“We’re a pretty unique program to Wyoming,” says Davona Douglass, director of the Research Products Center (RPC) of the center’s intellectual property and technology transfer services. “We have a service where we provide patent and trademarking searching for anybody in the state of Wyoming. Our goal is to help people get started when they have a great new business plan or invention.”
When it comes to UW, Douglass explains, “We’re involved in every step of technology transfer for the university—from conception of a new invention to protecting the new invention, patenting and then licensing it.
“[Creating] new companies that employ our graduates with high-tech, high-paying jobs located in the state is really our goal in protecting intellectual property here at the university.”
One example is Bright Agrotech, which was started by UW graduate students Nate Storey and Paul Bennick in 2009. “They make vertical hydroponic growing towers,” Douglass says. “We patented them and licensed them back to a company that they formed to develop them. Now they’re offering commercial products.
“Another example would be Firehole Composites. They developed software that originated at the university,” she says of the company that was founded by Jerad Stack, then a graduate student but later the CEO, along with Professor Andrew Hansen and other graduate students in 2000. The company grew and was sold to Autodesk Inc. in 2013.
