A support initiative has been launched in order to lead industrial property rights from research and educational institutions into exploitation through licensing, sale or a spin-off.
In North Rhine-Westphalia, comparatively few patents are registered in the economy, since rather few research-strong large-scale enterprises from patent-strong industries are located here. At the same time, North Rhine-Westphalia is characterized by a strong and permeable education system as the basis of its innovation system. In order to increase the application maturity of university inventions, to validate them in an application-oriented manner and thus to improve the chances of exploitation, a total of almost 27 million euros will be made available from the EU regional funding and the co-financing of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in the ERDF/JTF program NRW 2021-2027.
In order to lead intellectual property rights from research and educational institutions into exploitation through licensing, sale or through a spin-off, the NRW Patent Validation funding competition takes action at two levels. In a first phase, the scientific potential of research and educational institutions is activated for the validation of patents. In a subsequent optional phase, cooperative relationships between science and research are initiated and consolidated in the form of joint projects.
The NRW Patent Validation funding program is managed by the NRW Innovation Promotion Agency. The funding program has a single-stage application procedure.