Nine projects have been awarded £660,000 from the Intellectual Property Office to help businesses take their innovative ideas off the drawing board and into the marketplace.
The prizes, which were awarded as part of this year’s Fast Forward competition, were given out during a ceremony at the University of Birmingham by Intellectual Property Minister, Lord Younger. The winners will each receive funding of between £40,000 and £99,000 for their projects in the horticulture, sport, education, healthcare and games industries.
The Fast Forward competition encourages universities and Public Sector Research Establishments (PSREs) to work collaboratively with businesses and local communities to maximise the benefits of innovation and intellectual property. The competition has been running for the past 4 years and has now given more than £2.7 million in funding to 44 projects.
The projects that were awarded funding this year through the Fast Forward competition are:
- Royal Botanic Garden: Horticulture Micropropogation Services - a project that will help small plant breeders to source affordable and flexible services to develop new plant varieties
- University of Abertay Dundee: Investing in Digital Assets - this project will work with game developers to help them identify and value their intellectual property
- University of Stirling: Sports innovation challenge – a project that will link in with the 2014 Commonwealth Games and the Ryder Cup to give entrepreneurial students the opportunity to come up with sports company ideas; the best ideas will be supported by the university to form new companies
- University of Oxford: Encouraging IP uptake for SMEs – a project that will support a new scheme offered by Oxford Isis Innovation that will make it easy and affordable for small and medium businesses to create new intellectual property
- Plymouth University: App Challenge Model - this project will demonstrate how charities can manage software applications and create health apps University of Dundee: Technology Accelerator Program – this project is designed to bring together students, university staff, industry and SMEs to look at the commercial potential of platform technology
- Nottingham Trent University: Nottingham Creative IP Project – this project will provide businesses and students in the creative industries with a better understanding of how they can protect their IP
- Cardiff University: Health Technology Challenge – this project aims to increase innovation in the NHS to find solutions to help healthcare practitioners to deliver better care for patients
- Lancaster University: Philanthropic crowd-funding of IP through the ‘valley of death’ – this project will develop a new model to overcome the stalling of inventions between academic research and industrial application by trialling internet-based public crowd-funding to support patented medical research
This year more than 60 entries were received for the competition.
The winners of the 2014 Fast Forward competition are:
- Lancaster University: Philanthropic crowd-funding of IP through the “valley of death” £39,962
- Cardiff University: Health Technology Challenge Wales 2014 £65,000
- Nottingham Trent University: Nottingham Creative IP Project £69,000
- University of Dundee: Technology Accelerator Programme £73,000
- Plymouth University: App Challenge Model – developing software application IP in collaboration with patients and charities £75,645
- University of Oxford: Encouraging IP uptake for SMEs through the Oxford Isis Smart IP Scheme £77,000
- Royal Botanic Gardens: Horticultural Micropropagation Services £83,948
- University of Abertay Dundee: Investing in Digital Assets £85,668
- University of Stirling: Sports Innovation Challenge £98,719
Further information relating to the Fast Forward competition can be found at: http://www.ipo.gov.uk/fastforward.htm
