It takes more than a great idea to develop a commercially viable product. It takes intellectual property (IP) expertise, R&D resources, and effective business models to guide industry acceptance and adoption of new innovations.

At KAUST, we’re especially aware of these needs. Part of our Economic Development mission is to help Saudi businesses grow. The challenge is that many local companies lack internal R&D resources to develop the ideas and innovations they need to be competitive. That’s why at our office of Technology Transfer & Innovation (TTI), we have developed a new approach to commercialize new inventions and technologies.

We find ourselves in need to guide companies through all stages of the technology transfer and licensing processes. We do this in two ways:

Technical Support

To ensure development of products and technologies at KAUST are implemented in Saudi Arabia, we established scale-up laboratories to validate core technologies. The scale-up labs are guided by KAUST professors and inventors who lead the product development. This approach fosters a true lab-to-market partnership. Researchers can realize the commercial benefit of their research outputs, and companies become in a better position to examine scaled-up innovations.

Administrative Support

Transforming an idea into a viable product requires licensing, due diligence steps, and many other administrative tasks. We work closely with local industry to educate them in these aspects, to facilitate and accelerate adoption of technologies.

TTI staff are experienced in global licensing procedures and capable of working with different business models. They can tailor technology commercialization and licensing frameworks to fit the business model a new or existing company needs.

Although we developed our technology transfer approach with the Kingdom in mind, we have found our model to be equally beneficial to companies from around the world.

Unlike other university technology transfer offices, we guide our clients through every step of the due diligence process to achieve early-stage commercialization in the most efficient manner possible. This hands-on style of technology transfer means extra work on our part, but we believe that it’s worth the effort.

By going the extra mile, we are better able to ensure that new knowledge and technology created at KAUST are effectively transferred to achieve the widest public benefit and promote the economic development of the Kingdom.

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