FluidityIQ
Get to know Jeff Roy, CEO & Co-Founder of FluidityIQ.
Can you share a little about your company’s mission and what drives your work?
FluidityIQ helps innovators to innovate faster. We believe that true innovation drives economic growth, and we want to be at the forefront of innovation. We use industry-leading technology and data solutions to quickly expose the state of technology in any given field while providing user specific contextual insight. Our unique Private Innovation Libraries® enable development of a secure, interactive corpus of knowledge that can be leveraged to evaluate a technology, a market, or a specific company.
What motivated you to start, or join, your company?
We founded FluidityIQ to help innovators overcome two very real issues in the industry. First, the larger players in the intellectual property market tend to operate “transactionally”. So, they offer products and services that are priced on a “per search” basis, for example. This results in higher costs. The problem is, research institutions and innovative companies innovate every day, not transactionally. Secondly, innovative institutions and companies only research a fraction of the work that comes out of the research or R&D efforts to control costs. We wanted to accelerate invention by making it easier and more cost-effective for institutions to review a larger share of their research. We also ensure that research persists, making it reusable and easier to build upon.
What problem does your company aim to solve, and why does that matter to you personally?
Innovative companies and independent inventors often do not protect enough of their great ideas because of cost or an inability to access professional tools. We want to make sure that both large and small companies, as well as research institutions, all have a level playing field when driving new ideas into the market. Personally, as an independent inventor earlier in my career, I developed a number of products and did not protect those innovations because of the legal costs, time to patent, or a general lack of understanding of the process. While we serve large corporations, we also provide educational materials and accessible solutions to small businesses, educational organizations, and independent inventors to ensure they can protect their innovative concepts just like the big guys.
What recent project, or partnership, are you most proud of?
We recently rolled out a series of market-leading deep research agents that make the investigative process entirely conversational. Users can now conduct rich novelty, market, and competitive assessments of their innovation in minutes at the push of a button. This compares to the typical two to three weeks and thousands of dollars it usually takes to conduct a similar search using traditional methods. This allows teams to review more of their work faster, improve the quality of patent filings, and lowers legal costs significantly.
Can you share an example of how your product or service has made a tangible difference for a client or partner?
We love our relationship with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which you can read about here. This tremendously innovative organization has to process invention disclosures from wide array of scientific disciplines. They leverage FluidityIQ to significantly reduce the time to evaluate these disclosures, find potential licensing partners, and to generally get an understanding of the state of the art within their research areas. We save them time and money.
What trends or challenges in technology transfer are you most focused on addressing right now?
We see tighter budgets and faster moving technologies combining to force technology transfer professionals to do more with less. Our innovative application of deep research agents and industry-leading research tools enable tech transfer teams to do just that. We simplify evaluation, make it easy to understand trends in real-time. and provide tools that can simplify the development of an effective IP strategy.
How do you see your company contributing to the growth or transformation of the innovation ecosystem?
We don’t see the pace of innovation slowing down any time soon. We think it’s important to bring a new generation of tools and data to the innovation market to enable more teams to innovate faster. That means intelligently applying AI to the research process while ensuring appropriate guardrails are in place to overcome the weaknesses inherent in the off-the-shelf tools that have rapidly been introduced to the market. We see the future of innovation being centered on the appropriate and ethical use of these tools and we continue to work with firms of all sizes to make sure that the right educational material, data, and applications are available to match their specific needs.
What do you wish the AUTM Community knew about your organization?
We would like the AUTM Community to know that we are a company founded by innovators and inventors with decades of experience in the information industry. Our goal is to reduce the friction inherent in developing new technology, protecting that technology and bringing it to market. We offer flexible engagement and licensing models to match any budget.
What is one fun fact people might not know about your company?
We are basically a collection of data nerds. Our name comes from the fact that we believe information behaves like a “liquid” when it flows through any system to build intelligence. Hence, the origin of the name FluidityIQ.
What excites you most about the future of the technology transfer field?
We expect there to be much higher level of collaboration between research institutions and their commercial partners in the future. We think technology transfer professionals sit at the intersection of that collaboration across a multitude of fast-moving and fascinating technologies, including quantum computing, advanced climate technologies, and autonomous systems. We love the idea of helping them advance technology in these areas.
How can people connect with your organization or learn more about your work?
The easiest way to connect with FluidityIQ or learn more about our vision and solutions is by visiting our website at www.fluidityiq.com or connecting with us via LinkedIn here. You can also email us at info@fluidityiq.com to engage directly with a person.