US Department of Energy Online Laboratory Partnering Service

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has released a new Lab Partnering Service that allows review of patents for licensing from 17 national DOE laboratories.  The Lab Partnering Service website states:

The Laboratory Partnering Service ("LPS") is a suite of online applications enabling access to leading experts, projects, and patents from across the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the national laboratories. It delivers a host of information to provide access to a portfolio of investment opportunities. The LPS enables rapid discovery of expertise and serves as a conduit between the investor and the innovator by providing multi-faceted search capability across numerous technology areas and across the national laboratories.

• Expert Search

The Expert Search provides customers a direct conduit to experts from the DOE’s national laboratories. This categorized list is a selection of lab-identified leading experts across several "hot" technology areas with ability to further refine the list of the experts by sub-specialty.

• Technical Summaries

The Technical Summaries provide information about the numerous technologies associated patents, patent applications, and publications from DOE’s national laboratories and other participating research institutions available for licensing.

• Visual Patent Search

This search tool enables a unique, visually-facilitated search of the patent content contained in the Lab Partnering Service. This patent content contains published US patent applications and issued US patents resulting from Department of Energy funded R&D.

The Visual Patent Search tool was created using two powerful technologies developed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the IN-SPIRE™ Visual Document Analysis and the Scalable Reasoning System (SRS). Using these analysis tools, a tiered patent categorization system was created from the "bottom up", enabling Lab Partnering Service to develop a unique way of searching DOE-patents beyond a simple key word search.

The DOE also offers the Energy Innovation Portal, which concerns access to energy efficient and renewable energy DOE funded patents for licensing.  [Hat Tip to Technology Transfer Central.]