An online marketplace for science

Last week in Brussels, the European Commission unveiled a long-awaited statement on its innovation policies. It was a bit of everything – ideas mostly old, some borrowed, and only a little new. Nevertheless, declared EU Vice President Günter Verheugen, to succeed “all we need is the political will”.

Indeed, Mr Commissioner – though you’ll pardon us at Science|Business if we aren’t holding our collective breaths, waiting.

In fact, we are taking action now, ourselves. This week, we are launching a private initiative to improve the process of innovation in Europe. You can see it in the middle of our home page now: the Science|Business Marketplace. No committees involved. No memoranda (well, OK, there was one memo on the marketing research for it). Certainly no lack of will: It was less than two months from idea to execution.

Reaching out

And the idea doesn’t need a corps of translators to explain. For years, scientists have been using the Internet to reach out to each other – for collaborators, for research, for publications, for access to scientific databases, and more. At the same time, the commercial importance of what they do has been soaring: more than $650 billion a year gets spent on R&D in the developed world. So it’s pretty obvious that the researchers would start using the Internet to find investors, corporate sponsors and licensees.

But it isn’t easy or cheap at the moment. Various government sites (including some run by the EU) allow development partners to find each other – but there’s a vetting process, and the online paperwork can be daunting. Many universities advertise their licensing opportunities – but that leaves the corporate in-licensing officers struggling to keep an eye on hundreds of universities individually. And there are a few rather fancy private sites on the Web – but most charge commission or hefty subscription fees. And they’re geared towards serving wealthy corporate buyers, rather than cash-starved scientist-sellers.

Cut through the tangle

We’re trying to cut through all that. With the Science|Business Marketplace, any subscriber can access our Web form, cut-and-paste details of their technology in their own words, and submit it to us for publication. It can be any technology, any country, any type of partner sought – investor, licensee, corporate sponsor or partner. We’ll review the submission and, assuming it’s serious, publish it online on our home page. (See the “Business Leads” box. We’ve re-purposed it to this new service.) We’ll also include it in our weekly email bulletin, which goes out free to a wider audience of technology professionals.

The next step is up to the individual buyers and sellers: they can use the contact details provided to talk off-line, direct. We’d love to know if a deal results; in fact, subscribers can use the same Web form to tell us about that, or any other deal, they like. We’ll consider it for publication – again, in your own words. Our editing role, on both technology opportunities and deal reports, will be simply to filter out noise: no Viagra ads, no perpetual-motion machines, no embarrassing grammatical or spelling mistakes in the titles (a welcome, and free, service to the majority of our scientist-subscribers for whom English is a second language).

It’s easy, simple and cheap – like the Internet should be. In fact, it’s free for existing subscribers (who include everybody with campus email addresses at Imperial College London, ETH-Zürich, TU Delft, Chalmers University of Technology, and Karolinska Institutet.) For non-subscribers: you may email us information ([email protected]) and we’ll consider it for publication, if we think it would be interesting to our subscribers.

More changes

There are other changes on the site, as well. We’re marking more clearly which stories are free and which are accessible only to subscribers. We’ve dropped some news features, and added others, based on subscriber feedback. We’ve changed some of our promotional literature, too, to emphasise our emerging role as a news service that connects buyers and sellers of emerging technologies.

Science|Business, on 13 October, will mark its first year in publishing (yes, party to follow: 9 October in Brussels. Let me know, at [email protected], if you’d like details.)

This new Marketplace service is an experiment, like the company itself. Its purpose, in collaboration with our network of nine leading science universities, is simple: to harness the tools of the Internet towards making it easier for researchers and investors to find each other in the vast world of science and technology. Our aim: to promote enterprise in science.