Changing the game for tech transfer offices
Since the Bayh-Dole Act, the ‘knowledge transfer’ mindset has been assailed with chronic doubts, and may be facing unanswerable questions. ‘Publish or perish’ does not sit easily with revenue maximisation, especially in the science and technology sphere.
Inside the technology transfer unit, patent prosecution, licence/spinoff negotiations, and collaborative research deals compete for time and attention. Few technology transfer organisations (TTOs) are in a position to be self-funding from transaction revenues, but with dependence on the university for cash comes head count limitations and other operational constraints, especially in difficult economic times.
Does this litany sound familiar? Laments such as these have been told and retold, but no quick fix or sustainable solution seems possible. In the lab, when every direction seems to be a dead end, researchers seek an entirely new paradigm: to address the fundamental challenges of sharing knowledge, while making money from protecting value, all in the context of difficult economic circumstances. What might such a paradigm be?
What if one views the TTO not as a small piece of a university culture, but as a small piece of a commercial marketplace? Today, the TTO operates as a tiny element of a not-for-profit organisation, whose motivations rarely intersect across the entire range of university endeavour.
In most cases, university revenues from technology commercialisation are less than 1 percent of total annual budgetary requirements. Indeed, revenues from selling branded mugs and sweatshirts may actually exceed tech transfer income. From a commercial perspective, such a unit would look like a child’s lemonade stand across the street from an 80-storey office tower.
To survive and flourish, the TTO’s primary interactions need to be horizontal—across TTOs, across geographic markets, across technologies—and not simply vertical within the university. Looked at from this perspective, TTOs can radically change workloads associated with generating revenue while collaborating to create more valuable transactions. As standalone businesses, most TTOs today would have unacceptably high risks:
