When UNC Charlotte’s Director of Licensing and Operations Brad Fach found Tradespace, his office was facing a three-year backlog of technologies. Says Brad, “They were in our system, but we didn’t quite know what they were and didn’t have a way to rank them against each other.”
His original plan? Budget 12 months of staff time to process and post them.
With Tradespace, the office cleared the three-year backlog in “just a few weeks.” Within a few months, Brad’s team had posted 100 technologies — “a huge win for our office.”
The technology and domain knowledge behind Tradespace’s efficiency and insight
Tradespace lets technology transfer offices and IP teams process assets quickly and meaningfully through a combination of AI and IP acumen. Says Brad, “When we first onboarded, I was surprised to see all our patents — even ones I didn’t know we had — already imported and categorized in the system. Tradespace has real domain expertise in helping us manage our IP portfolio.”
Tradespace’s IP intelligence became especially clear in its search capabilities. “With our prior systems, we’d keyword search for ‘energy,’ ‘grid,’ or ‘wind.’ If the keyword wasn’t in the title, we wouldn’t find the technology. With Tradespace, we can search by category and identify technologies and patents that don’t fit the keywords but match the sector we’re interested in. When applying for a clean energy grant, it was really helpful to see all those technology groupings.”
Making industry intros for new inventions in minutes, not days — and strengthening grant applications
For commercialization, Tradespace’s automatic analysis cuts intake to outreach from “hours or days” to “a matter of minutes.” “Before, it took us hours — maybe days — to research a technology, figure out its advantages, identify interested companies, and find email addresses. Now we can do all that quickly and reach out to several companies at once.”
UNCC faculty have noticed the difference too. “Our faculty appreciate the quick introductions we can now make. It shows we’re working on their behalf. Some have even started using our Tradespace research in their grant applications. Newer grants require a commercial story — something faculty don’t usually think about. Now they can pull in competitive advantages and commercial partner data from Tradespace.”
Building relationships and saving money while keeping sensitive data private
As universities face federal funding pressures and expectations to do more with less, Brad sees clear value in tools like Tradespace. “It handles the mundane tasks that might have required two or three administrative assistants before. That makes our office more efficient and less financially burdensome to the university. With the time saved, we can network more, meet industry partners, connect with researchers and students, and build those personal relationships.”
For TTOs evaluating AI solutions, Brad stresses testing and comparison. For his office, data protection was the deciding factor: “What we liked most about Tradespace was how safe and comfortable we felt with how the system is set up to protect your data — it’s not shared with other systems or used to train models. That was essential to getting over the hurdle of university approval.”
Tradespace: “Totally worth it” for helping TTOs do more with less
For small offices where everyone does “a little bit of everything,” Brad’s endorsement of Tradespace is straightforward: “We’re all struggling with staffing shortages and managing more inventions, patents, and agreements than we have people to handle. An AI tool that can really help with that has been instrumental for our office and totally worth it.”
Quantitative wins
- 3 year backlog cleared in weeks
- 100 technologies posted in months
- 12 months of staff time saved
