The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), UK, has teamed up with an Oxford University spin-out to sponsor six challenges on Marblar - a radical new online platform for finding applications for unused scientific discoveries.
It is observed that over 95 percent of technologies developed in universities never make it to market, leaving publicly or philanthropy-funded research collecting dust on the shelf. Often, given that academic research can be so ahead of its time, the commercial relevance of these technologies isn't immediately obvious.
Marblar aims to remove this bottleneck by crowdsourcing ideas for real-world applications from the global science and technology community, with the ultimate goal to create new products and new companies that will drive job creation around these innovative discoveries.
Marblar was founded by four PhD student entrepreneurs from Oxford University, Kings College London and Imperial College London. They have developed an innovative idea to gamify the traditional technology transfer process by posting interesting science in the form of challenges and asking 'Marblars' (users) to find clever new directions for these technologies. Marblars are rewarded with online points, badges and cash prizes, as well as the possibility to join any fledgling start-ups that might arise from their ideas.
The RSC has selected six promising technologies that have been published in RSC journals and is sponsoring a Marblar challenge for each one. Two of these challenges have already launched and they will be open for ideas from the community for the next three weeks. Users will be able to vote on the most promising ideas and the RSC will award cash prizes of £700 to each of the winning proposals, as well as £200 for each of the crowd favourites.
