Technology Transfer: CORDIS Helps Aerospatiale Matra Airbus
Date: 30.10.2000

For Europe technology transfer is a means to accelerate innovation. For high tech companies, like Aerospatiale Matra Airbus, it can be a valuable source of development capital.

To handle this, the intellectual property department of the company is involved not only with patenting, but also with licensing the technologies developed by Aerospatiale Matra Airbus. It has all the necessary legal skills for this work in-house, and some time ago, it accepted the offer of the Regional Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Midi-Pyrénées to try its technology brokerage service as part of the network of over 50 Innovation Relay Centres (IRC) across Europe, financed by the European Commission.

"As part of the IRC Network we could disseminate the selected offers rapidly across the whole of Europe", says Jean-Philippe Mounier, who developed the co-operation with Aerospatiale Matra Airbus. He published the offers on CORDIS (Community Research and Development Information Service), which acts as the EU's innovation portal and promotes the exploitation of European R&D; results. He also used the IRCs Intranet on the CORDIS site, the Opto-laser Europe magazine and a few other professional channels. Then he spent almost two weeks sifting the high level of responses and interviewing more than 20 companies, in order to gauge their level of interest and their capacity to reach an agreement.

After negotiations with Aerospatiale Matra Airbus, a collaboration agreement was signed with a Belgian SME for a laser technology, which guarantees an accurate positioning of the laser beam for cutting metal sheets of large dimension. The contact provides one year preliminary use of the technology by the Belgian company. It expires at the end of this year and will hopefully result in a patent license agreement.

Recounting this experience, Mr Mounier and his successor Alain Blasius mention that it was not necessary to take the usual step of involving another organisation from the IRC network to succeed with this business contact. The Belgian company found the offer through the CORDIS website alone, identified its business potential and sent a message of interest. If its current partnership with Aerospatiale Matra Airbus survives the test, it will be a demonstration of how CORDIS can help both small and big companies across national frontiers and industrial sectors to do business together.

"In the past, we have worked with a small group of licensees - mainly suppliers", says Jean-Marc Brunel of Intellectual Property department of Aerospatiale Matra Airbus. "CORDIS and the IRC give us access to a much wider group, and not only in the aeronautic sector. That serves to strengthen our European supply base, as well as increasing the return on our investment in R&D.;"

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