A strategy to seek global partnerships with institutes in India, China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore is paying dividends for Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures, LLC. The firm signed an agreement with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Bombay to license some of its inventions and to work on technology commercialization strategies with its researchers. Last fall, IV opened offices in five Asian countries to gain access to a wider pool of inventors. Led by global head of technology Patrick Ennis, a physicist and former managing director at Arch Venture Partners, the company is building relationships with prominent academic scientists in Asia and setting up partnerships that will enable it to license certain inventions in exchange for helping with patents and commercialization. “The agreement with IIT-Bombay is important as it gives [us] more direct access to top flight university-based Indian inventors,” Nicholas Gibson, the firm’s Tokyo-based director of business development, explained in an e-mail. “The deal also gives IIT-B access to commercialization possibilities that they haven’t had much opportunity to access as of yet. Finally, it gives their faculty and students access to the many ‘problems needing solutions’ that Patrick and his team work on every day to identify, thereby making the chance that an IIT-B invention will make a global impact a little closer to reality.”

Although Intellectual Ventures is working with approximately 10 schools in India, “IIT-B is one of the premier universities in India – one of the original IITs, so it is a little like working with, say, a Harvard or Stanford for us,” Gibson added. Full financial terms of the partnership weren’t disclosed, but Gibson said “the arrangement is for the university … to send us invention disclosures from time to time as well as allow us to directly work with professors we have identified to partner on brand new inventions…. The arrangement is not exclusive and the university is free to pick and choose which inventions it gives to us and which it doesn’t. [Intellectual Ventures] pays a fee once we decide to actually accept the invention from the university and we pay all associated patenting fees.” He stresses that any deals made for specific inventions will be in the form of exclusive licenses, not outright purchases. The company, he adds, “is taking on a certain amount of risk in the expectation that we can and will monetize the invention either by licensing, spinning out a specialized company, or partnering with a third party. Generally, we also pay the school a piece of the back-end we generate from licensing or other commercialization events — which can be significant in some cases.”

Go to: Xconomy

Posted March 25th, 2009 under Tech Transfer

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