CITTRU — Jagiellonian University Centre for Technology Transfer (Kraków)

CITTRU (Centre for Technology Transfer) was established in 2002 at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków — Poland's oldest university, founded in 1364 — to build a portfolio of technologies and research results developed at the university and connect them with business. It was formally reorganised as a university-wide unit by Senate resolution in 2015.

CITTRU's core functions span identifying commercially promising research results, securing patent and other intellectual-property protection, analysing market potential, and negotiating licensing, sale or spin-off agreements. It also runs the ScienceMarket database, a public repository of Jagiellonian University inventions and research services, and oversees the AIP UJ academic-entrepreneurship incubator supporting startups founded by the university community, alongside further incubation programmes such as Inkubator Rozwoju and Inkubator Innowacyjności 4.0.

In 2021, CITTRU's technology-transfer activity produced 19 Polish and 49 international patent applications, plus 37 Polish and 17 international granted patents (mostly via the European Patent Office and the US Patent and Trademark Office). The same year it concluded 68 knowledge-transfer agreements covering university inventions and other research results, including 9 licences, and the university's overall commercialisation portfolio comprised more than 150 market-ready products and services.

Why it matters: CITTRU shows a large public research university running its own in-house technology-transfer office with a full pipeline — IP protection, licensing, spin-off support and a public inventions marketplace — and publishing year-specific patent and licensing counts rather than only broad, cumulative claims; those figures nonetheless remain self-reported university statistics rather than an externally audited evaluation of downstream economic impact.

Read the full analysis: https://cittru.uj.edu.pl/en_GB/cittru