Category: TT Office organization

Mutualization of TT activities

I was contacted recently by a government official of a country where they are trying to set up several TT offices which would serve large regions as hubs. I said to him I was not very keen in regional servicing TTOs and that a Swiss effort to do this failed (the Swiss network of Innovation).

Bureaucrats love this idea of funding only a handful of TT entities. It makes their life easier to get the due reporting and manage the network. It also looks good for politicians weary of spending public money in too many organizations. Companies love it too because they think having fewer seller’s of technology would provide a more efficient market.

I have to concede , I actually agree with them.

However , despite these positive aspects, one need to keep in mind that such centralization comes at the expense of an important  element which is central to academic innovation: the interest and implication of the initiators of the discoveries.

By putting more emphasize on the technology over its contributors , hubs or centralized TT office will have a much more challenging time in keeping academics interested and pro-active to disclose and help develop new discoveries. If you are not MIT or Stanford, keeping academics involved actually lies often on top of the priorities.

So where does mutualization add value to the technology transfer ? Sub critical schools or Universities should  turn to existing and well established technology transfer offices for help. The government could support for a few years the cost one technology transfer officer that is shared between both organizations. After that, either there is enough deal flow to have a dedicated unit (about 30 disclosures a year) or the partnership will maintain itself without governement support.

Another role for the government would be to support positions of marketing specialists that are hired within industrial clusters or trade associations and which job would be to provide support to TT officers in identifying the best contacts within such networks of companies.

Nothing politically or bureaucratically sexy but of true added value for the practitioners.

Should TTO be monopolies ?

A few weeks ago I was sitting in a meeting where one of the leading economists working on KTT related issues (Jerry Thursby) looked at me and wondered until which extend KTT office could be “outsourced” by Faculties. The economists (and I understand them to some extent) do not like to have TTOs act as quasi-monopolies within the Universities.

My answer at that time was that since most TTOs are not only faculty service but also University service,  it is not possible for a faculty to just buy-in “TTO services” from an outside source which is not “validated” by the University. What I mean by “validated” is that the signing authority (eg VP of Research) does need to trust the negotiation job done enough to make the call to sign or not the contract.

A better question may then be , if not all, what type of activities deployed by TTOs could be outsourced ? I came up with the following list:

Core activities that need to remain within a TTO :

  • Contract negotiation (licensing , collaborations)
  • Faculty and Industry contacts

Activities that may be outsourced:

  • Market research
  • IP portfolio management (to some extent)
  • Spin-out creation (eg through an incubator)

What is the best solution ?  The determining  factor should be service over cost and will vary from place to place. Competition is good when the outsourced services are in a profitable space. If not, one needs to be careful and avoid spending public money to duplicate monopolies.