Commercializing university research outcomes: A Sri Lankan experience

Sri Lankan government has taken a policy decision to develop the country as a knowledge hub in Asia. Universities have a pivotal role in realizing this goal and they have the responsibility to contribute new knowledge, through innovation and research, towards the economic development. Research culture in the Sri Lankan universities is gradually developing and there have been several research projects that resulted in commercializable innovative outcomes. However, commercialization is a challenging task due to several reasons and only a few significant outcomes of the university research have been successfully commercialized. Commercialization challenges are an integral part of the universities and research institutes and they are looking for pragmatic solutions. In developed and industrialized countries, it is now widely accepted that the research outcomes of universities plays an important role in the economic development and it is quite common for the industry to work in collaboration with the universities to innovate and find solutions to their problems. However, this is not the case in Sri Lanka and due to this there is a large gap between the university research outcomes and industry expectations. In this paper, as a case study, we present our experience in taking the outcome of a university research project and adapting it to solve a problem faced by two entities responsible for handling maritime traffic in Sri Lanka. We have productized the research outcome to a large extent and deployed it to handle a real world problem. While we cannot claim that it is fully commercialized yet, we have bridged the gap between the expectations of the real world users and the researchers at the university. Also, in this paper we explore how other countries have handled the problem of commercializing research projects as well as the Sri Lankan effort in this regard.