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GATHERING dust on the shelves of companies across the globe lie hundreds of
thousands of inventions, often spin-offs from other R&D, chance discoveries
or simply ideas whose time had not yet come. Also out there somewhere are
companies who could put many of those inventions to good use. Now an
Internet-based service—backed by some heavyweight industrial
muscle—wants to bring the two together in what aims to be a clearing house
of new technology.

Last month, 30 of America’s biggest manufacturing companies—including
Boeing, Ford, Polaroid, Dow Chemical and Procter & Gamble—helped
launch the new service, called Yet2.com, by putting many of their licensable
technologies onto the site. This week the R&D divisions of six major
European companies—British Telecom, Philips, Shell, Porsche, Siemens and
BASF—joined them. “Right now, 80 per cent of the inventions developed by
corporations worldwide are unused and unexploited,” says chief executive Chris
De Bleser, who co-founded Yet2.com with Ben DuPont, a former technology
licensing executive with his family business, the DuPont chemicals company.

But the new service stresses that the site is not the preserve of corporate
giants. Individuals and small businesses will also be able to seek out
inventions they need or raise their own profile by offering technologies to
others. “If a Ford engineer likes the technology on offer and asks to meet a
lone inventor, that inventor then has as high a profile as anyone at, say,
General Motors,” says John Osbourne, Yet2.com’s chief technologist.

Licensing and acquiring technology is a lengthy process in which companies
and inventors negotiate via “technology transfer” agents. “It can take between
18 months and 2 years to close a deal—with the first year spent simply
finding the appropriate technology,” says De Bleser. Yet2.com aims to reduce the
process of finding or offering new technology to “a matter of days” and in the
month since its launch has added around 1000 inventions to its database.

To speed the matching of buyers and sellers, Osbourne and his colleagues in
Lake Tahoe, California, have developed search engine software that helps users
browse through standardised descriptions of inventions that are put up for
licensing. It is based on a neural network that “learns” how searchers are
making links between seemingly disparate fields of technology—polymers,
for example, might interest both the toy and automotive sectors.

Yet2.com will provide for free a basic functional description of each listed
technology, without revealing how it works. To get a more detailed three-page
description costs $25. If inventor and buyer meet to discuss a licence,
Yet2.com charges $1000. If a deal is struck, Yet2.com charges a 10 per
cent fee, capped at $50 000.

Martin Sandford of the technology transfer agency BTG agrees that a lot of
technology lies uncommercialised, but says that tech transfer is slow for a
reason: people have to “really understand” the technologies in question. “So I’m
not sure a new website will move things along that much,” he says.

However, Trevor Hunter, president of Britain’s Licensing Executives Society,
says of the site: “Anything that promotes technology transfer is a good thing,
but people will have to be careful not to give away their patent rights.”