Leading Universities Launch Joint Technology Licensing Program

2021-02-18

Fifteen of the country’s leading research universities—Brown, Caltech, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, the University of Illinois, Michigan, Northwestern, Penn, Princeton, SUNY Binghamton, UC Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Southern California, and Yale—today launched University Technology Licensing Program LLC (UTLP).

UTLP brings a subset of intellectual property assets from within these universities’ patent portfolios related to the physical sciences together for efficient licensing, enabling interested tech companies to obtain licenses to inventions from multiple universities for their existing and future product offerings.

In pooling the patents, UTLP will streamline the dissemination of these universities’ technologies, paving the way for continued innovation in the marketplace. Previous university developments in the physical sciences have already generated important patented inventions that have improved lives and enabled new products. By providing a one-stop shop for companies to access technologies of interest, UTLP is designed to accelerate the pace of innovation in the industrial arena.

Multiple technology areas are included in the University Technology Licensing Program, including connectivity (e.g., power management, networking protocols, signal processing and codecs, location tracking, cameras and image processing); autonomous vehicles; and data applications (e.g., storage, data management, network protocols). Each participating university will determine which patents from among its intellectual property portfolio to contribute to the UTLP pool. In the future, UTLP may develop additional patent pools related to semiconductor fabrication, applied electronics, batteries, photovoltaics, robotics, and other areas.


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