LNU Innovation

Our support often takes place at an early stage, when research is still ongoing and before an actual business idea has been developed. You therefore do not need to have a business plan, a ready-made team or at all worry that your idea is too unfinished before contacting us.

The work of evaluating the commercial potential of your idea takes place in an integrated process, where patents and other intellectual property rights, as well as financing and teams are also discussed. The innovation advisors attach great importance to your interest and drive.

The first meeting is unbiased. The innovation advisors listen and ask questions and together you agree on the next step based on your needs. The responsibility for moving the process forward lies with you as an idea bearer, but together with your innovation advisor, you set up a suitable strategy for commercialization. How often you will meet depends on your needs and availability.

To strengthen the customer and user perspective and the commercial conditions in your idea, the following aspects are in focus in the process:

• Analysis of customer needs, market and competitors
• Ability to protect the idea, for example via patent and trademark.
• Verification of production method
• Analysis of regulatory and legal requirements
• Technical verification
• Business
• Team

The plan for how the actual commercialization will take place looks different from case to case. One scenario is to start a business, another is the licensing of patents or some other form of knowledge transfer. In other cases, commercialization can take place through corporate collaborations of various kinds.

We help you test and develop the commercial potential of your idea.

Your support in the early business development.
Do you have an idea or research result that you think can be developed into a product or service for wider use? An idea can also be about new processes, models, methods or new application areas that others can benefit from.

The teacher exemption means that in most cases as a researcher and teacher at a Swedish university, you have the right to your research results, a unique benefit that you should take advantage of.

Our innovation advisors will help you develop a plan for evaluating and verifying the commercial potential of your idea or result. We suggest activities that increase the possibility of making your idea commercially attractive.

You decide how your project will be continued. There are often several opportunities and we provide support for different types of commercialization; Starting a business is an opportunity, licensing and different types of business collaborations are other ways.

The support is free of charge and is aimed at students, researchers and other employees at the university. All advice is confidential and we do not take shares or ownership in projects.

Knowledge and research from Linnaeus University will benefit society.

We help you test and develop your idea and can give you support and guidance to make use of it, commercially or non-commercially.

Do you have an idea or result that you think can be developed into a product or service? Or in other ways spread for wider use? An idea can also be about new processes, models, methods or new application areas that others can benefit from.

Based on an initial meeting, our innovation advisors will help you develop a plan for evaluating and verifying your idea or result. We can also look at ways of financing the utilization.

You don't have to have all the answers. Together we help each other to find the way forward.

Our advice is free of charge for students, researchers and other employees at Linnaeus University. All advice is, of course, confidential. We also do not take shares or ownership in projects we support.

Contact us today to book a first meeting.

To evaluate and develop research-related ideas and business concepts, money and other resources are usually required. This may involve, for example, financing patent applications, verifying results for future commercial use and conducting preliminary market research to obtain information about customer needs.

We can help find different forms of financing, advise and help you with applications and contacts.

 - DO YOU NEED FUNDING TO TEST YOUR IDEA?

We can have the money you need to verify your idea early and enable the first steps in the development of a working business concept or other utilization.

Below you can read more about the different funding opportunities.

 - VFT - VALIDATION FOR APPLICATION

Fyrklöverns Innovationskontor has funding from Vinnova for the popular validation program VFT. The funds are for developing and verifying innovative ideas from both researchers and students. The money is intended to be used for such things as market analysis, development of prototypes, patent applications, building teams, travel to meet partners and more. VFT aims to minimize various forms of risks in the early stages in order to strengthen the possibility of successful commercialization or other societal benefits.

 - EQUITY

Linnaeus University has a holding company, Linnaeus University Development AB, whose subsidiary Linnaeus Venture AB is an early investor in researchers' and students' ideas against part of future profits, or against shares in existing or future companies.

It is through the holding company that the university can contribute to the licensing of new technology and to the establishment of new research-based companies. Linnaeus Venture AB be the investor that enters with the first capital investments made entirely on a commercial basis.

Linnaeus Venture AB and the innovation office have activities that complement each other and work closely together to give ideas from the university the best possible conditions to be commercially successful.

