Iowa State is entering an intellectual property partnership with its sister institution, the University of Northern Iowa, in order to better commercialize new ideas.

The agreement will allow UNI to use the expertise of ISU’s Office of Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer to improve its patents and increase its chances of being commercialized.

Lisa Lorenzen, executive director of the ISU Research Foundation, Inc. and director of the Office of Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer, explained the logic behind the agreement.

“In order to have a tech transfer office, you need to be big enough, have enough research going on to generate enough ideas. In talking to UNI, they’re really not big enough to support their own office,” Lorenzen said. “We came up with a plan on how we could do shared services between sister institutions.”

The shared service will cut costs for UNI by allowing it to work on patents without the need to spend resources on its own tech transfer office, and will allow Iowa State to benefit from the commercialization of those ideas.

“For every 100 ideas we get in the office, we’ll patent about a third of them. About a third that we patent will actually get into the hands of companies. And about a third of those will end up in products and making money,” Lorenzen said. “This will provide an extra 10 percent on the number of ideas we get every year.”

The agreement also assists in the development of patents by putting them in the hands of a well-practiced office.

“Iowa State has a lot of years in experience of doing this, so hopefully that experience will help us be more effective in commercializing these technologies,” Lorenzen said.

Lorenzen said this kind of cooperation between universities is rare, but not unheard of.

In addition to helping both universities, the agreement will also increase the chances new ideas are brought to the general public.   

“Every time you eat an oblong seedless watermelon … that was developed at Iowa State University,” Lorenzen said. “The job of our office is to help get those ideas into the hands of businesses, so they can commercialize and sell them, and the whole society benefits.”