Huntsville is known for the advanced technology of its defense sector, with firms developing bleeding edge advancements in fields as varied as computer engineering, hypersonic ballistics, and material science.

Since the advent of the Space Age, Huntsville has invested a great deal of resources into developing the intellectual infrastructure that has made this concentration of technical expertise possible. A critical component of translating technical innovation from the university into viable products is the Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) at UAH.

From L to R: OTC Director Kannan Grant and Dr. Randy Gaillard, with a ‘mini-oligonucleotide synthesizer’ developed at UAH

The OTC liaisons between inventors and prospective investors. These investors can range from multibillion-dollar global conglomerates like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, down to individual entrepreneurs looking to establish a startup company.

“It is important that we make our innovators, who also want to be entrepreneurs, understand that different types of investors come with different expectations,” OTC Director Kannan Grant told the Huntsville Business Journal. “The first step in innovation is understanding your marketplace. Almost always we ask the question, what problem does your innovation solve? The last thing we want is for innovators to find a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. Once we can establish the problem, the next steps are to find the magnitude of the problem, existing solutions and who provides them (competitors), how the innovation is different from existing solutions, what the barriers are to entering the marketplace, etc.”

Another very important function that the OTC fulfills is the facilitation of patenting procedures and negotiating licensing agreements.

“An important aspect of innovation is the intellectual property position of the invention in the marketplace.” said Director Grant. “As we go through this exercise, a pathway to how an innovation will be commercialized will emerge.”

This pathway involves prototyping the invention, establishing the manufacturing process, and marketing the resulting product. Of course, not all inventions will pan out. The OTC evaluates inventions for potential commercial viability, which includes factors such as market saturation and estimated return on investment. However, because the evaluation is done by the university, innovators are able to take greater risks than unsupported home inventors, who could be ruined by sinking resources into what could turn out to be a dead end.

“The good thing about finding out that a technology is not commercializable is that the innovators have spent very little of their resources to find the answer,” said Grant. “If you are going to fail, fail early, as they would say.”

Still, the risk mitigation that the OTC provides to inventors has enabled the University to contribute directly to the knowledge economy. On April 21 2022, twenty-two inventors received commemorative plaques in recognition of their patents.

These patents include such developments as a micro-fluidic reactor with in-plane micro-lenses, an unmanned aerial vehicle docking system, and methods to convert flash memory into one-time programmable memory.

The OTC’s website features a catalogue of inventions that are available for licensing. “I think if there is a technology that solves an important problem, and doing so in an innovative way that has a potential to disrupt the market, there will always be investors,” said Grant. He suggested that inventions that address problems in the fields of medicine, cybersecurity, hydrogen storage, battery and solar cell advancements, and clean water technology would be prominent in a 10-to-20 year time frame.

Those interested in licensing technology developed at the Office of Technology Commercialization can contact the office at otc@uah.edu.

Images provided by The University of Alabama in Huntsville.