About Los Alamos National Laboratory

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is a multidisciplinary, federally funded research and development center in northern New Mexico. Founded in 1943, the Laboratory's mission is to solve national security challenges through science, technology, and innovation. Within LANL, the Richard P. Feynman Center for Innovation (FCI) operates at the intersection of technology commercialization, entrepreneurship, and industry engagement, translating breakthrough science into real-world impact by aligning lab-developed technologies with market needs, supporting startup formation, and building partnerships with industry.

The Challenge

National labs like LANL generate extraordinary science, but translating that science into commercial impact presents systemic challenges. The Feynman Center needed to engage industry partners with clear, data-driven narratives, prioritize which technologies to advance, and align advanced R&D with real market needs across both commercial and national security applications.

The information required to make those decisions well was fragmented across multiple systems and formats. Technical data, patents, publications, and market signals lived in different places, held by different people. Synthesizing all of it into actionable insight was time-intensive and often inconsistent, and the traditional tools and workflows available made it difficult to move quickly or operate at scale.

Left unaddressed, these bottlenecks in the tech transfer process limited the Center's ability to proactively connect innovation with industry demand. The risk was not just inefficiency. It was that breakthrough technologies with real commercial potential would stall before ever reaching the market.

The Solution

The Feynman Center's approach has been to build a more structured, intelligence-driven commercialization workflow, with AI playing a central role in standardizing how the team explores and evaluates technology transfer opportunities.

The team developed standardized templates to consistently identify commercialization pathways and generate recommendations on how to steer technologies toward more viable market outcomes. Initially, Cypris was valuable for search-driven discovery, helping the team identify relevant patents, research, and technical signals through targeted queries.

More recently, the evolution toward workflow tools like Report Builder has been especially impactful. Instead of just finding information, the team can now generate structured, shareable reports, including Innovation Scorecards that incorporate landscape analyses, whitespace opportunities, partnership recommendations, and commercialization plans that directly support decision-making. These reports can be continually upgraded with new information, and shared folders allow any team member to pick up where another left off on a commercialization project.

The Impact

This shift has improved both the speed and clarity of the Feynman Center's commercialization efforts. The team can move from raw data to actionable insight more quickly, strengthening its ability to evaluate opportunities and engage partners with compelling, evidence-based narratives.

Innovation Scorecards are now integrated at the start of the Center's internal Design Sprints and the University of California/LANL Entrepreneur Postdoc Accelerator. These analyses enable staff and postdocs to begin market and customer discovery with a more targeted approach from day one. They also equip program leads with deeper insight into the technologies involved, improving how participants are supported throughout these programs.

Greater visibility into technology landscapes and industry activity has strengthened alignment both internally across teams and externally with potential partners. This leads to more informed prioritization and greater confidence in how the Center allocates resources across partnership, licensing, and spinout opportunities.

Looking ahead, the potential impact is significant. By systematically connecting LANL's technology portfolio with industry needs, the Feynman Center can prioritize high-potential opportunities, reduce time spent on low-probability pathways, and accelerate commercialization outcomes, increasing the likelihood that breakthrough innovations successfully reach the market.

Toexplore technologies available for licensing or partnership from Los AlamosNational Laboratory, visit: https://www.lanl.gov/engage/collaboration/feynman-center/tech-and-capability-search

‍

About Talking Rain

Talking Rain is a privately held beverage company headquartered in Preston, Washington. Founded in 1987, the company is best known for its flagship brand, Sparkling Ice, and has grown from a regional Pacific Northwest brand into a prominent U.S. and global leader in the sparkling and still water category.

The Challenge

For Talking Rain, staying ahead in the beverage industry means more than product innovation. It means continuously monitoring the patent landscape to protect the organization's trajectory and understand what technologies are emerging across the category.

The traditional path to that intelligence was expensive and slow. Prior art searches required engaging legal professionals billed at around $600 per hour. Each search was a standalone engagement, and there was no efficient way to combine patent data with broader market and competitive intelligence in a single workflow. The process placed meaningful constraints on how often the team could go deep, and on how confidently they could act on what they found.

What Talking Rain needed was a more accessible and cost-effective approach to patent research, one that could surface global insights without requiring a legal consultation every time a question arose.

The Solution

Talking Rain turned to Cypris, a platform that merges conventional IP data with market-oriented analytics to support new product development and commercialization decisions.

With Cypris, the team gained access to unlimited global patent, research paper, and company-specific searches without incurring legal fees for each query. Using the Innovation Dashboard, they could proactively scout available technologies aligned with their strategic interests and monitor what was happening across the beverage category in real time.

