COLUMBUS, Ohio — Many entrepreneurs fear the so-called Valley of Death: the perilous time between research and development, and a move into the marketplace.
A new fund at Ohio State University wants to deliver its researchers to the edge of the valley and help push them across.
Ohio State’s Office of Technology Licensing and Commercialization is testing a $225,000 “maturation fund” that helps equip inventors to win funding and start companies around their discoveries. It doesn’t fund research. Instead, it pays for marketing materials like product videos, prototype creation or patent work.
School officials who thought of the project would someday like to have a $500,000 annual budget to help commercial-ready research.
“When you go out and try to license a technology, you hear, ‘Come back when you have a working prototype’ or ‘Come back when you can give us more information,’ ” said Jean Schelhorn, associate vice president for the commercialization office.
“What I wanted is to do things that would advance the case toward marketing, finding a commercial partner and creating an opportunity for the technology to be in the marketplace,” she said.
The fund started last year and has spent money on a handful of projects, including a prototype and marketing materials for a wound-care device. The money isn’t focused on the university’s life-science projects, though; any Ohio State University technology is eligible.
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The commercialization office started the fund by pooling award money from state-funded innovation competitions, Schelhorn said.
The maturation fund is an uncommon approach in the state, though you can find them scattered throughout the country by other names such as gap funds.
“I agree with [Schelhorn]” on the need, said Joe Jankowski, Case Western Reserve University’s associate vice president for technology management. “Many potentially valuable technologies are too early for market forces to continue investing in them.”
CWRU doesn’t offer early stage funds. Its focus has been on later-stage development through its Case Technology Ventures, Jankowski said. It relies on external grants to help researchers in earlier stages of development.
Maturation funds sometimes lose focus as the inventors try to use the money for research instead of commercialization, Jankowski said. Schelhorn said Ohio State’s fund stops that from happening by requiring that the money is spent on outside contractors — effectively blocking any method to reinvest in a university research project.
“Not one dollar from the fund goes back into Ohio State,” she said.
[Front-page photo courtesy of Flickr user Shayan USA; photo courtesy of Flickr user Count Rushmore]
