reached in 2018 and reaffirmed under the 2025 Carnegie criteria, with close to $146 million a year in research expenditure and around 25,000 students, 84 percent of them Hispanic and more than half the first in their families to attend college. It is one of 19 Hispanic-serving institutions in the country with R1 standing and the only R1 with open undergraduate admission. Its research runs through health sciences, biomedical engineering, aerospace, energy and environment, water, cybersecurity and border studies, and its Office of Technology Commercialization manages a patent portfolio in water technology, 3D printing, therapeutics, medical devices and advanced materials.
Jacob Croft is Director of Licensing and Commercialization at UTEP, leading a four-person office that identifies patentable inventions, manages prosecution, licenses the university's technologies and markets them to industry. A biologist by training, with a bachelor's from Arizona State and a master's from New Mexico State, he did bench research on the genetics of cerebral cavernous malformations and taught biology at El Paso Community College before moving into technology transfer, and is completing a Master of Laws in intellectual property at Texas A&M.
Challenge
Before the office had any AI tooling, every disclosure meant a manual search across Google Patents, Google Scholar, the USPTO and WIPO. Jacob could not give a researcher a date for an answer. The fastest turnaround was about thirty days and often longer, which was a real problem for faculty who needed to publish without the paper counting as a first public disclosure.
For a four-person office serving an R1 campus, the search time also came straight out of everything else: marketing, research translation events, and the conversations with industry that turn a disclosure into a licence.
Before Tradespace the shortest turnaround could have been 30 days, sometimes longer, which was unacceptable when researchers are trying to publish papers without constituting a first public disclosure.
Tradespace Value
Jacob estimates Tradespace saves the office about twenty hours per disclosure. The time goes back into marketing and research translation events, and the search step that used to be open-ended now has a deadline: every researcher gets a decision within fourteen working days of the disclosure arriving, along with the reason.
The reason is the part he values most. Tradespace's assessment sets out what fits in the marketplace and what does not, and why. When the office moves an invention forward, Jacob can tell the researcher which companies are interested; when it declines, he can show what already exists in industry and why the invention would not have found a path. Either way the researcher gets a connection to the market rather than a yes or a no.
Tradespace has provided us a full, detailed disclosure of what fits and what doesn't fit into the marketplace. But it also provides the opportunity to understand why.
The add-on that surprised him is the ideas platform, which complements invention harvesting. He has opened the inventor portal to the whole faculty and lets them enter their grants early, so they can see a track line of what they are working toward as the research proceeds. Faculty are finding parts of the IP in their own projects that they had not considered when they wrote the grant.
- About 20 hours saved per disclosure
- A decision, with reasons, within 14 working days, down from 30 or more
- Inventor portal open to all faculty, with grants entered before the research starts
Because we're a small office, Tradespace allows us to complete disclosures rapidly and efficiently. It lets us communicate the ideas of industry to our inventors, and it makes the connection instantaneously.