You can get funding for, for example, the following activities:

• Analysis of customer - user needs
• Verification of production method
• Analysis of regulatory and legal requirements
• Technical verification aimed at minimizing project risks
• Patent and/or trademark protection
• Shareholder agreement

The teacher exemption means that you as a researcher and teacher at a Swedish university have the right to your research results, a unique benefit that you should take advantage of. Also consider the importance of agreements, especially in collaboration with researchers from foreign universities but also companies nationally and internationally that do not have the same privilege.

 - DEVELOP A SUSTAINABLE STRATEGY TO PROTECT YOUR IDEA 

Intellectual property rights, such as patents, design protection, trademark protection and copyright can be tricky but can be important tools when you want to commercialize your idea. Intellectual property is about ownership over a knowledge asset. In parallel with your publishing strategy, it may therefore be important to consider how the assets created from your research can be managed. Do they need to be protected in order to be utilized?

The ability to utilize research results commercially often depends on how the research is funded and who owns the rights to the results.

- IT IS IMPORTANT TO HAVE THE RIGHT COOPERATION AGREEMENT

In the context of collaborative projects, "sponsored" projects or licensing agreements, issues related to intellectual property rights and ownership are often central. It is therefore important to have well-thought-out cooperation agreements, which regulate the rights of all parties involved. Cooperation agreements regulate, among other things, the right to results and rules for publication.

In a collaboration, your rights depend on what the agreement looks like. The Innovation Office can help you sort out any agreements and if no agreement exists, to go through what must be taken into account when entering into different types of collaborations, such as confidentiality, publication, future exploitation and exploitation of the results.

Do you want advice or book an appointment?
Contact a lawyer or one of our innovation advisors.

 - ARE YOU THINKING OF APPLYING FOR A PATENT?

A patent is a protection for new technology in the broad sense. If an invention is intended to be licensed to a company or used as a base in a newly started company, then patents are usually a prerequisite.

In a first step, the conditions for patent protection must be investigated through, among other things, news review and assessment of the possibility of patenting.

In order to create powerful patent protection, a conscious planning of continued research experiments and publication is required: You cannot get a patent for an invention that has already been published and therefore it is important to do things in the right order. This means that you must first protect your results by filing a patent application, before publishing them at a conference or in an article.

Our innovation advisors help to formulate a basis for the patent application and with contacts to patent attorneys who complete your application.

The Innovation Office can also help with the financing of a patent application.

 - IP-POLICY (draft)

Linnaeus University is developing guidelines for how knowledge assets created at the university should be managed. These constitute, for example, support for externally funded research that is conditional on the funder taking over or gaining the right to use the results of the research.

 - LEARN MORE ABOUT INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Do you want to learn more about patents and other intellectual property rights and what is important to consider when research is commercialized or utilized in another way? Or do you want your students to gain a greater understanding of different forms of protection and their importance in order to be able to take an idea to the market?

The Swedish Patent and Registration Office (PRV) also has a basic online education in intellectual property law:
https://www.prv.se/sv/kunskap-och-stod/prv-skolan-online/

Together with our colleagues , we are happy to help early in the work with research applications to identify and concretize how you can and want to work with impact and utilization in your research project.

In addition to the research result itself, many other values and assets are often created in a research project. At a 1-2 hour workshop with the research group/project, we make an inventory and together identify these assets. In addition to the list itself, this activity often leads to a changed mindset and increased consensus in the group, which is usually very valuable.

Introduction video: https://vimeo.com/110134553

IPC is a simple tool to quickly sketch out how you plan to work with impact in your research. After a 1-2 hour workshop, you have an overview of how you plan to create and measure your impact in your project.

Short introductory video: https://play.lnu.se/media/t/0_ittyekn3

In this workshop, you will learn how to compress your message into an easy-to-understand presentation / pitch where you still get your core message out. The pitch is built up according to the NABC model. 

Need – what are the customer's, the recipient's or the market's needs?
Approach – what is your solution to the customer's needs?
Benefits – what are the benefits of your solution?
Competition – what other options are there to solve the customer's needs?

When you have prepared your pitch, we gather a panel that listens to you and gives you feedback based on given roles. This is repeated a couple of times and the message develops. This is called the Value Creation Forum – VCF and is a method developed by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and is one of the cornerstones of their innovation process.

Short introductory video NABC: http://youtu.be/iHiLAJGDGt4