Making Money from Ideas:Fraunhofer Supports Thailand’s Innovation System

Commercializing “know-how” is as much an art as it is a science. How do you move from developing interesting ideas to starting a business that makes a lot of money?  The answer is: “It’s not easy!”. But if anyone knows this process it is the Fraunhofer Venture Group from Munich in Germany, because their job is to take the 250 patents that Fraunhofer’s research institutes register every year and then evaluate if there is a viable business behind the invention.  These are people that are not impressed with fancy presentations on the “revolutionary nature of an invention”, but rather on whether there is money to be made by licensing or spinning off the invention to investors in the private sector.

In November the two top managers of this Fraunhofer Venture Group visited Thailand to give practical tools and tips to four regional teams from three Thai universities that are trying to do just this- commercialize the know-how of their cutting-edge scientists. Participants at this workshop were members of the Regional Innovation Intermediary Teams supported under the GTZ-TMC joint project on “Mapping and Matching Innovations”, and included academics and researchers, representatives from Technology Licensing Office of NSTDA as well as the industrial technology advisors (ITA) staff of the Industrial Technology Assistance Program (ITAP) from three provinces. During the intense and interactive workshop a stepwise process was adopted for evaluating the commercial value of inventions, using actual Thai case studies in the shrimp, palm oil rubber and fruit and vegetable sectors. Intellectual property valuation methods were introduced through role playing exercises that included: inventors, innovation brokers and innovation adopters. Methods were introduced to simplify techniques of deal-making and revenue-sharing mechanisms. 

For the four teams, the next step will be to take their new knowledge back to their inventors and to hammer out deals that result in more ideas finding their way into the market place in a way that is mutually profitable for the inventors as well as the businesses that aim to commercialize them. Watch this space to see which ideas “make it”!