The partnership aims to increase commercialisation efforts.

US-based Purdue Research Foundation has struck a partnership with Universidad de Caldas in central Colombia, that will see the two working together closely in both the US and Colombia over the next several months to drive commercialisation efforts at Caldas.

Rogelio Ocampo, director of research at Universidad de Caldas, and Patricia Salazar, technology transfer office director at the university, spent three weeks at Purdue funded through a $170,000 grant from iNNpulsa and Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje, both Colombian government agencies created to foster entrepreneurship and innovation.

Their visit is the first of three milestones. The second milestone is set for June, when two members of Purdue Office of Technology Commercialisation’s (OTC) team will lead a workshop at the Universidad de Caldas. The third milestone is set for September, when Ocampo and Salazar will return to Purdue to develop commercialisation and intellectual property strategies for technologies coming out of Caldas.

Purdue Research Foundation was set up in 1930 to handle contributions to Purdue University and acquire real estate for its expansion. The foundation owns and manages several satellite technology incubators, as well as Purdue Research Park, which has 200 companies that generate an economic impact of $1.3bn on Indiana. Most notably, Purdue’s OTC operates technology transfer programs among research universities in the US.

Caldas was founded in 1943, and has since grown from a main campus, which houses Natural and Exact Sciences and Engineering, to four satellite campuses, which host the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, the Faculty of Health Sciences, and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, respectively. It offers both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees.

Rogelio Ocampo said: “Similar to Purdue, we have a strong engineering and agricultural presence at our university. Applying new and different perspectives to commercialising our technologies is important for the university and the region, which has a firm agricultural base and is located in one of the most significant coffee-growing regions worldwide.”