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The Research Data Management team and UCL Business have come together to provide even greater advice and support for researchers wanting to explore the commercial potential of their research outputs.
is the commercialisation arm of UCL, helping bring to market the innovations from across its research base.聽The following offers some guidance on considering whether there is a commercial opportunity for licensing your data.
Commercializing databases involves incorporating the data into a marketable product or service by identifying its value to industry, ensuring data quality, developing a user-friendly interface, and implementing effective marketing and sales strategies. It is important to identify industry needs and gaps in the market to define specific use cases for your data. This initial step helps in positioning your database as a valuable asset and may require conducting market research to determine its relevance and uniqueness, which UCLB can support.
For the data to be offered commercially, you will need to address legal considerations by ensuring clear data ownership, any licences used to generate the data, and compliance with privacy and data protection laws. There may be an expectation for data processing and management which may require validation and cleansing, enriching and securing your data, or to develop products that cater to different user needs such as raw data for advanced users, processed datasets, and insights through analytics tools. Consider whether further work and funding is required to develop comprehensive documentation and customer support to facilitate user adoption and also consider the resources that may be required to maintain the data, documentation and associated customer support over the lifetime of any secured licences.
Giving due consideration to the costs of any such product development, maintenance, marketing and sales efforts (that may include sales literature, industry outreach etc.,) will help define appropriate pricing for your data products, which could be structured as subscription, pay-per-use or flat fee, in order to build a sustainable business model which could eventually provide sufficient funds to develop new Intellectual Property and return additional value.