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The Rice Office of Technology Transfer was founded in August 1998 as a component of the University’s outreach efforts in order to make the benefits of new discoveries available to the public. OTT provides a service to Rice faculty members, students and staff researchers by protecting intellectual property developed by them during their pursuit of the university’s mission of providing an unsurpassed educational experience to its students and serving the educational needs of the larger community. The OTT facilitates the interaction between academia and industry, so that science may be transformed into technology.
Summary statistics of OTT’s work from founding through November 2002 demonstrate the office’s activities in support of these goals:
- 169 disclosures of new
inventions or software
- 157 licensed or active
cases
- 70 licensed or
optioned
- 80 avail for licensing
- 291 US patent
applications filed
- 78 foreign applications
filed
- 45 issued patents
- Agreements negotiated
and signed
- 21 exclusive license
agreements
- 4 exclusive option
agreements
- 5 software licenses
- 20 cooperative
Research or Inter-institutional agreements
- 41 materials transfer
agreements
- 61 confidential
disclosure agreements
- 8 operational start-up
companies that have collectively raised $43M.
- Molecular Electronics,
Inc.
- Carbon
Nanotechnologies, Inc.
- Oxane Materials, Inc.
- itRobotics, Inc.
- Nanospectra
Biosciences, Inc.
- Plasmonics, LLC
- Advanced Reality, Inc.
- Natcore Technologies,
Inc.
- $1,228,149 income and reimbursements received
The level and rate of innovation by the Rice faculty and research community are responsible for this remarkable level of activity. To measure Rice’s “innovation quotient” relative to other universities, data from the most recent annual survey by the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) provide the following insight. For each US university, three discovery metrics, the number of disclosures submitted, the number of patents filed, and the number of licenses consummated, were normalized on the basis of reported research expenditures to account for university size. These three metrics were added and used to rank each reporting university. Rice is ranked well within the top fifteen universities on that list and, significantly, well ahead of Princeton, MIT and Stanford.
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