Client Spotlight: UF Innovate

Client: Client Spotlight: UF Innovate

About The Company

Based at one of the nation’s leading research institutions, UF Innovate supports an innovation ecosystem at the University of Florida that works to move research discoveries from the laboratory to the market.

From closing the pandemic year in 2020 with a record number of technology licenses to date, to pushing the boundaries of human health, agriculture, artificial Intelligence, and space research in 2022, UF Innovate has had a busy couple of years. Recently, UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) put artificial intelligence to use on Florida’s citrus farms by synthesizing millions of images into instantly actionable information. Research discoveries such as these and hundreds of others spinning out of the UF ecosystem each year are helping to lay the groundwork for a more sustainable future.

UF Innovate currently comprises four organizations: Tech Licensing, Ventures, Pathways, and Accelerate, with its two award-winning incubators, The Hub and Sid Martin Biotech. Each part of the UF Innovate quartet aims to support the commercialization of discoveries and inventions that help foster a more resilient economy, cure diseases, improve quality of life, and make the world a better, more innovative place.

Wolf Greenfield & UF Innovate

UF Innovate’s four organizations form a comprehensive commercialization system that brings together six critical elements: facilities, capital management, training, talent, intellectual property, and technology-transfer expertise. Intellectual Property is, of course, where the Wolf Greenfield team comes in. Wolf Greenfield partners with UF Innovate to provide training across the university on intellectual property, technology transfer, and commercialization to heighten awareness of faculty and students and to promote protection of discoveries. The deep and diverse technology experience of our attorneys and patent agents facilitates assessment and establishment of patent portfolios on inventions in order to position them well for commercialization. Over the past three years, we have helped obtain over 250 patents for UF inventions.


Straight From The Team

Wolf Greenfield has served UF Innovate well for more than 18 years, protecting the intellectual property created by our researchers, sponsoring our yearly Standing InnOvation event to honor our innovators, and stocking our coffee bar, which fuels our incubator resident client startups and staff as they move innovations forward. The firm further invests in our faculty and students, working with our Pathways program to educate our researchers on how to protect and create value through intellectual property. We are thankful for the firm’s support and recognition that what our researchers do and what we do at UF Innovate is valuable beyond what we can measure with numbers and dollars. Wolf Greenfield’s collaboration is part of our success.

Jim O'Connell
Assistant Vice President for Commercialization and Director, Office of Technology Transfer, University of Florida

The University of Florida is recognized as one of the top US universities in creation and advancement of new discoveries into real world applications that improve people’s lives. This starts with the wide-ranging breadth of technologies explored across the university combined with the excellence of the faculty, staff, and students at UF. From there, whether teaming with UF Innovate to educate faculty and staff on basics of entrepreneurship, intellectual property, and tech transfer, or developing strategic patent portfolios, or advising on commercialization to create economic opportunities for the university community, Wolf Greenfield’s collaboration across the entire spectrum of UF’s innovation ecosystem is extremely gratifying.

Jeff Hsi
Shareholder, Pharmaceutical Practice, Wolf Greenfield