Tennessee Tech expanding its support for intellectual property protection through a specialized grant program and a series of workshops designed to help faculty safeguard and commercialize their inventions.
Vice President for Research and Economic Development Dr. Michael Aikens said the university provides specialized guidance to steer faculty and students through the patent process and technology licensing avenues.
“All of this is predicated on protecting your idea,” Aikens said, “Because if you don’t protect it in the right way, somebody else can come along and steal it, somebody else can come along and say that they did it first, We help our faculty to understand that it all starts with the protection aspect of it.”
The university has seen consecutive years of record momentum, according to Aikens, with 13 invention disclosures filed so far this year, including a current electrical engineering project utilizing wireless ground electricity transmission to improve safety for mining operations.
“It’s a really neat program where we have what we call a trade show and essentially the faculty come and they have their inventions, their prototypes, their posters, and they have a booth and people can come and actually physically interact with the faculty,” Aikens said.
Aikens said the university offers an internal proof of concept grant providing faculty members up to $15,000 to help de-risk their technology.
“We also want them to be doing what we call customer discovery,” Aikens said. “So essentially going out and understanding what is the problem that they’re actually solving.”
Aikens said the university partners with Upper Cumberland’s Biz Foundry to provide mentorship and help faculty map the commercial value of their work within the marketplace.
“We have to completely understand the problem that we’re solving, how this technology can be iterated to really actually do that and so there are of course inherent risks along the way,” Aikens said. “Maybe they want to start a business, but that technology is not exactly ready or maybe it’s over-engineered.”
Aikens said the university maintains a progressive split where the faculty member and the institution share revenue from an invention.
“What we want the faculty to understand is that they own 50% and the university owns 50%,” Aikens said.
