STIK | Sweden

The International Federation of Inventors Association (IFIA) is an international association with the objective of being a forum for exchanging ideas and collaborations between national inventors associations.

IFIA aims to develop a centralized web-based platform for technological exchange of information. This new platform titled Technology Transfer Center (TTC) will serve as a means for exchanging information between all member associations within IFIA, why the international perspective is vital.

The primary goal of the TTC is to provide channels for inventors to quickly and easily reach out with their inventions/ideas and more efficiently find manufacturers and funding, both regionally and internationally. A coordinator for each member country will be locally responsible for finding the appropriate contacts when an inventors request is received from the TTC central board.

Since the TTC will manage large amounts of information, it is of great importance that the system relies on both simplicity and logic structure. Within the platform information must be easily identified, edited, added and removed. This will be achieved through advanced search functions, classification of information in different categories, and the use of keywords (so-called “tags” or “keywords”).

A local inventor has contacted his or her national association with a request to be processed. The coordinator reviews the request and considers it sufficiently interesting to submit. The coordinator logs in to the TTC. Once logged in, the coordinator is able to enter new requests. The coordinator fills in a number of predefined fields with information on the new request, clicking “Add” for submitting. The request is now immediately added into the system. The TTC central coordinators will instantly be notified of the new request received. The central coordinator will evaluate the request and approve it. Once approved the request becomes visible to all member state coordinators logged in to the TTC. The request in question will be visible both as a searchable topic and will also top the list of “active requests”.

In the request, the national coordinator has entered what is inquired (manufacturer, license partners, investments etc.). All coordinators connected to the TTC will see this information and have the opportunity to respond directly through the system. The result in this case will be a number of responses with various proposals on stakeholders. The local coordinator will be automatically informed through e-mail each time there is a response to a request. The coordinator selects the appropriate responses and then submits the marked request as “closed”.

It is not possible to further respond to a closed request. However, the closed request will remain archived in the system for future reference and statistics.

The following list is simply a proposal on the targeted functionality. The list needs to be both supplemented and made more comprehensive and detailed. The primary purpose of the list below is to serve as the basis for further discussion between gluteus and IFIA.

• Personal login for all the national co-ordinators.
• Possibility for coordinators to add new requests in the system
• Possibility for co-ordinators to respond to active requests.
• Possibility to search for requests and co-ordinators.
• Ability to list all active requests and sort them by country of origin or type of information requested.
• Possibility for administrators to through the TTC add, delete and edit requests and coordinators.
• Primary language: English. Support for multilingualism is not a problem.