Enterprise Ireland and Dublin technology start-up company SoftEdge Systems are the first beneficiaries of a programme that allows governments and small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) to commercialise technologies that Microsoft has developed but will not market itself.
Microsoft senior vice-president and senior counsel Brad Smith announced the Irish collaboration and extension of Microsoft's IP Ventures programme at its post-Davos Microsoft government leaders' forum in Lisbon yesterday.
"We often create things we are uncertain how to use," he said. "We created the IP Ventures programme to take technologies we thought were useful and valuable, and license them to other companies."
SoftEdge Systems is to use a photo-editing technology developed by Microsoft's Beijing research centre in its multimedia document creation software, which only went to market in September last year.
SoftEdge chief executive Vikas Sahni said his company licensed the source code for the technology, which makes it easy to cut out and manipulate objects in a photograph - for example, to highlight a single person in a group photograph and remove the background around that person.
Microsoft is evaluating all the projects in its US and international research labs as possible licensing opportunities for SMEs. The company is working through government business development agencies, asking them to consider the shortlist and then match prospective companies to projects.
Mr Smith said Enterprise Ireland was the first agency to respond and consider the matchmaking potential of the programme.
SoftEdge's multimedia software, which runs on top of Microsoft's Office document suite, will feature the Microsoft imaging technology from June.
Enterprise Ireland chief executive Frank Ryan said last May that the agency had already devised a new strategy to support SMEs in licensing property from larger companies.
So when Microsoft announced IP Ventures last year "we moved in right away. We were all dressed up and ready for this venture. We're very pleased that the first company for IP Ventures is an Irish company", he said.
Mr Smith said the SoftEdge agreement was a good example of the global impact that the programme could have.
"A research advancement in China that moved through the company in the US, found its way to the government in Ireland and moved to a small company with an Indian chief executive, that is now shipping a product," he said. "It's a story of opportunity."
