Innovation Pipeline Manager

An innovation pipeline is the list of inventions, technologies or ideas you are responsible for, arranged by how far each has progressed toward use outside the lab. Technology transfer offices, corporate R&D groups and research-led founders all keep one, often in a spreadsheet that drifts out of date. This tool gives you a structured version that runs in your browser.

1. Add an innovation. Click “Add innovation” and give it a working title. Owner, technology area, TRL, next step, due date and notes are optional, but the next step is the field that makes a pipeline useful.
2. Place it in a stage. Pick the stage it is in today. Each stage column also has its own “Add” button that pre-selects that stage.
3. Move it along. Use the dropdown on the card to move it to any stage, or the arrow button to advance it one step. The tool records the date it entered the new stage.
4. Review regularly. The stage counts at the top show where items are piling up. Past-due next steps are highlighted in red. Filter by stage, technology area or a search term to focus a review meeting.
5. Keep a copy. Download CSV exports everything to a file you can open in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers.

Your entries are saved in this browser's local storage and are never sent to Commercify. If you want to try the tool first, “Load example” adds three invented innovations, each labelled “Example”, which you can remove with one click.

The tool does not score your innovations or estimate their value. It reports three things, each calculated from what you enter:

• Count per stage: the number of innovations currently in that stage. When a filter is on, each column shows matches out of the total, for example “2 of 5”.
• Days in stage: today's date minus the date the innovation entered its current stage. It resets only when the stage changes.
• Past due: an innovation outside the Inactive stage whose next-step date is earlier than today.

These are deliberately plain. A long time in Evaluation or Marketing is not necessarily a problem, because some fields have long sales cycles, but it is a prompt to ask whether the next step is still the right one.

Take a hypothetical technology transfer officer who manages a dozen open cases. At the start of the month they enter each one, with the next step written as a concrete action: “Inventor interview”, “Send to outside patent counsel”, “Call three companies from the conference list”.

The stage counts come out like this (all numbers invented for illustration):

• Disclosure: 4. Three arrived in the last two weeks; one has been waiting for 70 days.
• Evaluation: 3. All have next steps with dates.
• Protection: 2. One provisional application is approaching its 12-month deadline.
• Marketing: 3. Two have next steps that are past due.
• Licensed / Spinout: 0.

Three actions follow. The 70-day disclosure gets an inventor meeting this week, because a disclosure that sits unreviewed risks missing publication or reporting deadlines. The provisional gets a filing decision on the calendar, because a US provisional application expires 12 months after filing. The two stalled marketing cases get a decision: a new outreach list, or a move to Inactive with a note explaining why. A month later the officer exports a CSV for the office's quarterly review.

The next-step date is the right place to record hard deadlines. A few come up often in research commercialization:

• Federal reporting. For inventions made with US federal funding, the Bayh-Dole regulations require the institution to disclose each invention to the funding agency within two months of the inventor disclosing it to the institution's patent staff (see 37 CFR 401.14). Most agencies take these reports through iEdison.
• Provisional conversion. A US provisional application lasts 12 months. To keep its priority date you must file a non-provisional application, and usually any international application, within that window. Our provisional conversion guide covers the decision.
• Public disclosure. A paper, poster, thesis or talk can make an invention unpatentable in many countries if no application was filed first. The US offers a one-year grace period for the inventor's own disclosures, but most other jurisdictions do not. Record planned publication dates as next steps for anything still in Disclosure or Evaluation.
• License milestones. Once an item reaches Licensed / Spinout, the next step becomes the licensee's next diligence milestone or report date.

• Vague next steps. “Follow up” is not a next step. Write the action and who it is with, and give it a date.
• Never closing anything. A pipeline where nothing moves to Inactive becomes a list of every idea ever disclosed. Releasing or parking cases is a decision, and recording it frees attention for the rest.
• Stages without exit conditions. If two people would disagree about whether an item is in Evaluation or Marketing, agree the rule and write it down.
• Tracking activity instead of progress. The number of disclosures is easy to count. What matters more is whether items move toward a license, partnership or company.
• Overstating TRL. Enter the level you can document today. A pipeline full of optimistic TRLs gives a misleading picture to anyone reading the export. The TRL assessment helps keep levels consistent.
• Keeping the only copy in one browser. Download the CSV regularly, especially before clearing browser data or changing computers.

Once your pipeline is in order, the innovation prioritization matrix helps you decide which cases deserve the most time, the patent and IP planner helps with protection decisions, and our guide to licensing university IP covers the deal stage.