First and foremost, implementation should be viewed as a process composed of multiple stages. This process begins when, as a result of research activities, some of the obtained findings show potential for implementation — in other words, they may have commercial applications.
If determined that an invention has implementation potential, the next step is securing intellectual property rights. At universities, this is most often done by filing for protection with the Polish Patent Office. Inventions submitted by universities are typically filed at a very early stage of technological development due to the primary focus of academic staff — publishing research results. It’s important to note that only innovations that have not been publicly disclosed retain economic value. Once research results are published, they enter the public domain and anyone may use them, though the original authorship is still acknowledged. Filing for patent protection allows the intellectual property rights of a given innovation to be secured. Once this is done, research findings can be published in scientific journals and presented at conferences without fear of losing intellectual property rights.
Because patent applications are filed at an early stage in the innovation’s development, the subsequent steps may seem to take longer when commercialization is carried out through the university. Patent-protected technologies require further research and validation to raise their Technology Readiness Level (TRL). At universities, only a small portion of available funding — such as incubator programs — can be used to finance prototype development and validation. Yet these steps are crucial for demonstrating a technology’s utility in its intended application.
When it comes to carrying out initial pre-implementation work — i.e., adapting the technology to potential end users or confirming its effectiveness in laboratory settings — past experience shows that this phase alone can take a minimum of 1.5 to 3 years. Of course, the timeframe depends on the type of technology being implemented. The following implementation stages will also vary in duration depending on how long it takes for a technology to reach the market. For example, the time needed to implement a software solution is significantly shorter than for medical devices or pharmaceuticals, which require clinical trials — an undertaking that demands not only substantial financial investment but also considerable time.
The implementation of medical technologies is always linked with a long timeframe from the initial development of the technology to its introduction to the medical services market.