——Guangdong University Technology Transfer Center Accelerates Patent Commercialization  

  As a “rich source” of patent technologies, universities have long been a focal point for industry attention regarding how to efficiently convert their patent achievements into tangible productive capacity. The Guangdong University Science and Technology Achievement Conversion Center (hereinafter referred to as the Conversion Center) has explored a series of innovative measures to assist university science and technology achievements in leaving the laboratory and entering the production line, laying a “highway” from campus to enterprise, enabling more valuable and marketable patents to reach their application “destination.” Its relevant practices have been selected as typical cases in the third batch of the Intellectual Property Powerhouse Construction initiative.

  Concept verification is the key to breaking through the “first mile” of patent conversion. “Patent conversion and application is a systematic engineering project. Especially in the field of medical and engineering cross-discipline research, it involves multiple stages such as scientific research, clinical trials, industrialization, and market promotion. To turn the ‘black technology’ in the laboratory into new products that the general public can use, we need to overcome several hurdles.” Luo Wei from the Translational Medicine Research Institute of Foshan First People's Hospital gave an example: “For instance, the immune strength quantification assessment technology we invented still has a long way to go before it can be truly applied in clinical settings for precise diagnosis and treatment of patients.”

  To overcome the challenges of the “first mile” in patent conversion, the Conversion Center established a market-oriented medical-engineering integration concept verification center, forming teams of engineers and product managers to deeply explore the application scenarios of intellectual property rights, ensuring that research achievements from the laboratory find practical applications.

  Meanwhile, the Transformation Center has collaborated with enterprises to build pilot manufacturing bases, providing testing and production for validated results and addressing the engineering challenges of transforming patents into products. When discussing the challenges encountered in patent conversion and application, Professor Li Suhua from the School of Chemistry at Sun Yat-sen University said, "The main issue lies in the mismatch between technological maturity and industrialization requirements. Take our developed catalyst technology for synthesizing dimethyl succinate as an example. This technology can reduce production costs by 5,000 yuan per ton, and its high catalytic activity has been verified at the laboratory level, with all reaction parameters meeting industrialization requirements. However, due to constraints such as facility space and costs, pilot-scale scaling-up verification and process package development cannot be conducted. Meanwhile, companies generally require the technology to have ‘plug-and-play’ production feasibility to mitigate risks. This contradiction has made the process of the R&D team independently contacting companies quite challenging."

  To address this, the Technology Transfer Center and the Sun Yat-sen University Research Institute have explored and established a comprehensive collaborative mechanism encompassing “front-end precise matching, mid-end professional empowerment, and back-end compliance safeguards.” “At the Second Jiangsu Industry-Academia-Research Cooperation Matching Conference organized by the Technology Transfer Center, we established initial contact with Suqian LianSheng Technology Co., Ltd. The center then coordinated an on-site visit.” Li Suhua noted that the technology pricing model provided by the center's professional team effectively balanced the differing demands of the university and enterprise, facilitating efficient risk management and contract compliance reviews. This deep collaboration enables patent outcomes to be rapidly implemented, helping enterprises achieve economic benefits more quickly.

Encouraging university faculty to step off the podium and into the workshop is a key initiative of the Technology Transfer Center to promote patent conversion and application. “To date, the center has invited over 1,800 university faculty members to visit enterprise workshops, providing technical services to over 900 enterprises, effectively resolving technical challenges and empowering the high-quality development of manufacturing,” “ Li Jiayu, director of the conversion center, explained that the center has also established a team of full-time technology brokers across various technical fields, who conduct on-site activities such as patent classification, conversion clinics, and field research at universities to actively promote the licensing and transfer of university intellectual property rights. To date, the conversion center has facilitated 194 technology transfer contracts through technology brokers, involving over 300 million yuan, enabling university intellectual property rights to ”generate value."

  Patent conversion and utilization is not simply about “moving technology,” but about building an innovation ecosystem. “The Conversion Center is not only our ‘technical translator,’ converting complex professional terminology into business language that companies can understand; it is also a ‘resource supermarket’ for matching technology supply and demand, placing patent technologies and corporate needs on the shelves so that both parties can find what they need; it is also an ‘entrepreneurial coach’ for innovation teams, conducting research, negotiating fees, signing contracts... The staff at the Conversion Center kindly guide us on how to transform our good technologies into good products,” said Luo Wei.

  “In the future, the Conversion Center will continue to focus on the supply side of universities, guided by market demand, to strengthen the conversion chain; simultaneously, it will root itself in local areas, aligning with the ‘one town, one industry’ industrial landscape, to further densify the network of conversion workstations. This will promote the close integration of university intellectual property with local economies, address corporate technical challenges, inject new momentum into local economic development, and contribute more to the construction of an intellectual property powerhouse,” stated Li Jiayu.