NOC Partners with Ploughshare to Scale Up Ocean Innovation

The UK’s National Oceanography Centre (NOC) has partnered with Ploughshare to enhance the commercial activity of the NOC’s trading subsidiary NOC Innovations.

NOC Innovations has signed a 5-year agreement that will see Ploughshare provide technology transfer services to NOC. This partnership will see Ploughshare supporting NOC Innovations with capability and capacity to discover, liberate, and scale NOC’s intellectual property into multiple industries, by helping them to create licensing and spin-off products based on both novel and existing technology.

NOC Innovations team supports and advances marine innovation for the benefit of both scientific and commercial industries by researching challenges such as blue carbon, carbon capture, and storage, reaching Net Zero and energy transition. NOC has specialist engineering and testing facilities to support the research of their scientists and technicians.

Ploughshare will help NOC Innovations bring new inventions to market quicker, providing new routes to market for NOC’s research scientists across a wide range of global science disciplines. This will stretch across the industry, expanding innovations outside of oceanography to entrepreneurs, investors, SMEs, corporates, not for profits, and public sector organizations. The partnership will also help ensure that the capability of technology is not reduced when it is commercialized, and that the products and services that are produced are of scientific grade.

Huw Gullick, Managing Director at NOC Innovations, said: “We have a long history of developing pioneering intellectual property and making scientific and engineering discoveries, and we always want to achieve impact from what we do. Ploughshare has a demonstrated track record in helping to take intellectual property and discoveries to the world through models such as licensing and investment, and this is an excellent opportunity for us to scale up our science and research to the wider science community and general society.”

Kalyan Sarma, VP – Climate, Environment and Sustainability at Ploughshare, said: “The collaboration with NOC is a key milestone in the roadmap for Ploughshare’s Climate, Environment and Sustainability business unit which is currently in early stages of development. We believe the commercialization of leading-edge IP can make a positive contribution to the environmental challenges being faced by the UK and other countries around the world.

“Ploughshare has access to a diverse range of knowledge assets that can be applied in multiple ways and across different sectors, including climate and sustainability. Ploughshare’s technology transfer capabilities enable us to harness the use of new technologies that align with with NOC’s goal of providing capabilities that support and enhance UK and global ocean research.”

NOC Innovations has undertaken successful commercialization activities in recent years and prior to signing the agreement, including the development of the ecoSUB miniature AUV which is produced and sold by Planet Ocean. Some of the intellectual property underpinning the ecoSub technology was developed by NOC and licensed to Planet Ocean in 2018. Planet Ocean have an ongoing collaboration with NOC, with an office located at the Southampton site where they sell the ecoSUB product from the NOC’s Southampton site to customers all over the world.