Venture Funding for University Research

Many Venture Capitalist companies have been formed to work with universities to license research results or products from university research laboratories. I had a chance to interact with multiple of those. Most of them had difficulties because many universities really don’t understand entrepreneurship. Their intellectual property offices think more like lawyers than business people. If universities want to be successful in benefitting (though — whether they should be doing that is a different topic) from their research, then they should recruit entrepreneurs to work in their technology transfer office.

In any case, there is an article of interest in Forbes on this topic. They mention a company that has been successful in this difficult area:

In funding the commercialization of academic research, Allied Minds has an ample assortment of targets, given the paucity of bank credit and the preference of VC firms for big, quick investments. But it’s a territory littered with failures. Two and a half decades ago University Patents was a glamorous pioneer in this business, with a share price of $24.50. All that’s left is a moneylosing firm called Competitive Technologies (amex: CTT – news – people ), which sells for 95 cents a share and is at distinct risk of being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.