innovate With Licensing Or Spinning Off

1. To Gap Fund Projects

Enterprise collaborates with industry & A*STAR research institutes to identify new technology areas early in the research value chain to co-develop innovative products and services.

Gap funding of projects is applicable for A*STAR technologies where: 



1. Potential licensees take up A*STAR technologies
2. These technologies will require further research and/or development to be commercially ready
3. Potential licensees are willing to collaborate with Enterprise and the research institutes in co-development efforts

2. To License

There are two types of licenses that can be granted – exclusive licenses and non-exclusive licenses. A non-exclusive license allows the IP rights to be used by more than one licensee. An exclusive IP license, as the name suggests, allows the licensee to be the sole party to use the IP.

Where an exclusive license is provided, we will typically limit it to:

• Specific fields of use that are sufficiently wide to address the licensee’s potential market segments. This means that A*STAR RIs and Enterprise would be able to enter into research collaborations and licensing activities with other entities outside of the licensee’s fields of use.
• Particular geographic areas where the licensee is confident of the market.
• A certain exclusivity time period sufficient for the licensee to protect its market lead (and hence its investment), after which the license rights become converted to a non-exclusive one.


With our Simplified Licensing, licensing agreements are now much shorter and drafted using simpler language. This allows both parties (A*STAR and licensees) to focus the discussion on the transfer of the technology rather than the contract.

The Headstart initiative allows SMEs that enter into a Research Collaboration Agreement (RCA) with A*STAR to enjoy royalty-free and exclusive licenses of IP developed for the first 36 months.

Read more on Licensing here.

3. To Start Up

We provide 2 types of business services:


• Investment services
• Spin-Off services

Startups are also supported with fund-raising guidance, business plan coaching and mentoring services through A*StartCentral’s activities and programs.