NOC Partners with Ploughshare

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

NOC Innovations signed a five-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 organisations. The partnership will also help ensure that the capability of technology is not reduced when it is commercialised, and that the products and services that are produced are of scientific grade.

NOC Innovations has undertaken successful commercialisation 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.