Students walk past the Technology Ventures Office on George Street every day without knowing about the work going on inside. The office expanded this fall with hopes of further aiding the process of managing and commercializing the products of Brown research.
Thus far, the office has been involved with the start-up of genetics company NaBsys, business-optimization organization Dynadec and greenhouse-gas-reducing Banyan Environmental, all of which started in laboratories at Brown.
On a day-to-day basis, the office's five staff members "meet with faculty to discuss research and assess potential inventions, evaluate technologies and markets, have discussions with potential third party licensees and negotiate potential deals," wrote Katherine Gordon, managing director of the TVO, in an e-mail to The Herald. According to Gordon, this work is directly related to Brown's efforts to boost its national research prestige.
"Our initiatives to move our technologies into the public sector provide the means to commercialize these programs. The recognition of these accomplishments, originating from innovative research at Brown, validates the high quality of the research," she wrote.
Professor of Computer Science Pascal Van Hentenryck formed Dynadec, a business optimization software company, in 2009 with the help of the Technology Ventures Office.
Van Hentenryck said the office was integral in the start-up of his company, helping with the initial licensing agreements between Brown and Dynadec, making the organization more appealing for outside funding and negotiating deals.
"You have to have these things for intellectual property agreements," Van Hentenryck said. The office "made things attractive for Brown and for Dynadec, creating a win-win situation for both."
The office has been working closely with the Office of the Vice President of Research and the Rhode Island Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship to create more industrial partnerships. One such project is the IBM-Brown supercomputing center, which is able to perform more than 14 trillion calculations per second.
"Our work … ultimately has major benefits for the public sector," Gordon wrote.
