How online licensing platforms can solve university tech transfer headaches

In his recent blog post, David Rogerson of E-lucid, an online platform that helps UK universities with technology licensing, points out some problems that online licensing can solve for TTOs.

To Rogerson, there are two main types of university tech transfer organizations. One is focused primarily on patents, licensing and start-ups. These organizations often have large legal teams and business managers, leading to negotiation-heavy processes for any licensing deal. This overkill can often cost the organization in resources and time more than it earns them in licensing fees.

The other kind of office focuses on aspects of tech transfer such as consultancy and knowledge transfer – a particularly common situation in Europe. These organizations have much smaller legal resources and aren’t as capable of exploiting licensing opportunities.

“In both of these cases, and for two different reasons, we have the same resulting problem — licensing opportunities that fall between the cracks,” Rogerson writes. At E-lucid, his team mitigates these issues using automation and a variety of intuitive tools geared towards tech transfer. Here are some of the pain points that E-lucid addresses:

Back and forth with legal teams costs too much money. Using open software licensing, MTAs and Easy Access IP — all of which are available on E-lucid — you can do the work up front and commission a set of licenses that can accommodate 80-90% of non-exclusive use cases, he says. 

Someone has to manage the process of approving a license. “It’s the back and forth between researchers, licensees, your legal team, their legal team and anyone else involved that is the real time sink for licensing,” says Rogerson. E-lucid provides automated workflows that kick in when the licensing process begins, sending e-mails to anyone who needs to approve or be informed about a given order. Approval happens with the click of a button. 

Negotiations suck away your time. As opposed to haggling over a license that costs relatively little, you can use online platforms to publicize your license up front with clearly defined terms. “In most cases,” Rogerson writes, “it will reduce the amount of negotiation to zero.” 

One size doesn’t fit all. Organizations have approached online licensing by building a massive, centralized IP marketplace. In reality, that’s not what customers want. It’s better to have a clear way to license the exact thing the customer needs. “From an organization’s perspective, most of the technologies we deal with are different,” Rogerson says. Using a platform like E-lucid, “each product can be finely tuned to the needs of that particular product, and each storefront can be tailored to the brand and positioning of each particular organization.”