News & Comment

Technology-transfer activities have surged since the 1980s, but only few inventions are bound to become a commercial success. Academic patenting requires professional strategies and should be motivated by goals beyond licensing revenue.

Tony Hickson, Managing Director of Technology Transfer at Imperial Innovations, talked to Nature Materials about their efforts in stimulating academics at Imperial College London to disclose their inventions, and about trends in the patent system and the challenges of patenting early-stage technology.

Seven years after isolation of the first graphene sheets, an analysis of the densely populated patent landscape around the two-dimensional material reveals striking differences between universities' patenting activities and illustrates the challenges of a fast-moving technology space.

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded for the discovery of quasicrystals recognizes a breakthrough that has fundamental scientific consequences.

Combining the efforts of physicists, materials scientists, economists and resource-strategy researchers opens up an interdisciplinary route enabling the substitution of rare elements by more abundant ones, serving as a guideline for the development of novel materials.