UNI partners with ISU to commercialize more inventions

Officials at two of Iowa's public universities say a new intellectual property agreement between the schools will create new opportunities for commercializing inventions created on campus.

Earlier this month, officials from the University of Northern Iowa signed an unprecedented agreement to allow Iowa State University's Office of Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer to help oversee the patents and business plans that may develop from ideas hatched by UNI faculty and staff.

"It's a numbers game," said Lisa Lorenzen, who directs the office as well as ISU's Research Foundation. "The more ideas you get, the more chances to have to commercialize them."

ISU annually files about 30 provisional and 35 to 40 regular patent applications — with between 30 and 35 patents issued each year, Lorenzen said. Working with UNI is expected to increase those numbers by 10 percent.

For the past few years, UNI has been reaching out to ISU for advice on an ad hoc basis, said Randy Pilkington, UNI's executive director of business and community services and co-chair of the UNI Research Foundation.

"They've been helping us vet the technology," he said. "They provide a deeper expertise than we have at UNI yet."

Neither Lorenzen nor Pilkington could provide a timeline for when the universities expect to have their first profitable venture come from the new agreement.

"It could be tomorrow, it could be five years from now," Lorenzen said. "We actually thought we were going to have some (successes) to announce" along with the partnership. But there were some prior claims, and "we couldn't patent the technology."

The new agreement, Pilkington said, formalizes that relationship and, for some projects, allows ISU to consult on a profit-sharing basis — meaning that the Ames-based office could perform its services and not be paid until a business plan proves profitable.

"We'll file the patents," Lorenzen said, "but we won't benefit at all unless the technology is successful."

Lorenzen said the arrangement is similar to the one ISU has with the Ames Laboratory — a government-owned, contractor-operated national laboratory located on the ISU campus. But over the past few years, her office has begun looking into the possibility of developing similar arrangements with other institutions and businesses.

"It's a way to work together with our sister institution," Lorenzen said of the agreement with UNI. "And we're going to look at this as a workshop or a model for how we can provide this service to other small universities or small companies."

The next step is for ISU staff to become more familiar with the faculty and facilities at UNI, Lorenzen said. ISU staff visited the Cedar Falls campus last fall, and another trip is scheduled for later in the summer.

UNI did explore the option of working with the technology transfer and intellectual property protections offered through the University of Iowa's Research Foundation, and Pilkington said he remains open to developing agreements with UI in the future. But "Iowa State's expertise," he said, is a better match with what's coming out of UNI" in terms of natural sciences, education and industrial technology.

The number of developable ideas being pitched at UNI has held fairly steady over the past few years, Pilkington said. As patents, licenses and profits emerge from the new partnership with ISU, however, he expects faculty and staff to be inspired to share more of their ideas.

"It will expand our portfolio substantially," said Pilkington.

The ISU-UNI agreement will automatically renew every year. Either university can terminate the agreement with 30 days written notice.