Written evidence submitted by IN-PART (MIP0031)

1         Introduction to IN-PART

IN-PART is an expanding business that launched in January 2014, focused on catalysing university-industry collaborations.  We host an online platform to showcase the opportunities but this is really just a tool that allows us to actively promote university opportunities to an engaged audience of senior R&D decision-makers within industry.

Born out of the philosophy that the collaboration process between universities and industry should be as simple as possible, the IN-PART platform provides a centralised hub for universities to showcase research that is available for commercial co-development, accessible only to industry R&D professionals.

We provide universities with detailed Impact Reports that overviews our industry audience’s interest and their qualitative and quantitative feedback about their research. These Impact Reports are designed to aid research strategy, validate commercial potential and to incentivise academics to engage further in knowledge transfer.

We work with 70 universities around the world including 40 in the UK.  Our university subscribers include big names such as MIT, Cornell, Oxford and Cambridge but also smaller institutions such as Aberystwyth, Salford and the University of Coventry.  Each university gets the same level of service regardless of size, with IN-PART looking to connect at least 70% of their technologies to industry.  We have achieved an average contact rate of 74% to date.

More information can be found at our website: https://in-part.com/

2         Quotations from universities

Business Development Manager – Russell Group University

"We have used IN-PART to promote technologies ranging from cancer therapies to software algorithms. Using the platform has led to a range of contacts for the University, with large corporates as well as SMEs and as a result we have a number of positive on going dialogues with companies.

As well as the contacts the platform generates, we receive detailed Impact Reports enabling us to assess the reach of our technologies with industry. The variety of metrics provided helps us gauge the reception our University’s technologies have had on a wide range of industry, as well as providing feedback for potential future routes to market.

From our experience of similar platforms, IN-PART is market-leading, and having a trusted and proactive third party with links into such a wide range of engaged high-level industry contacts has been of direct benefit to our team."

Head of Business Development and Innovation – UK university

“Within two months of using IN-PART we received contacts from several companies for our submitted partnering opportunities. In particular, a Derbyshire based SME, TBG Solutions contacted us regarding our Dental Drill Project – ‘A Hybrid Noise Reduction Device for Cancelling High Frequency Sound’.”

“We are now building a relationship with TBG Solutions, and are in the process of completing market analysis before submitting an application for a TSB Smart Award. More importantly, connecting with TBG Solutions through IN-PART has enabled us to introduce them to other academics within Brunel University, who are now planning other applications for joint R&D funding on new projects. Further still, our use of IN-PART, and the partnership that has resulted with TBG Solutions, has led to TBG Solutions planning to host some students on industry placements, and shows how much can come from an initial introduction made through IN-PART.”

“Working with IN-PART has been wholly positive, with access to a broad range of high-level decision makers searching for new partnering opportunities. Likewise, having a reliable contact within IN-PART has made our interaction with industry even easier.”

Head of Technology Transfer – UK University

“We submitted our Polymers for Cryptosporidium Binding & Recovery technology to IN-PART looking for partners in water treatment & purification; we were quickly contacted by a multi-national company to begin discussion around water testing products and are now working towards long term collaboration. IN-PART offered us access to high level decision makers who showed real interest in early stage technology from Universities; our discussions provided the basis for long term collaborations with blue chip organisations in water treatment and purification.”

“IN-PART was a great success for us, it’s a technology marketing platform that really works and we discovered water treatment partners for our Cryptosporidium technology willing to engage in long term collaborations with our staff.”

3         Why we are submitting evidence

IN-PART has been supporting university Technology Transfer Offices for 3 years now with over 70 (40 in the UK) universities subscribed to our service.  Our aim is to build genuine and meaningful relationships with each Technology Transfer Office as they are ultimately our paying customers.  This gives us a unique perspective on how different universities approach the challenge of technology transfer. 

