“Strength in numbers” might well be the marketing watchword of The University of Chicago and five of the region’s leading research institutions, who teamed up to put their collective best foot forward recently at the BIO International Convention in Chicago. UChicago Tech, the university’s Office of Technology and Intellectual Property, teamed up with Argonne National Laboratory, Children’s Memorial Research Center, Loyola University, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago to jointly premiere the Chicago Innovation Pipeline, a tool that enables industry members to view more than 120 licensable technologies in a single database and shop for technologies of interest. The pipeline prototype, which UChicago Tech developed, was demonstrated at BIO.

Designed to be “industry-friendly,” the pipeline groups technologies by product type, therapeutic area, and development stage. The development stage of each technology is represented graphically, allowing users to rapidly assess the potential use and status of each technology. Users can view products of interest, click on one-page summaries of the products in the pipeline, and add them into a shopping cart. At BIO, the cart also allowed users to collect summaries of interest that were to be e-mailed after the meeting.

“We were very excited to demonstrate our database publicly for the first time,” says Nina Paciotti, associate director of commercial development at UChicago Tech. She adds that UChicago Tech will soon launch a version of the pipeline on its website, but hopes to incorporate feedback from industry members into its final model.

Source: The University of Chicago

Posted May 11th, 2010 under Intellectual Property Marketing

Write a comment