Technology Development, Transfer, and Licensing

Through the Harvard Office of Technology Development (OTD) we aim to make the fruits of Harvard research more accessible outside the University and to ensure that society benefits from Harvard innovations by fostering their swift, professional and effective development and commercialization.

Specific objectives include:

• Ensuring that Harvard research results are made widely available and transformed for public use and benefit.
• Serving as a dynamic bridge from laboratory to industry to make certain that promising new technologies are translated into products and services that benefit society and the world.
• Evaluating, patenting and licensing inventions and discoveries made by faculty of Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
• Stimulating innovation and technology development within the Harvard community and securing all necessary protection of the resulting intellectual property.
• Licensing Harvard technologies to strong, effective partners.
• Establishing start up companies and building value around Harvard innovations.
• Building sponsored research collaborations with industry around faculty-initiated applied research projects.

For more information contact: Alan Gordon, Director of Business Development (617-384-5000). Note: OTD holds office hours on Tuesdays from 9am to 12 noon in Pierce 207B.

Notable Successes & New Ventures

• SiEnergy Systems
  A spin-off that aims to commercialize solid oxide fuel technology.
• SiOnyx
  A spin-off dedicated to commercializing black silicon.
• Lebônê Solutions
  A student-based social entrepreneurship company, is a social enterprise working in off-grid energy delivery and lighting technology in Africa.
• Raindance
  The recently formed company is devoted to discovering, developing, and commercializing the precise manipulation of minute amounts of fluids in microfluidic devices.
• Liquid Machines
  Computer scientists created this leading provider of Enterprise Rights Management (ERM) solutions to protect critical business content and audit usage while enabling collaboration. Liquid Machines was purchased by Check Point in July or 2010.
• Pulmatrix
  Grown from a novel course, this venture- funded startup develops products that diagnose, treat, or prevent or inhibit the spread of airborne infectious diseases.
• Oxford Nanopore
  Jene Golovchenko, in collaboration with Harvard Physics faculty and the University of California at Santa Cruz, licensed a technology that has the potential to lower the cost of DNA sequencing to Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd. The team employed nanopores to rapidly process, identify and record DNA bases in sequence. In addition to the licensing deal, the company provided funding for continued research. 
• NVIDIA
  Through the leadership of computer scientist Hanspeter Pfister, Harvard was recognized as a CUDA Center of Excellence for its commitment to teaching GPU Computing and its integration of CUDA-enabled GPUs for science and engineering research projects. These activities also resulted in a $2M grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the development of GPU-enabled computational science.
  

• BASF Advanced Research Initiative at Harvard University
  BASF and Harvard University jointly established the BASF Advanced Research Initiative at Harvard University. While based at SEAS the initiative benefits from having strong ties with departments and schools throughout the University. Set up as a fully collaborative, integrated partnership among Harvard and BASF researchers, the agreement represents a novel model for university-industry collaborations and is designed to foster a vibrant and dynamic intellectual exchange. Projects are in areas including: applied physics, physics, applied mathematics, chemical biology, systems biology, bioengineering, and materials science. For more information contact Jens Rieger (rieger@seas.harvard.edu / jens.rieger@basf.com).

• Crimson Grid (with IBM)
  Another particular success was the development of the Crimson Grid. IBM partnered with faculty members to create an innovative computing platform designed to support collaborative research and sharing of data.

More Information

Alan Gordon
(617) 384-5000

Note: OTD holds office hours on Tuesdays from 9am to 12 noon in Pierce 207B.