We also work very closely with our audience of users from industry (numbering over 2,000), who represent R&D professionals in positions capable of commercialising university technology, or actioning collaborations. An important aspect of IN-PART is our industry audience curation; we only allow relevant users into our system, i.e. those working in companies and in R&D. This curation reduces the possibility of passing on connections often referred to as ‘tyre kickers’, or those seeking to sell their services to university technology transfer teams. Similarly this also allows us to discern meaningful trends from the interaction data of our platform. As a result, we find ourselves sat on a technology pipeline for the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical and biotech companies, as well as companies placed in the electronics and high tech engineering sectors. From this privileged position we are able to see overall trends in relation to industry engagement with early stage university technology, and which scenarios provide the most fertile ground for successful research commercialisation.

4         Key observations

Our aim is to bring together relevant parties to facilitate collaborations between university and industry. What we have found is that the technology transfer system is not broken, the willingness to collaborate is firmly planted on both sides. Where there is a disparity, is in the focus of successful outcomes from the university perspective against what industry would view as useful and successful.

Universities are heavily focussed on licensing, which is becoming less and less interesting a proposition for industry. So while the IP is important in order to provide downstream protection for any future commercialisation partner, and allows the disclosure (post patent filing) of a technology summary for industry partners to assess the technology as early as possible, it is not necessarily the biggest driver in initiating collaborative interaction. 

4.1        University TTO’s have a lot to do with not a lot of resource

TTOs have a huge amount to do as part of their role in the university, and normally with very limited resources to do it.  The diagram below shows all of the functions a TTO needs to deliver:

Figure 1:  Overview of what a UK Technology Transfer Office needs to do

For many of the smaller universities a team of one or two is not uncommon, so their ability to deliver all the things described above is very limited.  Each of the functions often requires a very specific skillset, from technical to legal, and from business strategy to marketing. 

It is unlikely that any one TTO will have world-class capability in all of these areas, so they are increasingly looking at opportunities to work with other universities or specialists to deliver. 

4.2        IP licenses deals are rarely what companies are looking for

IN-PART has reached out to thousands of individuals promoting hundreds of university technologies.  We have found that companies are much more interested in establishing a relationship with the academics behind a patent than discussing licensing opportunities.  The reality is that the vast majority of these approaches will not lead to a licensing deal and if that is the main focus of an initial conversation, the company will normally walk away.  We have found if we focus our outreach message on trying to establish a relationship, there is a much higher likelihood of contact being made.

Licensing opportunities are only one of many ways in which industry can engage with universities, other favourable options include consultancy, sponsored R&D and collaborative research projects.  It is much more likely that the outcome of interactions with industry will take the form of one of the latter, rather than direct technology licensing.  The eventual downstream outcome may result in university IP being licensed, but this normally requires a significant amount of R&D to be performed prior to any license being viable.

Understandably TTOs tend to prioritise promoting opportunities based around a patent, as the potential pay-off could be very high, but when looked at from a portfolio level, this focus may actually reduce the overall effectiveness of technology transfer.

IN-PART is not promoted as a licensing platform but much more as a relationship broker (match.com not EBay).  As a result, a significant proportion of the opportunities we promote do not need to have a patent behind them. Companies are often just as interested in know-how based projects, or intuitive technology roadmaps which the academics are seeking to engage companies with.

4.3        Finding the right people in industry is difficult

There is no shortage of great opportunities at UK universities but getting these in front of the right people in industry is very difficult.  TTOs often have good networks but they are only ever going to be a small sub-set of potential partners. Finding the right person at the right organisation can be very time consuming and require multiple follow-ups.

IN-PART specialises in finding the right people to approach and reaches out to them directly.  This really is at the heart of our value proposition to universities, and it drives engagement from both sides, universities who need to find the right person, and for companies who only wish to view the technologies that are within their fields of interest.  We have a network of thousands of R&D professionals actively engaging with our platform, which gives us unique information regarding their interests, and we continually build our intelligence on their evolving requirements, in order to provide more intuitive recommendations of what they should engage with from universities.  

4.4        Patents are terrible marketing documents

Many TTOs host their patents on their own website, or general passive IP platforms in the hope that companies will find them and reach out, but this very rarely leads to interest.  The main reason for this is that patents are terrible marketing documents.  They are often written to be broad and not focussed on articulating the commercial opportunity.  This makes it very hard for a potential licensee to understand why it should be of interest to them.

