This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Jeanine Burmania, senior director of intellectual property and licensing for WARF.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which handles patenting and licensing for UW-Madison research, is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. Burmania discusses the organization’s efforts to identify “the great innovations” being developed on campus with prospects for commercialization.
WARF’s six-person licensing team assesses the market potential for these new technologies and conducts outreach to companies in hopes of identifying commercial partners to develop the inventions further and bring them to market.
“The work we do really has an impact on providing additional resources for funding research on campus,” Burmania said. “But what also we see is new products that are created because of the work that happens on campus … at any given time, there’s probably hundreds of millions of dollars of products that are sold each year globally that are under WARF license agreements.”
She notes more than 400 licensees around the world are using UW-Madison inventions through agreements with WARF, including about 75 companies in Wisconsin alone.
“Some of the big companies in the state still look to WARF and UW as a resource for new innovation,” Burmania said.
The conversation highlights the “necessary” role that scientists play in this process, as they help facilitate the transfer of knowledge from the lab bench to industry, as well as the impact of startup companies formed as campus spin-offs.
“When there’s a successful company, then the people from that company then have gone on to do other things, and we’ve seen multiple other startup companies formed … so those are really great examples of the benefits that we see from helping start new companies, and then feed into the ecosystem,” she said.
Burmania also spotlights some of the most promising technologies coming out of the university, ranging from breaking down harmful PFAS chemicals to advanced materials for aviation and much more.
Listen to the podcast below, sponsored by UW-Madison, and check out an earlier podcast with WARF CEO Erik Iverson.
