Help CenterIt is crucial to provide an attractive and up-to-date description of your technology to increase your chances of getting the attention of potential partners.
Here are a few pieces of advice to improve your technology description for IP-based technologies, spinouts, facilities, and R&D services.
IP-Based Technologies
Keep the title short
The ideal title length should be short to quickly engage the audience. For life sciences, based on our research, titles containing between 4-10 words are the most efficient. We've published a full article with more insights on this here.
Provide as much information as possible (but remain concise):
We recommend completing all sections of the page (e.g., patents, tick boxes, further details), the most important one being the “Stage of development”.
Your page should contain:
-
An impactful description of your technology. See Communicating science to industry: How to write an effective technology disclosure.
-
A background explanation: how does this technology fit into the current market?
-
The stage of development: current TRL (Technology Readiness Level), description of what they envision the next steps to be, and more detail on what they would need to achieve those. See Technology Readiness Levels – What are they and why are they important?
-
If there is no patent, is it know-how? Trademarked?
-
The benefits and applications of your technology.
-
Further details section, with any papers or articles that could expand on the information given on the page.
-
The kind of collaboration opportunity you are looking for and what it would look like.
-
The kind of engagement you are after. Is it feedback on the next steps or introductions? Make sure you talk to your Account Manager to let them know which technologies you consider your "star technologies".
Convey clear and impactful information
Technologies are sometimes reviewed by technology scouts, with superficial knowledge of the science.
Here are a few recommendations to fit this audience:
-
Don’t use tradenames or company names unless they’re explained.
-
Make sure your description isn’t too technical and doesn’t use too much jargon.
-
Keep the description to something that could fit into 1 page. A too-long copy might dilute the impact of the description and put off a busy audience; conversely, a too-short description might lack enough content to grab the audience’s attention.
-
Inform the audience in which industry and what applications your research fits into, as some technology scouts search technologies that way.
Use keywords
To make sure we can provide accurate matching of your research, our algorithm utilises many elements in the text. This includes the keywords you’ll find at the bottom of your technology description and things such as where the terms are used. Because of this, we advise ensuring your technology summary contains the key information within its title and summary, followed by essential terminology throughout as each word is weighted according to its position on the page during searches. This includes common acronyms and synonyms somewhere in the description where possible so that we cast the search net wider.
We recommend including specific words and their synonyms, if possible.
Facilities and R&D Services
Using bullet points and short paragraphs works better for these types of opportunities. We recommend the technology summary to:
-
Explain how companies can work with your facilities to generate IP.
-
For TTO specifically, outline when they would come in, at what point, and how they can help develop IP.
-
Highlight the facility’s benefits, and why is it better than others (e.g., that a specific microscope can give them more information). But avoid a long list of features.
-
Provide a list of next steps; expand on which steps the facility can help with.
-
Give examples of where these facilities or services have been used in previous situations to create patented products.
-
List the types of people that these facilities or services would be useful to (on suggested companies, so our team can do better-targeted scouting!).
-
Outline how your university or lab can provide support: what steps they can help with to improve the IP stage and other services they can offer.
You can find more advice on publishing facilities in the toolkit here. You can also get inspired by this example of an impactful technology description.
How to Best Keep Your Technology Description Up to Date
We regularly review technologies that have undergone important description updates to promote them again on Connect. This includes promoting the updated technology to the top of the opportunity search page with a blue tag indicating the recent update. The technology can also be recommended again to industry users.
To update your technology page and have it promoted again, we recommend to:
-
Explain the TRL (Technology Readiness Level), even if it’s just to include what are hopefully the next steps to be, and what you need to achieve that. Is it ongoing? What are the roadblocks? Is it currently stopped because you require more funding?
-
Add the links to any newly published articles.
-
Incorporate the patent updates: Were new territories or new stages added?
-
If the technology needs a big update, consider rewriting the description with a different angle (e.g., focusing on an application instead of listing many possibilities).
-
Use feedback received from companies who reviewed your technology to improve the technology description.