Brazilian Government investments in science and technology were relevant in Brazil until the first half of the 2010 decade. These investments have generated both increases in researcher numbers and in the number of researches conducted, which could be demonstrated by the science, technology and innovation national indicators of that period. The indicators, as the Brazilian scientific publications, indicate that most research was rooted in public universities and most of this represents inventions and has the potential to become innovation. However, despite this seemingly promising scenario, the conversion rate of these inventions into innovation was very low, making a large part of these inventions fated to "die on laboratory stand". To address the problem, this paper aims to identify the main difficulties encountered by researchers in bridging the gap between invention and innovation in the innovation environment of Brazilian public universities. For that, it was though small-scale semi-structured interviews with individuals in key-positions of entities involved in innovation at the university and their boundaries. The findings demonstrated that culture is the most important aspect to be considered, followed by people's lack of knowledge about the laws, rules and policies that support the generation of innovation in those environments.