A funding system for assisting with marketing faculty inventions and technology, called the LSU Leveraging Innovation for Technology Transfer, or LIFT, was approved by the Board of Supervisors Friday.
The LSU LIFT fund would award grants of amounts up to $50,000 twice a year to faculty members to help with applied research and with getting new innovations ready to be marketed, said Nicole Honoree, LSU System director of research and economic development initiatives.
The fund will be sustained permanently by allocating 5 percent of the University’s future intellectual property licensing income directly to the new fund and the first grants are expected to be awarded July 1, according to a University release.
According to the release, applicants to the fund would have to present their projects to a committee.
Research funding usually comes in much larger sums for beginning new research, but the LIFT fund is designed to provide enough money to develop already existing ideas to a profitable level, Honoree said.
For Chandra Theegala, biological and agricultural engineering associate professor, the funding this program provides would give him the ability to build a permanent structure to house his recent invention, which currently sits on a trailer.
Theegala said funding for the type of research that goes on after an idea is developed is hard to come by, citing difficulty getting the funding to test one of his other inventions, a water skimmer that separates crude oil from saltwater.
Theegala said he thought the program would be effective and would help with some of the problems he experienced when he developed his skimmer because he could not get funding to develop it further, despite its multiple uses in the oil industry.
“The LSU LIFT Fund will provide our excellent faculty with a new means of advancing their innovative research towards the market,” said J. Stephen Perry, member of the LSU Board of Supervisors.
Civil and environmental engineering professor Ronald Malone said when he developed his water treatment technology he was originally rejected by the University.
“When I was developing my technology, we literally had to go to the bank and borrow the money to get the patent,” Malone said.
Malone said LSU LIFT looks like a promising program for young professors and those that have new ideas they want to pursue.
Malone said that while $50,000 doesn’t appear to be much money, it can go a long way toward getting an invention on the market.