Joint Research Centre - European Commission

JOINT RESEARCH CENTRE
The European Commission's in-house science service
European Commission

Noordwijk (NL) - 28/04/11 - 29/04/11

TTO Circle – 1st Plenary Meeting

 

The JRC is co-organising with the European Space Agency (ESA) the first plenary meeting of the TTO Circle Initiative at the premises of ESA in Noordwijk (NL) on the 28,29 April 2011.

The TTO (Technology Transfer Offices) Circle is an initiative of the JRC aiming at connecting Technology Transfer Offices of large European public research organisations (PROs). Participants are the heads of the TTOs of CEA, CERN, CNR, EMBL, ENEA, ESA, Fraunhofer, Helmholtz Association, IMEC, INRIA, Max Planck Innovation, NPL, NCBiR, Sintef, Tecnalia, TNO, Tubitak and VTT.

Organisations like EARTO, JET, RESEAU CURIE will participate to the meetings as observers. The JRC will be the secretariat.

The meeting will be of an operational nature where all the partners are encouraged to exchange experiences and best practices. During this 2-day seminar two major subjects are going to be addressed:

1.  The case of IP pools.

This session will address the concepts of IP pools and clearinghouses. Outlines on how to build successful pools despite challenges will be presented. The role of the EC and standardisation bodies will be explained particularly in the light of open innovation. Speakers are Ms Esther Van Zimmeren coming from the University of Leuven and Ms Sabina Brufani from SISVEL (IT).

2.  Valuation of early stage technologies.

A set of different approaches have been proposed by experts to value patents and several have been put in practice. Qualitative and quantitative valuation methods will be presented during this session. Several real life case studies will be demonstrated with a special focus on how valuation issues can be resolved in the license contract structure. Speakers are Ms Olga Spasic from WIPO and Mr. Raph Villiger from Avance (CH).

DG Enterprise and DG Research and Innovation are also invited to the meeting to give a brief introduction to the members on the current state of play on European policy regarding innovation.

Programme

Download the Programme of the meeting

Seminar Presentations

State of Play of the European Policy

IP Pools

Valuation of Early Stage Technologies

Next Steps of the TTO Network

  • Conclusions and Next Steps
    Giancarlo Caratti, Head of Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer Unit, JRC, European Commission

More on the TTO Circle concept

The EU needs more innovation to boost its global competitiveness, harness its knowledge base, enhance its economic position and tackle the grand societal challenges of the 21st century. For these reasons, innovation has been placed at the heart of the Europe 2020 strategy for growth and jobs. The Innovation Union flagship initiative stresses the importance of developing mechanisms to strengthen knowledge transfer offices in public research organisations, in particular through trans-national collaboration (Commitment 21). Article 181 of the Treaty encourages the Commission to take any useful initiative to promote coordination with the Member States aiming at i.a. establishing guidelines and indicators, exchanging best practices and promoting monitoring and evaluation.

The vision of the TTO Circle is to unite forces with all the important PROs to develop a common understanding of the challenges Europe is facing in the domain of innovation and draw some lines of action. As the largest public research organisations in Europe, all the members act as role models to smaller institutions and universities and must therefore facilitate the spread of innovative ideas and best practices to smaller TTOs, thus effectively streamlining the part of the innovation value chain of Europe involved with the dissemination of research results.