“How do I build real differentiation?” is a question I hear many entrepreneurs ask. After all, it is close to impossible to have a new idea. And if you’re doing anything less than cutting a path through uncharted wilderness, there are probably several companies doing something very, very similar. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, since success comes more from execution than concept.

But in an era where many investors are chasing the next hot thing (group buying, location-based services, mobile apps), unique and patented intellectual property is oft-overlooked. Pick the right technology and it can make what you’re doing stick out in a crowd of me-toos. If you can incorporate that technology into your core business, it can make a real difference toward establishing defensibility in a crowded and fluid market.

In addition, many successful startups start with a strategy to “roll up” many pieces of intellectual property within a specific vertical. This can happen in software (database, video and search are some examples) or other industries, like pharmaceuticals, new materials or devices. An IP roll-up can be a successful business by itself.

And there’s stuff just sitting in universities, waiting to be licensed.

But how do you find it? For starters, you can try to find faculty members in universities that do research relevant to your startup. In web tech, for instance, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and MIT would be good places to start — but each university has certain focuses and specialties depending on the faculty they’ve recruited. One university may have several faculty working on the cutting edge of databases, for instance, while another may have a very search-heavy computer science department.

Also, most universities have a “tech transfer office” that manages the licensing of all university intellectual property. The tech transfer office can be very useful, but contacting every relevant tech transfer office is difficult — especially since they may only list a handful of available technologies on their site.

While many faculty and universities have sites that explain their research and some tech transfer offices list their technologies, this type of search is still time-consuming and onerous. That’s why we’re building LabApp. We want the process of finding technologies to be easy, so entrepreneurs can spend more time building their businesses and researchers can spend more time doing research.