In 2023, the Innovation Agency of the State University of Campinas (Inova Unicamp) completes 20 years of continuous action in the protection of intellectual property, technology transfer, partnerships with the business sector and promotion of technological entrepreneurship.
Created before the Brazilian Technological Innovation Law, which institutionalized the Technological Innovation Centers (NIT) of Scientific, Technological and Innovation Institutions (ICT), and being one of the pioneers among Brazilian universities, Inova Unicamp reaches two decades of existence with achievements that demonstrate the positive impact of the Agency on the growth of innovation and entrepreneurship actions at Unicamp, as its executive director and professor Ana Frattini explains:
“Although Unicamp was already born as a university at the forefront of innovation and with important social returns generated by its technologies, the strategic vision of having a body focused on acting exclusively on these fronts was very positive. To give you an idea in numbers, Inova doubled the number of technology licensing in the first year”, analyzes Frattini.
Between 1995 and 2002, the period in which Inova was structured as a body, five technologies were transferred to the business sector. With the Agency consolidated in 2003, in just its first year of operation, Inova doubled the number of licensing contracts carried out in the previous seven years, reaching 10 transferred technologies.
From its creation to data from the Inova Unicamp Annual Report 2021 (the 2022 Report will soon be released), Inova reached 298 signed technology transfer contracts, of which 197 are active, with an economic return of almost R$2 million for the inventors of these technologies, their units of origin and the University.
Strong in the culture of intellectual property protection, Inova Unicamp also presents significant data in this field: from 2004 to 2021, the Agency has already analyzedu 1.587 communications of inventions coming from its teachers, researchers and students, in addition to making it possible to deposit 1.093 patents with the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) in the same period, which represents 85,6% of Unicamp's portfolio, which today totals 1.276 patents.
Regarding its entrepreneurial trajectory, Unicamp has more reasons to celebrate, as recalled by professor Renato Lopes, associate director of Inova. With its programs to encourage entrepreneurship, such as Unicamp Challenge, that models businesses based on Unicamp technologies, and its Technology-Based Business Incubator, Unicamp has 62 academic spin-offs in its portfolio, as companies that were created to enable a business based on the results of research or knowledge developed at the University are called, whether these technologies or knowledge are protected or not.
Since 2006, the Agency has also carried out annual mapping of Unicamp's daughter companies, having increased the number of companies registered in its database by 895% since then, going from 130 to 1.293 registered companies. Of these, 1.061 are active on the market and generated 44.624 direct jobs, totaling annual revenue of R$19,3 billion in 2022.
“One of the most interesting facts about Unicamp’s impact on the entrepreneurial agenda, as a state university in São Paulo, is to observe that, of these daughter companies, 91,6% have their headquarters in the state of São Paulo. In other words, the return in income and jobs is mostly in the state, especially around Unicamp; 59,4% of them are in the Metropolitan Region of Campinas (RMC) and in the Metropolitan Region of Piracicaba (RMP), where we have the Piracicaba and Limeira campuses”, calculates Lopes.
The last Unicamp daughter companies report, published by Inova in 2022, also highlighted that 19% of daughter companies maintain collaborative Research and Development (R&D) agreements with the University.
Commemorative stamp
In view of these and other achievements, such as Unicamp occupying the first place among Entrepreneurial Universities of Brazil, Inova has just launched a commemorative stamp that will be used alongside its brand to celebrate the Agency's 20th anniversary.
The commemorative seal is related to the original conception of the Inova brand and the trajectory of innovation. The Inova Unicamp brand was designed to express the Agency's fluidity and perception of dynamism, which, regardless of the origin of demand, works internally in an integrated way to promote innovation, as explained by Kátia Kishi, communications supervisor at Inova Unicamp:
“In addition to the Inova typography, used in the 20th anniversary design, we know that innovating is never a linear and unique path. It is a journey with stages until our technologies reach society. This same journey of curves, but without breaks, was followed by Inova to reach the maturity we have today and is represented in the seal”, comments Kishi.
Regarding the continuous outline of the 20-year design, Frattini also adds that: "Inova's processes have been perfected over these 20 years, but without breaking the Agency's initial mission of promoting innovation and technological entrepreneurship at Unicamp.”
The Inova Unicamp seal in English and Portuguese is now available for use in Inova Unicamp library.
To learn more about the history of Inova and the commemorative stamp, Watch the video.
