The Knowledge: Liverpool Uni makes fresh start on commercialisation

THE University of Liverpool has wound up its ULive intellectual property licensing arm in a shake-up of the way it commercialises research.

It has bought out the Merseyside Special Investment Fund (MSIF), which held 25% through its Liverpool Seed Fund after investing £2.5m in 2008, and moved ULive’s assets – such as patents, intellectual property license income and shares in spin-out companies – to its commercial arm, the Business Gateway division.

The university says it wants to take full control of commercialisation and put academics at the heart of the process, making them “customers” rather than “suppliers”.

ULive, based at the Liverpool Science Park, was set up to hold and manage the portfolio of spin-outs created by the university. Under the management of chief executive Alan Sibley this remit expanded to include the identification, protection, maintenance and commercialisation of all intellectual property (IP) owned and created by the university. This set-up has been disbanded and Mr Sibley will not be involved in the new arrangement.

John Flamson the university’s director for partnerships and innovation told TheBusinessDesk.com that the move was prompted by a desire to exploit IP in different ways and use it to showcase the university’s “invention value” to help it win research contracts.

He said: “By taking control once again of our intellectual property portfolio what we’re doing is broadening the type of outcomes that we can engineer around IP exploitation. We’re taking a university view on this, we’re now treating the academic as a customer not as a supplier.

“In some cases we may say you need to publish research – build on a track record in this field, do not protect the IP, give it away. In some cases we’ll say you need to file a patent then publish, in other cases file a patent and work with other academics to bundle different pieces of IP together to make a more compelling vision. In others we’ll file a patent and use that as a lever for research grants.”

Mr Flamson said ULive’s business model focused on certain types of IP license that the university felt was too narrow and this wasn’t, “yielding results, or the breadth of results”.

A five person board will be in place for the official launch on July 1 and the university is currently seeking a commercial partner to work on individual projects.

“The question is, do we want to be in the IP exploitation business? We’ve taken a view we do want to be in this game and we know it’s a long game. But it does require paying for patents, due diligence and advice”, said Mr Flamson.

“We’ve created a patents budget and we’re procuring an external commercial partner, somebody who will be paid a fee to give advice on individual projects.”

He added: “The message to the business community is this: the university is open to discuss with people how they can take advantage of IP.”