Faster and smoother spin-offs with fixed key points for spin-offs

Faster and smoother spin-offs with fixed key points for spin-offs

Spin-offs from Charité and BIH, in addition to licensing technologies to industry partners, are a possible way to bring scientific findings into application and benefit many patients. The founders and Charité or BIH negotiate a package of license agreement and participation according to international practice. 

The status quo at most German scientific institutions, however, is still individually designed and thus time-consuming and lengthy negotiations between institutions and founders. This leads to high time, cost, and personal effort for all involved and sometimes to the failure of negotiations. A main reason for this is different ideas about the appropriate participation of the publicly funded scientific institution in possible economic success as well as the different experience horizons of the participants. 

The "Standard Spin-off Terms" now defines fixed key points and thus creates a binding negotiation framework for science-based spin-offs. This represents another milestone in optimizing spin-off processes at Charité and BIH. The Standard Spin-off Terms were formulated to be both founder-friendly and liquidity-saving for spin-offs and their investors. The transparent conditions, applicable to all employees, serve to build trust and fair treatment of all involved, such as inventors, founders, investors, as well as Charité and BIH. At the same time, they ensure that Charité and BIH participate in the value creation of the spin-offs in a market-standard manner. 

The legal basis for the Standard Spin-off Terms is the Employee Inventions Act (Arbeitnehmererfindergesetz), which stipulates that all work results basically belong to the employer, i.e., Charité and BIH.   

In parallel, Standard Spin-off Terms were developed at the national level together with other scientific institutions under the umbrella of the national technology transfer association TransferAllianz (cf. position paper, in German). The agreed spin-off terms are now compatible with internationally tested and recognized models developed jointly by leading scientific institutions and investors. Particularly noteworthy are the recommendations of the US technology transfer association AUTM and the industry-specific USIT guides of TenU¹. 

¹TenU is a consortium of the technology transfer offices of the University of Cambridge, Columbia University, University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London, KU Leuven, University of Manchester, MIT, University of Oxford, Stanford University, and UCL. TenU is funded by Research England and hosted by Cambridge Enterprise.

CBI - central service point for technology transfer at Charité and BIH

Charité BIH Innovation, the joint technology transfer of Charité and BIH, acts as a central service point for the realization of biomedical translation, i.e., the transfer of solutions from clinical practice and research results into products and services through licensing and spin-offs. The focus on utilization is to ensure both the medical benefit for patients and the participation of Charité and BIH in economic success. To accelerate and make utilization processes more transparent, the simplification, harmonization, and standardization of processes and procedures are necessary. Since the beginning of 2024, Charité BIH Innovation has been intensively dedicated to the topics of strategic process optimization at Charité and BIH. Charité BIH Innovation supports founders with various services such as individual advice from our technology managers, at the idea consultation hour, or within the framework of start-up funding advice. Furthermore, we offer various funding opportunities for development projects with the BIH funding programs BIH Digital Health Accelerator and SPARK-BIH.

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