Until Blue Water Satellite, Inc., came along, “nobody had ever sold satellite monitoring of a reservoir to anybody,” says Robert K. Vincent, professor of geology at Bowling Green (OH) State University and co-founder of OhioView, a remote sensing consortium of the state’s 10 largest public research universities. Six months after operations began, though, initial customers had bought into Blue Water enough that the BGSU spinoff could make its first royalty payment to the university. The payment was just $213, but “there will be more, and they will be bigger,” predicts Deanne Snavely, interim vice provost for research and dean of BGSU’s Graduate College. Blue Water is the first spinoff to commercialize IP developed at BGSU — specifically, a patented algorithm developed by Vincent to detect the presence and location of cyanobacteria in drinking water reservoirs. Blooms of the blue-green algae, which present human health risks, are mapped on images from the LANDSAT satellite and targeted for treatment. The patent supporting the technology was awarded in November 2006 to BGSU, which granted an exclusive license to Vincent’s fledgling company. Working through the licensing process took about 18 months, since “every agreement had to be done for the first time,” Snavely says. In the meantime, Blue Water received a $50,000 grant from the Toledo-based Regional Growth Partnership to analyze the company’s potential. Funded through the Ohio Department of Development, the grant was critical to attract investors to the company. “Blue Water wouldn’t have come out of the chute” without RGP and its finance arm, Rocket Ventures, Vincent says.<\/p>\n
Blue Water is Rocket Ventures’ “first university-derived startup client company in northwest Ohio to make royalty payments to its parent university based on real earnings from a bona fide paying customer,” according to Greg Knudson, director of Rocket Ventures. A percentage of the university’s royalties goes to the inventors, and the balance goes into the BGSU research budget. The company has fewer than 10 clients, but several are repeat customers, Vincent says. And with some 150 drinking water reservoirs in Ohio, more than 11,000 nationwide, and more overseas — plus recreational lakes that could use the technology — a worldwide market is possible. “I think it has Google-type potential,” says Vincent, who has already turned down one prospective Blue Water buyer.<\/p>\n