October 9, 2017

CU Tech Transfer divides to conquer

The Innovation Economy - 2017

The University of Colorado decentralized its technology transfer program within the university system in the past year, in large part because the Boulder and Anschutz Medical campuses were getting too large to manage together.

Both campuses had “different portfolios and in order for those to get the kind of support they needed and be able to run and grow and develop those it made sense to basically separate technology transfer,” says Terri Fiez, vice chancellor for research and innovation at CU-Boulder.

It wasn’t a complete separation. The two campuses continue to share a board that meets regularly and coordinate a database together.

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“While from a business perspective we’re operating separately, we are very collaborative,” Fiez adds.

Technology transfer continues to grow in importance as the CU-Boulder campus focuses on being an innovation university.

“We’re really upping the opportunities for entrepreneurship for students, undergrads, grad students and faculty and also staff,” she says.

A big part of that effort is better communication on campus and in the community, letting everyone know that the tech transfer office is there to help them if they have intellectual property they want to better develop and potentially commercialize.

Often technology transfer is dominated by activities in engineering and the biosciences, says Bryn Rees, director of technology transfer for the CU-Boulder Technology Transfer Office. “But interestingly, we see it starting to become a campus-wide effort now with innovations coming out of the College of Music, athletics and all these different pockets of the university that are new,” he says, “really anywhere on campus where faculty and grad students and post-docs are creating things with commercial potential.”

One impact of decentralization is that the technology transfer office is “much more intimately tied into campus. We have a greater presence here,” says Rees. The Technology Transfer Office is present at various events and one of the byproducts of that is a better awareness of what the office does on campus and the services it offers.

“In the past, it was not like music and athletics wouldn’t have had access to technology transfer if they wanted it, but they didn’t know about it,” Rees says. “I also think as the faculty in general becomes more entrepreneurial and is also looking for other sources or ways to apply their research and commercialization, we’re seeing there’s a great interest in commercial applications.”

CU Technology Transfer has implemented what it calls faculty innovation ambassadors, who are peer mentors for faculty who have intellectual property or want to know what it means to start a company or if it is worth talking to the tech transfer office, says Fiez. It also hosted its first grad student boot camp to introduce them to entrepreneurship.

“There are a lot of curricular things they can tap into on campus. This is part of a much bigger picture really helping to support innovation and entrepreneurship across campus for every different group we have, including staff. If we are an innovation university, we have to reinvent how we work,” she says.

Fiez points out that the tech transfer office isn’t always about starting new companies; it is about how to get ideas translated so they have impact outside of the university, too. Industry collaboration is a main focus of the office. It has developed 11 master research agreements where the process is streamlined so the university doesn’t have to talk about contracts; it just needs a statement of work and it is ready to go, Fiez says.

On the technology transfer side, Rees is working on express licenses “where we can quickly and rapidly get to terms and let that company that is licensing, whether a startup or existing company, to start moving with the intellectual property,” Fiez says.

The last piece is the office’s great relationship with the startup community.

“The Boulder community is incredible and we are very fortunate to have them so involved and engaged and would like to have more places for them to plug in and be involved and help support the university being more successful at building entrepreneurship and innovation on campus,” Fiez adds. “We still see gaps we want to fill, but we think we are making good progress. That really is our metric. Is it moving in the right direction? Did we turn the ship around with everyone rowing in the same direction in getting there?”

CU Technology Transfer had 47 licenses last year, which was a record.

Historically the university would wait for intellectual property to be better developed before it approached businesses in the community, says Rees. Now, even if it knows that a particular innovation isn’t ready for investment yet, it wants to engage businesses as early on in the process as possible so “we can benefit from both their experience and perspective on what the true problem is,” says Rees.

One of the pitfalls of this type of work is that the university creates a technology to solve problem X and spends years on it before it shows it to a potential industry partner who says, that isn’t a problem for us or your solution doesn’t quite fit in with our systems.

“By engaging with the business community from an early stage, we’re trying to disrupt that pattern of development in a silo at the university and that’s out of acknowledging the value the community can add,” Rees adds.

CU Technology Transfer has started a few initiatives to help engage with the community. One is a formal partnership with Innosphere, a local accelerator that has a presence in Boulder, Fort Collins and Denver.

“They work with us on early stage university technologies to try and find mentors from Innosphere’s network who have been specifically matched in terms of their business and technical expertise to technology coming out of CU,” he says.

Another mechanism is SAGE Boulder, or Social and Advisory Group of Entrepreneurs, which is a way to get an early venture in front of a large number of community advisers where those advisers will volunteer time to give feedback to a new venture but also to provide some pro bono advisory work after the meeting.

It also has a program called Entrepreneurs in Residence. These are serial entrepreneurs who have had senior roles in multiple startup companies and are at a point in their careers where they are able to volunteer their time and meet with faculty, inventors and innovators during the early stages of development.

“All three things are ways to engage business leaders much earlier than waiting to the point they are trying to sell something,” Rees says.

Eric Gricus, program director for Innosphere, has been working with CU’s tech transfer office for more than 10 years as part of the Innovation Center of the Rockies, which merged with Innosphere in January 2017.

“I would say the biggest change is their renewed interest in supporting entrepreneurship and innovation and involving the community in doing so,” says Gricus of the CU Technology Transfer Office.  “The thing we are seeing more of is more opportunities for business people to engage with different technologies at various stages and generally earlier on.”

At the request of the tech transfer office, Gricus meets with research teams to get an understanding of who they are, their backgrounds and what they invented, both the technical merits and to get a sense of why they think it is unique and different and why they believe it has potential commercial applications.

“What we do is leverage a database of business people who have been prescreened by us and what our goal is is to leverage the business community to help us understand what the commercial potential or viability is of that invention,” Gricus says. “Once we have a good sense of that, in conjunction with the tech transfer office, we do our best to recruit individuals from the business community to help with commercialization strategies.”

The key things Innosphere tries to determine during the commercialization process is who is the customer, is the invention solving a need and are they willing to pay for that solution, says Gricus.

“The goal overall of what we do is to make sure the research community has a good experience with the commercialization process and the business community and to make sure they have a good interaction with the research community,” he adds.

The University of Colorado decentralized its technology transfer program within the university system in the past year, in large part because the Boulder and Anschutz Medical campuses were getting too large to manage together.

Both campuses had “different portfolios and in order for those to get the kind of support they needed and be able to run and grow and develop those it made sense to basically separate technology transfer,” says Terri Fiez, vice chancellor for research and innovation at CU-Boulder.

It wasn’t a complete separation. The…

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