Every year millions… No, make that billions… Of our country’s tax dollars and philanthropic funds are funneled into university scientific research labs to facilitate revolutionary – even world saving – studies. But what happens to the all that research? Where do all these world saving discoveries end up?
According to three British PhD students, “95 to 99%” of these wonders sit on laboratory shelves collecting dust; so in an effort to sort of clean off these shelves, the three students, Daniel Perez (Oxford), Mehmet Fidanboylu (King’s College London) and Gabriel Meckenburg (Imperial College) founded Marblar, a gamified startup designed to crowdsource innovative intellectual property (IP) ideas.
Serving as the venture’s newly minted CEO, Perez told the website ARS Technica, “As outsiders to tech transfer we found it odd that the process was so closed and parochial. There are simply too few voices in the conversation, and as a result incredible science gets left behind.”
What the three created is a platform where scientists can post their research as a “challenge” to the Marblar community. Members, who are called Marblars, can review the information and propose novel ways to employ the new technologies. Marblars can even expand upon other community members thoughts and suggestions, in effect creating an online forum where discussions build upon one another. In the end, Marblars whose ideas are selected are awarded badges or Marbles. They are even eligible to receive cash or partial equity in any company that is birthed out of their idea.
The team at Marblar has already realized stunning success by netting a $600,000 investment from British venture capital firm IP Group, as well as a successful beta run that crowdsourced University of Southampton Professor Tom Brown’s research that dealt with DNA Click Ligation. “We put it online and got some really neat responses so that the sponsors of the competition may well have two new start-up ideas around the tech,” said the team.
Currently the team at Marblar and IP Group are in discussions with the first place “beta” winner Luke Edeimann, a Cambridge student, about funding a company based upon his online suggestion which pairs Prof Brown’s research with DNA drug screenings. Even the second place winner’s suggestion was innovative enough to garner interest in funding another company… and could provide another college student with some important text book money.
As the game mechanics of Marblar get off the ground, the real winners will probably not come within the ranks of it’s badge winners. In the end, it may be society at large and the world’s Nutty Professors that realize the true benefits associated with introducing what would have ended up as dormant intellectual property to a game hungry crowd. The marbles produced by this platform have the potential to dust off the cluttered IP shelves inside many scientific research labs.
