The institutions of higher education need to attract the interest of potential industrial sponsors. This need can be approached by describing the problems to which their research is seeking solutions. For the institutions to retain the initiative for further work they also need to create an element of competition for the rights to utilize the results of their research and to develop the international market for their research and for the teaching programmes which emerge from it. This article suggests one method of creating these market conditions in the UK and describes a pilot programme carried out by The Technology Exchange Ltd to demonstrate that such a strategy can be pursued without diverting research funds into the marketing and protection of intellectual property.