At Planet Eureka! – the Open Innovation Marketplace - we 100% through and through believe in Open Innovation. In that spirit, here's a collection of other great sites to find technologies.

The Short List.   5 recent tests of the TechMining101.com site lauded the following 5 sites as the "first stop and most effective" for finding new technologies in any industry.  Simply use key words from your industry to find technologies that can feed into your innovation process.

Planet Eureka! Marketplace (http://www.PlanetEureka.org/) Every innovation listed comes complete with a simple description, an estimated sales volume, development status, proprietary protection status and even realistic royalty rates.  If you want to understand the idea and it's potential in 60 seconds or less, this is the place to start.

iBridge (http://www.ibridgenetwork.org/) Developed by the Kauffman Foundation, the iBridge Network is one of the very best. It provides the centralized online source for university-based research and innovations.

Tech Transfer Online (http://www.techtransferonline.com/) Tech Transfer Online is the largest IP database in the world.  It includes not only innovations from the marketplace, but also from other universities, federal labs, companies and individual inventors. A free account here gets you access to thousands of technologies available for purchase or license.

US Patent Office (http://patft.uspto.gov/) The source of all sources, the US patent Office lets you search all patents. The upside – you can search everything patented. The downside – you have to work your way through the patent to figure out what the idea is.

Google Patents (http://www.google.com/patents) Google knows searching, so they make finding patents and navigating through them as easy as possible. The downside – you still have to read the patent or abstract and hope it’s clear what the idea is.

The Complete List. The NIST/MEP Network that provides the USA National Innovation Marketplace has collected a short list of other great sites for finding technologies to spark your open innovation efforts.

Emerging Technologies - University & federal labs, SBIR projects, journals, patent databases

Community of Science: www.cos.com

Intute: www.intute.ac.uk

Google University: www.google.com/options/universities.html#U

Infomine: http://infomine.ucr.edu/

Developing Technologies - Incubator, venture capital sites, SBIR Phase II projects

SBIR/STTR Awards Database:

http://tech-net.sba.gov/tech-net/public/dsp_search.cfm

www.dodsbir.net

National Venture Capital Associations: www.nvca.org/members.html

Established Technologies - Business directorieies, press releases, trade magazines, industry portals

Thomasnet: www.thomasnet.com

EBSOHost: www.ebscohost.com

Industry Portals listing: www.virtualpet.com/industry/mfg/mfg.htm

Trade Shows: www.tsnn.com

Technical Area Searching

Reference Books: www.chipsbooks.com

Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/schhp?hl=en

Science Direct: www.sciencedirect.com

Industry-Based Searching

Trade Magazines: http://importexporthelp.tradepub.com/?pt=cat&page=Util&flt=mag

Business Directories: www.globalspec.com

IP Searching

Patent Sites:

www.freepatentsonline.com

www.patentlens.net/daisy/patentlens/patentlens.html

Other Fine Sites.  We also have a few other favorites that are particularly good for searching:

tech link (http://www.techlinkcenter.org) TechLink helps the Department of Defense to commercialize leading-edge new technology by partnering DoD labs with private sector companies for technology licensing, transfer, and research and development.

spark IP (http://www.sparkip.com/) Spark does a great job of not just giving you access to technologies, it’s dynamic SparkClusters™ displays technologies in visual maps to help you make connections to related items.

Yet 2 (www.yet2.com ) Yet 2 let’s you search and browse technologies. Their easy categories for browsing make navigation easy.