Rather than relying on outside counsel to frame the landscape, Talking Rain's team could now run their own searches, build context independently, and bring more informed questions to legal conversations when they were truly needed. Cypris Research Briefs further streamlined the process by synthesizing findings into clear, actionable summaries that accelerated internal decision-making.

The Impact

The most immediate change was financial. By reducing dependence on legal professionals for prior art searches, Talking Rain joined a growing list of Cypris customers saving an average of 6-figures annually on patent and prior art research.

But the impact extended beyond cost savings. The team gained the ability to source fresh innovations within the beverage industry on their own terms, without waiting on external resources or working within the constraints of a billable engagement. They could safeguard the organization's direction with greater consistency, monitoring the patent landscape as an ongoing practice rather than an occasional, high-cost event.

Access to global patent data also opened new commercial possibilities, giving the team visibility into technologies available for sale or licensing that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. And by eliminating the need to sift through disconnected data sources, the team reclaimed time and focus for the strategic work that drives the business forward.

For a company built on staying ahead of the category, that combination of speed, breadth, and cost efficiency has made Cypris a foundational part of how Talking Rain approaches innovation intelligence.

‍

About STAAR Surgical

STAAR Surgical is a global ophthalmic medical device company specializing in the design, development, manufacturing, and commercialization of implantable lenses and their accompanying delivery systems. The company's flagship products, the EVO Visian ICL and Visian ICL, address a wide range of visual disorders including myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism, and presbyopia. Available in over 75 countries, these foldable lenses have surpassed one million implantations globally, offering patients a path to visual independence without reliance on glasses or contact lenses.

The Challenge

For a company operating at the intersection of optics, materials science, and global regulatory environments, staying current is not optional. STAAR Surgical's teams rely on deep, timely research to support patent analysis, competitive intelligence, and scientific literature review across multiple disciplines and geographies. The stakes are high: gaps in market understanding can directly influence product strategy, investment decisions, and competitive positioning.

The problem was the mechanics of gathering that intelligence. The team was dependent on public search tools that were neither built for the complexity of their research needs nor capable of keeping pace with how quickly the landscape was changing. Accessing data across patent filings, scientific literature, competitive activity, and global market trends meant moving between multiple sources, duplicating effort, and spending significant time aggregating information that should have been immediately accessible.

Manually managing a data environment that changes daily was simply not sustainable. With research workstreams spanning patent analysis, competitor monitoring, and emerging technology assessment, the team needed a better foundation for the work. Missing even a single development in a fast-moving market could have meaningful downstream consequences for how STAAR Surgical directed its resources and shaped its roadmap.

The Solution

STAAR Surgical integrated the Cypris Innovation Dashboard into its market intelligence function, bringing together patent data, scientific research, competitive activity, and global market trend signals into a single, unified platform. The intuitive interface and interactive visualization tools allowed the team to quickly orient themselves within complex data environments, evaluate competitive positioning, and track developments across key innovation areas in real time.

With access to over 500 million global data points, the platform eliminated the fragmentation that had previously slowed the team down. Rather than stitching together information from multiple disconnected tools, researchers could now move from question to insight within a single workflow. The platform's ability to aggregate and surface relevant signals across such a broad data landscape meant that meaningful developments were no longer at risk of being overlooked.

Cypris Research Briefs further extended the team's capacity, providing structured, analyst-supported intelligence that could be incorporated directly into strategic planning. Together, these capabilities gave STAAR Surgical a more complete and continuously updated picture of the global innovation environment they were operating in.

The Impact

With Cypris in place, STAAR Surgical's market intelligence team gained the ability to operate with a level of coverage and speed that manual methods could not support. The team could scrutinize competitor tactics and strategies with far greater precision, identify market prospects as they emerged, and assess the influence of global trends on their own operations before those trends became widely visible.

Accessing and synthesizing data from diverse sources became a streamlined part of the workflow rather than a bottleneck. This gave the team a stronger foundation for understanding customer motivations, evaluating emerging research, and making informed decisions about where to focus innovation efforts. The confidence that comes from knowing the global data landscape is being monitored continuously changed how the team approached strategic planning.

For a company with a global commercial footprint and products that depend on staying ahead of both the science and the competitive environment, the shift from reactive research to proactive intelligence has had a direct effect on how STAAR Surgical pursues its mission of delivering visual independence to patients worldwide.

‍