Thoughts on Commercializing University IP
As a PhD student trying to start a company and heavily involved in the Georgia Tech and Atlanta startup community, I learned many of the pros and cons of attempting to commercialize university IP.
Pros
- University IP is often very innovative and presents high barrier-to-entry opportunities
- The people involved tend to be very talented
Cons
- High barrier-to-entry often correlates with low market appeal
- University researchers tend to disproportionately discount the value of other business functions, outside of idea-generation or R&D; there is sometimes a tendency to overly cling to the control rather than turn it over to people that can bring the IP to market
The best cases are when there are high barrier-to-entry ideas with great market appeal coming from university researchers who are willing to give up control of the idea to business executors who can bring the idea to market.
Of course this all assumes that the university IP actually works, which is not true in many cases once push comes to shove in proving the robustness of published concepts. The bar to publish is much lower than the bar to make something robust and usable in a product.
Georgia Tech does a great job fostering university IP commercialization with ATDC, Venture Lab, and the TI:GER program.
What are your thoughts on commercializing university IP?
From the conversation
Comments preserved from the original post.
lance
The statement “University researchers tend to disproportionately discount the value of other business functions” can be extended to technologists in general.
melonakos
In reply to an earlier comment
Good point. Technologists that work in industry tend to appreciate other business functions more than those that never step outside academia for any length of time. There are a lot of foolishly romantic notions of starting tech companies based on university research that float about in academic circles, more so than elsewhere I think.
Some of those industry technologists end up becoming some of the best business leaders of tech companies when they can meld the technology street cred with business savvy.