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N. 35, September - October 2007
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 | IP & RTD: Articles
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TechnologieAllianz: A Contact for Licensable Research Results
“made in Germany”
Stefanie Zenk, LL.M.
Managing office
TechnologieAllianz e.V.
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A German example for the improvement of knowledge transfer
between public research and industry
Stimulating inventions from universities,
technical colleges and non-university research institutions and bringing them
to the market quickly for commercial exploitation – Germany places a
particular emphasis on this goal
With increasing success
When the professors' privilege was abolished in 2002, it became the
task of German universities to decide on the question of protection and
exploiting the results of their scientists' research.
Before that, universities’ inventors (as opposed to
resourceful company employees) had the choice of whether to exploit their
results or to not to make use of the invention for such purposes.
When the law was modified, the building and extension of a
professional patent and exploitation structure helped support universities to
value and exploit reported inventions. Now, the Federal Ministry for Economy
and Technology is providing support. For the most part, civil law
agencies for patents and exploitation (PVAs)
have taken over the task of protecting inventions arising from the German
research field through intellectual property rights and of commercialising them
for the universities. (In such a way), every PVA represents an association of
universities and non-university research institutes. A total of more than
200 German scientific institutions are
supported within the frame of a modern kind of division of labour between
research and exploitation. Altogether, the agencies employ more than
100 innovation managers who open up access
to the research results of more than 100,000 scientists
in a wide range of fields. The PVA employees not only know the
research but also speak the language of the market.
For the full economic exploitation of technologies and innovation,
the PVAs have developed an offer in the area of technology transfer that is
tailored to the needs of the companies: a technology transfer via research
results that are protected by intellectual property rights is used to provide
the economy with innovation and cutting edge technology that has already been
tested for economic relevance. In this way, the risk of undesirable
developments for companies is reduced. It also allows them to have an edge as
far as timing is concerned since they can make quick use of inventions that are
already protected and can secure a monopoly. Furthermore, the PVAs are
especially useful for small and medium enterprises because they give them new
access to university research by establishing the first contact between
universities and companies in more than half of the cases. They can achieve
this because of their well-structured method of contacting companies to
establish the groundwork for future cooperation between research institutions
and the economy.
To facilitate companies’ access to technology, the PVAs also
make use of their association, the TechnologieAllianz. The TechnologieAllianz bundles the offers of its 27
members and publishes most of them on its Web site:
www.technologieallianz.de. Currently more
than 750 technology profiles – extracts of the entire member portfolio
consisting of over 2,000 inventions –are centrally available in an
informative and understandable format. Moreover, on request, the
TechnolgieAllianz also investigates new
technologies that are not yet published in the network. In this way, companies
do not have to search the more than 200 research institutions individually.
Instead, they have easy access to all the patents at once.
The establishment and sustainable operation of this Germany-wide
infrastructure have lead to a clear rise in the number of inventions and patent
applications at German universities. More technologies have also been made
available to the industry for exploitation. Between 2002 and 2006, researchers
reported over 8,300 inventions to universities and almost 3,000 patent
applications for promising inventions were filed in Germany. Research results
that are suitable for usage in the market have been submitted and more than 500
dissemination contracts have been concluded for German universities (and the
numbers have been increasing every year). For the past few years, German
universities have been among the top 10 patent applicants at the German Patent
and Trademark Office (DPMA), following companies like Siemens, Bosch or
DaimlerChrysler.
To build on this success for universities and the economy in the
sense of a successful technology transfer, the TechnologieAllianz and (one of)
its (most) important partner(s) – the Federation of German industries
(BDI) –collaborated to recently make available a new service called
the Invention Store. It provides commerce
and industry with the ability to retrieve patent-protected state of the art
technology via a free e-mail-service. At the
Web site www.inventionstore.de users can define their individual
interest profile and then easily receive information on the newest technologies
that already have been protected through intellectual property rights in their
chosen research and technology areas.
Of course, the offer is also directed at those doing technology
searches outside of Germany. Therefore, the offers are usually available in
German and English. The TechnologieAllianz
and its members are connected to other actors like ProTon or partners of the
Innovation Relay Centres (IRC) network via memberships and co-operations, so
they are able to extend their work beyond the German borders.
Increasingly, the patent and exploitation agencies will also take
part in European research projects by acting as: partners for the protection,
dissemination and exploitation of the research results in European consortia;
experts in technology transfer; participants in seminars on IPR issues or in an
exchange of experience with colleagues of other countries
Access to technology offers of the TechnologieAllianz are available (also in English)
under:
www.technologieallianz.de
www.inventionstore.de
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