Effective Strategies for Marketing Biomedical Inventions: Lessons Learnt from NIH Licence Leads

Abstract

We analysed the origins of 281 licence agreements completed by NIH between 2001 and 2004. The origin of these licences was distributed among three sources that were classified as Inventor Contact (38 per cent), Marketing (34 per cent) and Public Information (28 per cent). Detailed analyses showed that while inventors played a more prominent role in securing leads for biological material licences, marketing efforts by the technology transfer personnel played a larger role in identifying commercial patent licensees. An inventor citation index analysis from 1992 to 2004 demonstrated that inventors who were personally involved in obtaining licence leads, and inventors whose technologies were licensed through NIH marketing efforts had similar citation indices. Taken together, these results suggest that inventor contact and technology marketing efforts are equally important in generating licence leads. Based on these data, we propose effective strategies that can be used by academic and governmental institutions for marketing their inventions to the private sector.