Bringing groundbreaking technologies from the lab to the marketplace is often slow, complex and costly. LaunchIQ is changing that. Born from a collaboration among MilTech, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and venture building and commercialization expertise from the 9Point8 Collective, the innovative platform offers a scalable and efficient way for Technology Transfer Offices (TTO) to manage and unlock the value of their intellectual property (IP).
“The process is that the typical Technology Transfer Office has a whole portfolio of technology that they manage,” said Patrick Miller, a project engineer from MilTech whose primary responsibility with the platform development was capturing requirements. “Their objective is often to get that technology licensed or to advance it to a commercial entity that can run with it and be compelled to produce it on an ongoing basis.”
And that can be challenging, according to Evan Allen, a co-founder and general partner with 9Point8 Collective, the technology startup that worked with MilTech and AFRL to develop LaunchIQ.
“It's disheartening to see what happens in the tech transfer landscape generally,” said Allen, who played a large role in the development of LaunchIQ. “Typically, a team of less than 10 people managing patent portfolios that contain hundreds, if not thousands, of intellectual properties, with dozens of new disclosures coming in on a month-to-month basis. No human could reasonably be expected to manage that portfolio with a high degree of fidelity.”
The arrival of LaunchIQ has the potential to make management easier, but, most importantly, faster. It’s a diligence and intelligence platform completely changing the way TTOs catalogue and manage IP inventory.
Federal and academic labs handle incredible amounts of IP and come up against challenging variables that include different requirements, shifting geopolitical environments, evolving commercial markets and economic trends. Navigating these components manually can be nearly impossible. The LaunchIQ platform is a solution, offering an expandable IP-evaluation process and product used simultaneously and again over time as technologies develop and variables change.
“With this solution, you would simply share your entire IP portfolio into the system,” Miller said. “It would evaluate each individual technology, rank them for potential amongst all the other technologies within that specified portfolio and then provide an in-depth report on the rationale behind its ranking.
“For example, what are the direct and indirect competitors? Who are the competitors that operate in that space? What is the technology readiness level of the technology? And there are a number of other factors that it would report on in higher fidelity.”
After accessing available documentation on a technology, LaunchIQ provides a complete report within minutes. It can include a summary of the technology and its development, areas for further diligence for licensing and commercialization, advantages and disadvantages, analysis of primary and adjacent markets, the ability to compare and contrast multiple technologies in a portfolio, an overview of federal-funding opportunities, and scoring and stack ranking of technologies based on strategic goals and parameters.
“A user would just take an invention disclosure or patent and literally just upload the PDF to our platform,” Allen said. “It ingests that information, prepares it for analysis, goes out, does that analysis, brings it back and synthesizes it into a nice narrative report that anyone could understand.”
The platform is capable of reading patents, white papers, one-pagers, slick sheets, slide decks and plenty of other documents. Additionally, it features a customizable dashboard for users and reports can be furnished as PDFs.
While cutting down long, tedious work tasks in managing IP is a powerful component of LaunchIQ, developers also paid serious attention to security. The platform was built within an Amazon Web Services Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) moderate environment.
“Security and confidentiality is near and dear to our hearts,” said Blair Merlino, a co-founder and general partner with 9Point8 Collective. “I started in the military, in the Army, and understood the concept around and the importance of security, and then, some of the requirements. That makes sense.”
His colleague at 9Point8 also saw the importance of security.
“This is confidential information, and if the information is leaked, that can count as a disclosure and impact the entity's ability or rights to actually protect the IP,” Allen said. “So, security was the top priority from Day 1. If we can't guarantee that, no one can use the tool, and then the tool can't have an impact in the world, and that would be problematic.”
MilTech, a Partnership Intermediary established in 2004 as a collaboration between Montana State University and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, served as LaunchIQ’s first academic TTO partner, while AFRL was the first Department of Defense user.
A notable pilot program was LaunchIQ’s work with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a Department of Commerce agency. NOAA was able to evaluate seven technologies in under 15 minutes, which resulted in a 99 percent time reduction.
“It helped them drive decisions on what technologies to focus on,” Miller said. “They were able to receive a listing of the technologies in terms of which ones to focus on and what specific actions to pursue, and they were very grateful for the rapid nature of the evaluation and how it was able to provide clarity on where to focus their limited time and money.”
With additional capabilities coming in the future, LaunchIQ is a game-changer for the TTO space. Additionally, it further solidifies the collaborative possibilities that come with the AFRL and emerging technology.
“The relationships with AFRL and MilTech specifically are directly tied to this, and not only do I think that will help evolve the software, but I also suspect we'll end up doing more commercialization and studio building work, too,” Merlino said. “The software will always be there, but some of our consulting and advisory will come into play and we'll expand that way with both AFRL and MilTech.”