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STAIRS
Sustainable Model for a Trans-National Technology Transfer Alliance Implementaing Return-on-Research Strategies |
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This INNOV-7 project, which started in the summer of 2006 and which will run for 24 months, involves 6 partners from 5 countries, including Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (D), the coordinator, engage AG (D), Centre d’Energie Atomique, Grenoble (F), KTH University, Stockholm (S), Technical University, Sofia (BG) and TII (L).
The basic objective of the project is two-fold: |
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to demonstrate that a public-private partnering process to support research exploitation gives better results, |
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to support the claim that a regional approach to Technology Transfer can be transposed to an inter-regional or international dimension. |
Among the difficulties facing most Technology Transfer Offices is that of finding a common field of interest between researchers (publications) and companies (return on investment) and reaching a common understanding of the commercial imperatives. Public-private partnerships already in place in some German regions seem to be giving very good results when they involve private experienced, motivated and rewarded intermediaries.
Based on this successful experience, the project aims to connect the exploitation activities of several further education establishments and research centres in the same region and in the same key sectors of technology, with a view to a systematic identification, evaluation and common development of opportunities. The idea is then to extrapolate the results of this mechanism to an inter-regional or international level. The exploitation activities are strengthened through the pooling of knowledge and the combining of the different capabilities of the partners involved. This pooling effect can be further exploited when Technology Transfer Officers from different universities and countries but working in the same sector, who know each other and who trust each other, agree to open their IPR files and to
bundle similar or closely related IP in order to achieve a more attractive IPR package. Strengthened by the synergies to be found in the pooled IP, this packaged offer has more chance to find a commercial buyer/developer.
In a first stage of the project, the four research institutions designed their own home model of innovation and R&D supporting measures, involving the major regional stakeholders. Based on these models they imagined a common model ideal for trans-national cooperation. Each R&D institution then selected one home case study of research results for which it is searching for an industrial partner. Depending on their common interest, each partner selected a foreign partner with whom to pool their IPR and to join efforts for commercialising them. TII will be involved in the dissemination phase of the project and with testing its transferability and uptake by other groups of research-industry transfer professionals across Europe. |
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