27 Feb WisBusiness: the Podcast with Jeanine Burmania, WARF
This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Jeanine Burmania, senior director of intellectual property and licensing for WARF.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which handles patenting and licensing for UW-Madison research, is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. Burmania discusses the organization’s efforts to identify “the great innovations” being developed on campus with prospects for commercialization.
WARF’s six-person licensing team assesses the market potential for these new technologies and conducts outreach to companies in hopes of identifying commercial partners to develop the inventions further and bring them to market.
“The work we do really has an impact on providing additional resources for funding research on campus,” Burmania said. “But what also we see is new products that are created because of the work that happens on campus … at any given time, there’s probably hundreds of millions of dollars of products that are sold each year globally that are under WARF license agreements.”
She notes more than 400 licensees around the world are using UW-Madison inventions through agreements with WARF, including about 75 companies in Wisconsin alone.