On my way back from Thunder Bay yesterday where I visited my friend Barb Eccles in the TTO at Lakehead University (and where, by the way, I encountered several very good people doing interesting things in nano-materials for example amongst other things), I pondered Robert S. Macwright's article in Les Nouvelles (vol XLII, #4, pps615-620). The unapologetic statement that, in his view, "academic technology transfer is a business" in the opening lines was - in a bizarre way - refreshing to me. It simply got better from there. There were some attempts to quantitate approaches that are used in one form or another by MANY of our Canadian institutions and which I had not seen so well compared face-to-face, before. I know that there are those who hold strong beliefs on BOTH sides of this table and I thought that this article formed a very good basis for the continuing debate.
There were also a number of statements that I wonder about and would like some feedback about from the readers of this blog. It is claimed that a reasonably trained TT officer can routinely get 25 disclosures in a year and translate them into 10 deals. This sounded a bit high from my experience (albeit in another system) and I wondered if there were any comments on this number (and other numbers quoted in this article) out there.
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Hi Adi!
It seems high to me as well, but quite sure this is achievable! One question is about defining what is a disclosure? If it's related to a sponsored research in which you'd like to define the commercial rights, it's different than managing a disclosure related to a pure technology platform, with no direct connection to the market yet. In between these extremes scenarios, there is certainly a room for quick license. We're, at Univalor, encountering that with specific technologies such as software based technologies from HEC Montreal.
Didier
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