Where's the Beef

Commercial is Commercial is Commercial

We (me included, until now) often talk as if there is only a dichotomy between university and industry. Commercial means anything, which has left the university side. But is "commercial" really commercial?

Michael Kenward commented on my article on the "survey" of university commercialisation performance by writing:

A couple of points, do not lump all "European universities" together. In the UK at least it is not true that they have "only recently turned their focus on patents and licensing". You also miss another commercialisation route, the spin-out company. If anything, in the UK at least, this has been an overused option. Licensing can be a better bet. But it doesn't do to ignore spin outs.

Many spin outs, however, are not "commercial" at all! They have been "capitalized" by patient investors, but they don't make a profit. Recently I had an opportunity to review Geron Corp's Annual Reports: the company has "burnt" up to 30 million $ per year for more than 10 years. Look up any seed or venture capital fund and you will see the same picture. In my Danish home town, Østjysk Innovation in its 2005 annual report recorded losses in almost all of its portfolio companies. The same does the largest Danish innovation fund. These companies are recorded as "hits" or successes in the survey statistics.

Add to this that many of these funds are initially or substantially publicly funded.

Commercial is not - always - commercial. One more reason to be extremely careful in the use of university commercialisation performance comparisons.

US Patents "grabbing" (data mining)

In an earlier article (see the same category as this), I have referred to how WIPO and espac@net allow some rather nifty ways to rapidly download and browse patent information. For some time, I have been looking for ways to the same with USPTO but have not been successful: you get only patent (application) number, and title.

Well, I found a solution for my Macintosh (and I'm sure you Windows and Linux guys can find a similar solution at Bruce Pokras' web site). It works!

Patent Grabber creates a set of files on my hard disk. With Mac I can then use the internal index search engine, Spotlight, to find the files with hits that match my interest (Windows users will use Copernic, I guess).

Patent Grabber also works with WIPO and EPO files. To create the files from downloads from those respective web sites, you need to isolate the information containing country code and patent number (it takes a bit of copy-paste & find-replace in Excel, for instance, to create such a list. Fast!

EU beats US Universities on Commercialization Performance?

Two researchers from UNU Merit have made a report with the title: Developing internationally comparable indicators for the commercialization of publicly-funded research. Their basis for the report is that they have also conducted a survey for ASTP of ASTP members and their commercialization of research results and now they compare the survey and the use of indicators with four other surveys (AUTM in North America, one UK; a Canadian and an Australian survey).

The report got most attention because it concludes that European public research institutes outperform their US competitors on "licences executed" and start-ups created.

Arundel and Bordoy mention the ProTon Europe Survey (led by my good collaborator from Valencia, Fernando Conesa and his team) but dismisses it because it uses a wrong denominator (academics per institution). It's a pity because that survey and the work behind it tell us that Europe hardly can be compared with the US. A&B see only two ways of how industry can gain from public research: either through formal arrangements involved in patenting and licensing or the "open science" of publications, seminars etc.

European universities have only recently turned their focus on patents and licensing, whereas collaborative and contract research contracts have accounted for the majority of activity and income for many years.

A&B mention insights into this point gained from their reading of research from the Uni of Sussex SPRU. Professor Sodi and before him Keth Pavitt recommended the UK government to be careful about focusing too much on the formal and technology routes of the impact of oublic research on the economy in a wonderful set of articles and lectures: Talent, Not Technology.

Conclusions: PROs should support creation of standardised indicators as is being produced by ProTon Europe and others, but policy makers should remember to take a balanced view on the results. And each PRO could find a group of peers with which to keep close relations in order to monitor their own performance, but be sure to keep their findings a secret! Use it for developing new strategy!

Update of JBEngine

Jacob Bar has refined some of his templates. Here are four new:

Strategic Partner Finder under  Company Information.

For finding Possible strategic partners. (lets say that you have a new invention like: biodegradable plastic and you want to find a strategic partner. In this case use the following keywords: biodegradable plastic etc.).

Business Model Finder under Product Information, to find a business model for your invention.

Strategy Finder under Market Information, to build a strategy for you product or service

Distribution Channels Finder under Market Information, to find a distribution channels for your product/technology or service.

EU Research Programme Design

On TII's Innovation Journal I have written an article about how to improve the prospects for commercial success of EU funded projects under FP VII. The basic point is about how the commercial success of a research result mainly depends on the quality of the research- and how I believe that quality in research can be greatly improved by using better peer review in the design of the research project. In short: make better/more literature studies by peers to make sure that research projects are not redundant but that they add genuinely new knowledge. The "publish-or-die" syndrome works against this, because we would get less pages per year fro academia, but nevertheless...

My second point is to leave the researchers alone so they can concentrate on what they are good at. Why must EC funded research projects involve SMEs or industrial associations or members from at least x countries if it doesn't add value to the quality?

The third point is about the use of "accompanying measures consortia" to do all the necessary exercises to ensure better commercialisation.

This is where the topic of this blog becomes interesting. The skills in Beef work are exactly what could/should be employed in the support of better research and better chances of commercialisation .

XXIII: Denmark jumps up the ladder?

Recently I compared Cambridge University Enterprise with Danish Tech Transfer Offices. Now the 2005 statistics from the Danish side have been published- The report, which is not yet publicly available (?), shows that the Danish TTOs have improved 15-20% on average on major indicators. Well done!! Especially one of the small "regional" universities with a tradition for industrial collaboration has imporved a lot. For those who read Danish, it becomes obvious that the PROs invested more especially by increasing staff and other costs (of course, more patents-more expense).

No doubt, the increase in disclosures and patents, spinoffs etc is a good investment which will pay back a few years from now.

But there is a matter of concern: there must be (I don't yet have specifics) quite a number of patents, licenses and spinoff creations, which were obtained by using funds from another "box" of the same ministry which monitors the PROs. So there is a problem of semantics (and maybe also reality) whether such partners can be considered "industry" partners? I have no doubts that the money spent by the Ministry is one of the best investments the Danish government may ever have made...BUT someone may have to create a smoke screen to persuade opposition politicians nothing is wrong??