National Innovation infrastructure

Last week I spent some time at the University of Algarve in Faro (Portugal). It was a Conference on Sustainable Innovation, and the presentations were most interesting. It was my first visit to Portugal in over five years, and I was most interested in two aspects – the current economic situation; and the Innovation atmosphere in the country.
One of the presentation dealt with the spin-off activity of the university research results. It was most interesting to compare the roles of the Technology Transfer unit in Portugal with that of a Technology Transfer Company in Israel. The unit in Portugal has to run a competition in order to stimulate ideas and to find ideas or technologies to be commercialized. It than trains the entrepreneurs and helps them raise the funds, hosts them (for a fee) and when ready lunches them into the world. The unit does not hold equity in the firms. Of course such close mentoring means that the number of firms that can be taken care off is limited.
The Israeli TTC gets the ideas reported by the scientists in the university, it has to filter them, if ready for spinning, than it recruits a team leader, let him raise the funds or helps the team get into a technology incubator. The TTC will hold equity, an if possible also license the technology to the firm it span-off. Theoretically the TTC can Spin-off as many firms as there are ideas.
Why do the two entities follow different models? The obvious answer has two parts: on the one hand the natural tendency to seek commercialization of research results or of ideas is probably higher in Israel; on the other hand the infrastructure is more diversified, the technology incubators, the VC sector and other assisting tools are more prevalent in Israel allowing the TTC to focus on its main function.
The natural tendency is misleading, it is only partly natural. A major part of it lies in the local culture and education. Encouraging individualism, free thinking and non conservative solutions has been dominant in Israeli culture. Admiring the ability to improvise rather than plan, to give all you have to reach a goal is a basic characteristic of the culture. Portugal has stressed conformism and order, accuracy and planning.
If one goes back in time to the late 1980's, Israel was not much different. Small number of entrepreneurs, little supportive infrastructure etc., that means that the transformation of the Portuguese current situation to one more resembling Israel's can be achieved. How?
I would suggest the following:
It is important to recall that creating an infrastructure requires enough potential projects in the pipeline otherwise a sense of misfit is felt, which could lead to negative results. If you create a 100 venture capital funds that will not have enough projects, the failure to return the investment would assure that it would take a long time for the venture capital market to recover. Therefore there is no need to copy entire systems but rather let them evolve. First create the demand, educate for innovation, encourage project creation, than invite the assistive "tools" or build them according to demand.
What type of education? How can it be done?
For that in the next post…….

Italian Israeli Conference – regarding Technology Transfer

The workshop taking place last week 23-24 of November 2010 was a most interesting event.
The conference opened (following the usual political speeches) with a discussion regarding the transfer from the lab to the industry of research results. The panel composition was most interesting. While the Israeli part was represented by Technology Transfer Companies managers and CEOs (Bar-Ilan R&D, BGN Technologies, Ramot at Tel Aviv University, Yeda etc.), the Italian part was represented by managers and Presidents of National Research Institutes (CNR, ISS, ISA ENEA etc.).
There were other very significant differences between the two country models. It seemed that the Israeli companies represented smaller organizations in comparison to the Italian organizations represented in the panels, the numbers of invention disclosed; patent applied for and approved, were larger for the Israeli firms. It would also seem that in most cases the Israeli Technology Transfer firms have been active for a longer period than the Italian counter parts.

Another interesting difference was regarding the performance data of the organizations. The Israeli Technology Transfer Companies, are private organizations, and their financial and therefore performance reports are confidential. The workshop served as an opportunity to discover some of the performance data. The Italian National Institutes are public organizations and their information is therefore public.

The Italian organization cited proudly the number of spin-offs they accumulated over the years, and lamented the scarcity of venture capital, which was, according to them, a barrier to further increasing the number of spin-offs. The Israeli technology Transfer companies while citing similar data mentioned (Yeda) preference to licensing over spin-offs.
That point was not discussed (I had asked the question, but Dr. Naiberg from Yeda was not given the chance to answer), but what is the difference between the two venues?
The biggest difference is in the overall employment impact. A spin-off creates measurable new employment positions. Licensing to a large organization, while it may add employment opportunities is harder to measure as a result of the TT effort. Thus governments and government organizations prefer this option. For commercial organizations, licensing has less risk embedded and can generate a cash flow more rapidly than spin-offs.

Regional Development - inter region cooperation

Yesterday I had the honor to participate in the signatory ceremony of twin regions between the region of Emeq-Hefer (where I am a council member) and the Heilongjiang province in China. The agreement is the first step towards increased cooperation between the two regions.
All that is very nice, and creates a lot of good will - especially if there are mission exchanged between the regions and people get to travel. But in the practical world we live in what does it really mean?
In the regional level there is little significance, there are donations, links between institutes and some missions, political, educational and others. But what more can you expect when the regional level of government is limited in scope of action, budget and legal powers to act?
Can there really be a significant advantage created by cooperation between regions?
The EU seems to think so, but seems to think that such cooperation needs encouragement - and it does so financially. The EU concept is based on the fact that beyond trading between regions, there are practical lessons regions can learn from each other and that the cooperation can lead to improvement, economically in both participating regions.
The basis is to find the means for cooperation that will allow the relatively small and entrepreneurial region on one side to learn and teach from the larger bigger region, which operates on a different scale. The key would seem to be intensive and continuous communication between the two regions - a committee to identify the areas for cooperation, allocate the means and plan ahead. Topics for cooperation change with time therefore only lasting communication can provide for real cooperation with time.Although distance may seem as a problem - once personal acquaintance has been established the daily communication can be done electronically.

Business Development and Clean Tech

Business Development and Clean-Tech would at first look seem to be just as relevant As Business Development and Communications for example. But it seems that those dealing with Business Development, the Clean Tech sector holds a special interest.

The drive towards more and more awareness regarding environmental issues has increased the interest of firms in Clean-Technologies. Whether these are technologies for better energy management and decreased usage of energy sources, recycling, usage of less waste producing manufacturing, the production of renewable energies and more, firms in different sectors have been looking at these technologies.
In many cases firms, after being pushed into a first look due to market pressure, that is, in order to better sell their products, or maintain their market share, get acknowledged as "Green" etc., realize that the Clean-Tech they were looking into, could directy influence their cost structure and help theri profitability.
While we will not discuss here how exactly each firm may benefit from absrbing environmentaly friendly technologies, the search and increased interest has led to widespread activity in the field. From the point of view of the technology or knowledge providers, the issue of technology transfer and Business Development in that sector are important parameters.
While there is an article of mine soon to be published ( a link will be provided from my site at: www. amiramporath.co.il) on the topic, here I would like to present some points for your onsideration:

1. Is the Clean-Tech really one sector? Are the developers of water treatment infrastructure size plants in the same market, as the developers of home water filtration systems?


2. If we are dealing with different secors, how would that influence the parameters of Business development and Technology Tranfer?


3. Regarding the role of the IP managers in firms, and Technology Transfer officers in research organizations, how would these roles change as a result of the activity in the Clean-Tech sector?


4. Which would be the best way for governments to encourage activities in Clean-Tech based on the above?

In order to demonstrate the level of importance that discussion has receeved and to give preliminary answers to the questions above please see the films in the links below, recently published on the web by the European Patent Office (EPO). some of the recent films were fillmed during an internal conference on the topic held recently.

Enjoy,

Amiram Porath

Links for this post:

• http://www.epo.org/topics/issues/clean-energy/films/renewable.html


• http://www.epo.org/topics/issues/clean-energy/films/films.html


• http://www.epo.org/topics/issues/clean-energy/films.html?update