From patent to market

Romania produces inventions. The delegations that attend international fairs return, year after year, with medals, and some of the awarded solutions address real engineering problems. What happens more rarely is the next step: moving the invention from a technically validated solution to a product that is manufactured and sold.

The distance between those two moments is not a problem of creativity. It is a problem of infrastructure — legal, financial and institutional. We have identified four obstacles that recur constantly in our work.

Who owns the invention

Law no. 83/2014 clarified the framework for establishing who owns an invention made by an employee. Its application, however, remains uneven, particularly in research institutes and universities, where internal regulations are sometimes older than the law or missing altogether.

The consequence is predictable. An inventor who does not know whether the invention belongs to them postpones filing the patent application. A company that might license the solution avoids the negotiation, because it cannot establish who it would be negotiating with. Ambiguity over ownership does not block the invention — it blocks the contract.

A framework regulation on employee inventions, made available to universities and research institutes as a model, with standard clauses on ownership, the inventor’s share and the internal notification procedure, would remove most of this ambiguity without any legislative change.

The cost of protection, not the cost of research

Public debate on innovation funding focuses almost exclusively on research. The stage that remains uncovered is the one between a validated solution and a patent with commercially useful coverage.

A national patent is affordable. Extending protection to the markets where the product would actually be sold means translations, professional representation and maintenance fees spread over years — at a moment when the invention generates no revenue at all. For an individual inventor or a micro-enterprise, this is an expense with no matching cash flow.

The result is adverse selection: what survives is not the best inventions, but those whose authors can afford protection. And an invention that is not protected outside Romania cannot be licensed outside Romania.

What is needed is a support instrument dedicated exclusively to the costs of industrial property protection — fees, translations, representation — for individual inventors and small enterprises, separate from the funding of research activity.

The inventor is not a licensing negotiator

An engineer who has solved a technical problem does not naturally possess the skills required to assess that solution commercially, to draft a confidentiality agreement or to structure a royalty licence. Nor should they. These are distinct professions.

Wherever technology transfer works, there is an intermediate professional layer between the inventor and the market: technology transfer offices, industrial property attorneys, technology valuers. In Romania this layer exists, but it is undersized and geographically concentrated, and for someone outside academia it is not even visible.

A public register of these services, organised by region and technical field, would solve half the problem. The other half is a matter of training: inventors need a practical module on the commercial assessment of a solution and on licence negotiation.

Industrial demand does not meet technical supply

The situation we encounter most often is not that of an invention rejected by industry. It is that of an invention industry has never seen.

There is no mechanism through which a company facing a technical problem might learn that the solution has already been patented by someone a few hundred kilometres away. Invention fairs partly perform this function, but they are one-off events, and their audience consists mainly of inventors rather than technical directors.

A permanent brokerage mechanism, built on patent publications and organised by industrial sector, with sectoral employers’ associations involved in formulating demand, would close this gap.

The four obstacles have one thing in common. None of them concerns the quality of Romanian inventions, and none of them is solved by additional research funding. All of them concern what happens after the technical solution exists.

We hold that public innovation policy must give this stage the same attention it gives research. An invention left unexploited is not a partial success but a complete loss — of the investment that produced it and of the value it would have generated.