The Commission of Professionals for Research and Innovation (EFI), a body that advises Germany’s Federal Government, highlights in its 2026 annual report that IP transfer constitutes a vital bottleneck in the start-up process. If a start-up’s intellectual property rights are not safeguarded, it does not have the foundation needed for establishing a practical company design and raising external capital. Complex contractual designs and partly diverging expectations between the university and the start-up business owner often result in lengthy settlements. Usually, the transfer of such rights presently takes around 18 months– and in specific cases far longer. In the vibrant global start-up landscape, this represents a significant competitive downside.
As Dr. Ronald Kriedel from the Center for Entrepreneurship and Transfer (CET) at TU Dortmund University underlines: “Basic change will just occur if we pick a method that no longer ventures to lessen or omit all the possible threats related to the transfer of rights but rather acknowledges and promotes the opportunities. The new standard is a genuine breakthrough that will not only assist us to transpose scientific advancements and findings to start-ups more quickly and effectively but likewise contribute to their commercial success.”
Producing legal certainty through lean procedures
Ina Brandes, Minister for Culture and Science, says: “North Rhine-Westphalia’s science and research study landscape offers optimum conditions for spin-offs and start-ups: a density of universities and research institutions unique in Europe and strong industrial partners. I am persuaded that we can leverage this possession even more efficiently. To do so, we need standardized procedures with clear and basic rules that quickly develop legal certainty and are therefore attractive to external financiers.”
With this in mind, the group at TU Dortmund University has actually developed a brand-new requirement for IP transfer. It develops a lean, transparent and at the very same time versatile procedure that is tailored to the specific start-up job. A water tight and clearly structured contract of just a few pages regulates the transfer of IP rights in a start-up’s different development phases. In the future, the whole negotiation procedure should be completed within three months at the majority of. Thanks to safeguarded intellectual property rights, start-ups will become appealing to external financiers faster.
Proven in practice
The brand-new IP transfer basic visibly streamlines and speeds up the entire start-up process. It is an essential component in increasing the number of tech-driven start-ups over the longer term and has already been proven in practice: Simplyfined, a start-up from TU Dortmund University, has actually effectively concluded the new arrangement on the transfer of copyright rights. The young company has filed a patent for an innovative procedure for establishing bio-based raw materials from veggie oils as an option to petroleum for the chemical industry. The raw materials are for that reason more sustainable and more environmentally friendly and will, in the long term, contribute substantially to securing the self-reliance of Germany’s chemical industry.
Dr. Thomas Seidensticker, among Simplyfined’s founders, discusses: “We are grateful that TU Dortmund University has actually embarked on this journey with us to make IP move a lot clearer and more efficient, likewise for future spin-offs from deep-tech start-ups. The people accountable at TU Dortmund University have actually thoroughly revamped the previous procedure, and the outcome is a structure that will benefit us as a start-up.”
In the future, universities and start-ups beyond the City of Dortmund could likewise take advantage of the contractual design developed by the team. At the Ruhr Development Laboratory run collectively by TU Dortmund University and Ruhr University Bochum too, the transfer of copyright rights is extremely important for shifting understanding from the universities into start-ups and in this method also into the economy and society.
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