- Almost every commercialized university technology began with a grant, yet tech transfer typically starts years later, at disclosure.
- Up to 50% of university innovations are never disclosed. Tracking new grant awards is the most efficient way to find them.
- Engaging PIs right after an award lets licensing officers bring market needs into the research, producing disclosures far more likely to license.
- Funder portals and APIs, paired with AI that reads full grant text, make following the funding practical for a time-constrained office.
Grant funding is the lifeblood of university research. Almost every innovation that transitions from a university lab to the market began with a grant, most likely from NSF, NIH, DoD, or DOE. Despite this, most tech transfer processes start years after the grant award, when a technology is disclosed. For tech transfer offices, this paradox represents their most fundamental challenge: they have no control over what technologies researchers develop or when those researchers choose to disclose the technology, and yet TTOs are expected to transition those technologies to market.
Most TTOs view their passive role in tech transfer as an immutable truth. However, forward-looking offices are beginning to leverage grant funding to flip the script and take a proactive role in seeking out innovation and working with researchers to disclose inventions in high-impact market areas. By using grant data to follow the funding, licensing officers identify PIs prior to invention, engage with their teams to understand the project and connect it to industry needs, and ultimately collect disclosures that have a much higher likelihood of transitioning to market.
You can’t commercialize technologies you don’t know about
In the current passive tech transfer model, technology transfer offices do their best to educate researchers on IP, then wait for them to disclose and hope the innovations are commercially viable. In reality, no education campaign is 100% successful, which means that many inventors may not think about commercialization at the right time, if at all. Our analysis of university R&D data suggests that up to 50% of university innovations are not disclosed. Most tech transfer leaders I talk to acknowledge they are likely missing innovations, but feel they lack the resources to further canvas the university for inventions or to stay in touch with every researcher.
However, by closely tracking new grant funding, you can efficiently pinpoint hotbeds of new innovation. What’s more, by looking at the award amounts and doing some basic market analysis, you can prioritize research efforts with a relatively higher likelihood of generating commercially attractive technologies. By meeting with PIs and their teams shortly after a grant is awarded, it is usually possible to learn what innovations are likely to come out of the research. At the very least, it’s an opportunity to educate the research team about the technology transfer process.
Early market feedback maximizes likelihood of success
By getting involved with research teams earlier, licensing officers also significantly increase the likelihood of a successful commercial outcome. Today, it’s common for researchers to disclose inventions as they wind down a grant-funded project, or right before they publish their findings publicly. When tech transfer offices receive these disclosures, they conduct research and outreach to determine specific industry needs and hope the invention aligns with requirements.
If the innovation solves an important problem but needs additional development to meet these specific market needs, the TTO has a very limited set of options to further mature the technology. Some technology maturation or venture funds have emerged as an innovative solution to this, but early market feedback can be a much more economic solution for most technologies.
When tech transfer offices follow the funding and use grant data to engage with research teams early, it creates an opportunity to inject market needs into the technology development process. We’ve clearly seen that when researchers better understand industry needs, the innovations that emerge from research projects better reflect these needs and have a much higher likelihood of commercialization.
What it actually looks like to follow the funding
For most tech transfer teams, time is their scarcest resource. Finding time to track and analyze grant awards can seem like a daunting task given the time most licensing officers are already spending on inventor engagement, technology analysis, and license negotiation.
However, new tools are emerging that can make this process much less time intensive. The majority of US grant funding originates from NSF, NIH, DoD, and DOE. These organizations now have online portals and even APIs that TTOs can access to create alerts when new grants are awarded. At Tradespace, we’ve built this connectivity directly into our IP Management System.
Once you learn about a new grant, it can still be time-consuming to read and analyze the grant. This is an area where enterprise AI tools actually excel. Using the same models we built to help tech transfer offices synthesize and analyze disclosures, we’ve been able to analyze full-text grant awards to extract a concise explanation of the subject matter, predict the innovations likely to stem from the work, and even flag potential industry partners.
We’ve seen TTOs use this information to start industry outreach much earlier. Companies are more likely to engage in a conversation focused on shaping an ongoing research project as opposed to licensing fully baked technology. Ultimately, these early-stage conversations often result in licensing conversations anyway.
Bringing it all together
TTOs face a daunting set of challenges to commercialize university technologies. But using grant funding to proactively seek out innovation enables offices to tip the scales in their favor. With improved access to data streams and AI that can turn grant text into actionable insight, licensing officers can identify promising sources of innovation and connect that innovation to market requirements early in the technology development lifecycle. This means more inventions, higher quality disclosures, and better commercialization outcomes.