Taking a patent or academic opportunity for collaboration and putting together strong marketing material is an essential step in tech transfer and one that universities often struggle with.  It is a particular skill that needs to bring together science writing, business understanding and a strong eye for design. This takes time and ultimately becomes a real bottleneck for getting these opportunities out there.

As a result of this problem, IN-PART offers a service for universities where we will take their opportunities and turn them into professional marketing material.  This is a paid for service and one that universities are very keen to use, with a good uptake from a large proportion of our university clients.

4.5        You need to market the marketing documents

Most R&D companies do not have a dedicated technology scouting or open innovation team going out looking for opportunities.  This means people from that company are very unlikely to go to a university website or passive platform to look at what they have to offer.  Ultimately this means that direct approaches are required.

There are a number of platforms that host university patents but it is very rare that these generate useful interactions for the TTOs we work with. Even when good material has been produced, there is still a large amount of work required to get this in front of the right people.  The reality is that most R&D companies do not have a dedicated technology scouting or open innovation function who are going out there and looking for opportunities. Even the large companies have hundreds of thousands of options to consider. 

The solution to the problem is identifying the right people (discussed earlier) and then actively marketing to them, to get in their field of vision. IN-PART specialises in marketing university technology and has tried and tested methods for generating and maintaining user engagement.  These methods include the production of native content about opportunities, and its strategic promotion through various channels, including relevant social media streams. Promotional materials generated include short articles focussed on quickly conveying key aspects of a technology, longer blog pieces on a technology and its place within a commercial sector, and also the inclusion of opportunities within a quarterly, sector-specific digest (called IN-FOCUS). In addition, our direct approach to target individuals within our audience harbouring complementary technology requirements helps provide impact for university TTOs. 

4.6        Comparison with North-American TTO’s

• Much more focus on marketing
• Produce good digestible content
• There are a number of US based passive patent platforms but no university speaks highly of them
• More tendency to use online services to manage their disclosure process
• They really value IN-PART’s model for active marketing

5         Recommendation for Action

Resource should be made available to help universities produce effective marketing content required to engage with industry.

TTOs should be encouraged to identify areas where they can work with third-parties to complement their in-house efforts

Resource should be made available to enable TTOs to work with such third-parties

Support should be provided to third-party service providers who have proven they can add significant value to TTOs

September 2016

Appendix

Patrick Speedie (Co-Founder):

Patrick holds an LLB and an LLM from the University of Sheffield specifically focussing on various aspects of IP along with bioethics, and has previously spent four and a half years working in multimedia publishing prior to co-founding IN-PART in 2014. Since launch, IN-PART has grown from 2-12 employees raised business angel and Venture Capital investment to fuel the growth of the company and grown from 6-70+ universities in less than two and half years, including launching the system in a number of international jurisdictions including the US, Europe, Asia and Australasia.

Robin Knight (Co-Founder):

Robin has a background in the Life Science sector, studying Microbiology at undergraduate level before working in industry, after which he undertook a PhD in Immunology at King’s College London before starting post-doctoral studies within the field of Virology. During Robin’s academic career he began working on a peer-to-peer platform for academics, before turning his attention to the gap between industry and the translation of academic research, where upon he co-founded IN-PART. Since its inception IN-PART has continued to thrive amongst its indigenous university community in the UK, and its success is paid tribute to by its international uptake within the technology-transfer community.

Owen Nicholson (Head of Growth):

Owen has over a decade of experience in early stage R&D management working on various research portfolios including the UK Special Forces and the Nuclear Submarines Programme.  He spent four years building the University Research Programme at Dyson negotiating contracts with over 25 universities in the UK.  He subsequently moved to Imperial College to manage the £5M robotics lab sponsored by Dyson.  He is now the Head of Growth for IN-PART looking to build both the university and company value proposition.  He is also part of small team of industrial and academic partners who are advising the Intellectual Property Office on updating the Lambert Toolkit which is a set of government approved contracts to govern industrial sponsored research at universities.