Swansea University joins twelve other UK Innovative Universities which were awarded  £750,000 support by Baroness Wilcox, the UK Intellectual Property Minister, under the 2012 Fast Forward Competition.

Announcing the successful projects, the Minister for Intellectual Property, Baroness Wilcox said:

“I am delighted to reward these projects for their role in helping hubs of innovation in UK universities to harness the intellectual property derived from their leading research and to collaborate with our most innovative and responsive industries. Bridging the gap between innovation and industry is key, and is vital for the UK’s continued growth, and these projects do just that. I look forward to seeing the real difference this year’s winners will bring to university and industry relationships.”

The Swansea project involves the creation of an early stage value assessment methodology for intellectual assets which is tailored for the UK research context.  

Speaking about the project Dr Gerry Ronan said: “ Technology valuation is a specialist, expensive process. As a result, higher education institutions generally only seek to place a value on intellectual assets once they are close to commercialization, by which time significant resource and expense has already been committed.

"Existing intellectual property valuation methods are generally business or product based and tend to understate value when applied to technologies that are some distance from market. This can lead to under-investment. Our project will develop a model to aide understanding at an earlier stage and test it in different technologies to assess its effectiveness with the aim of making it available to other institutions as a web based software tool.”