“We didn’t want to do the same things that everyone else is doing,” says Thomas Zurbechen, associate dean for entrepreneurial programs at the UM College of Engineering and one of three faculty who led the initiative.

From its launch in October, a total of $15 million will be granted to projects posted on the MCubed website. Faculty can access the site to post ideas and advertise for their own projects; once a team of three is formed over an idea, “boom,” writes Maxen — “within 24 hours the threesome wins $60,000.”

“The competition for funds depends only on speed, and isn’t fierce,” she says.

Zurbechen describes his inspiration for the new program: “I’ve sat on review boards for different agencies, and it’s really damn hard to judge who the best person is to execute a project,” he says. “Instead, we are allowing people to just execute their projects themselves, and after the fact we’ll see how they do. So really, it will be the purest form of a review.”

The success of the initiative will ultimately be judged by faculty at the Institute of Social Research, who will gauge the volume and types of new collaborations formed, the volume and prestige of works published, and the broader impact of those research results. “We want to see if we can move the frontiers of knowledge forward and make life better for people,” says Zurbechen.

Source: Nature.com

ALSO COMING SOON:

• Thursday, May 24: Create a New Revenue Stream by Supporting On-Campus App Developers
• Thursday, June 14: The Elimination and Creation of Defenses in the Wake of AIA
• Tuesday, June 26: Low and No-Cost Solutions for Marketing University Innovations

Zwilling cites “Startups in 13 Sentences,” an old essay by Paul Graham which makes the case that early-stage entrepreneurs should attempt to make “a few people happy rather than making a lot of people semi-happy.” In a similar vein, Zwilling argues that entrepreneurs should adjust their energy and priorities to challenges that present themselves “as more is known and markets change,” rather than trying to tackle every issue at once.

“Don’t mistake this for a license to launch an incomplete or poor quality solution,” Zwilling urges. “Your strategy today should be to define and excellently prepare the absolute minimum product that will excite a selected small segment of your intended customers, and roll it out to them.” Zwilling spells out the advantages he perceives in using this approach:

• Faster time to market. Launching fast means working with real customers in less than six months,  Zwilling says, as opposed to one or two years. And to launch fast, you must learn to adapt to everything, from changes in the marketplace, to changes in costs, to the evolution of competitors.
• Get traction before funding. Zwilling points out the harsh realities of the angel or VC funding process, which is typically unavailable to would-be companies that don’t yet have products or customers. “By using a laser focused approach for the first iteration,” Zwilling stresses, “you may actually produce something and get a customer without funding.” Thus you can begin attracting investors.
• Find customers, partners and channels early. Finding a real customer pipeline will greatly increase your chances of reaching partners and investors, Zwilling notes, but to do so you must be proactive and personal in your searching. This will also serve to “narrow your development focus and adjust your strategy for you,” he says.
• Use social networking to start the wave. Take advantage of the lost cost of setting up a legitimate website, Zwilling advises — that includes search engine optimization, blogging, and infiltrating social networking sites. “It won’t cost you your whole funding pot to start some momentum,” he says, “or to realize that your original strategy needs major tuning.”

Zwilling concludes by pointing out that even giants like Google, eBay and Facebook “inched their way” into the market before scoring their first million dollar funding rounds. Similarly, companies in the offline world start one store at a time, or in one geographic location.

Scoring big on the first try is the domain of large enterprises, Zwilling argues, and chances are that doesn’t mean you. “The biggest advantages you have as a start-up are speed and agility,” he comments. “Use it.”

Source: Startup Professionals Musings

From using frankincense to sticking chewing gum directly onto burns, people have experimented with the treatment of scars for centuries, mostly to no avail. But Alman has discovered that by turning a well-known analgesic molecule into a cream, then applying it every day for three weeks, surgical scars can grow to less than half of the anticipated size.

MaRS, the government-funded tech transfer organization, picked up Alman’s discovery and has since struck an agreement with the Chinese firm Novotek Therapeutics Co. Ltd., which has dubbed the treatment ScarX.

“Scar forming has been a big concern for most of surgery patients after they have gone through a critical stage of their life, sometimes a life or death situation,” says Jubo Liu, Novotek’s chief executive officer. “I believe this will help the patient to recover faster and enjoy a happier life.” Novotek will spend about $6 million to bring the drug to the Chinese market, according to Liu. In exchange for developing and commercializing it, Novotek keeps the Chinese market; MaRS Innovation receives data, milestone payments and royalties from China but is able to sell it in other worldwide markets. In the U.S., that market is estimated at $4 billion. North American clinical trials on the treatment are to begin in early 2013.

Patients most likely to seek the cream treatment are those undergoing reconstructive surgery from burns, tumor removal, congenital malformations, cesarean sections, or joint replacements. The expected cost is $350 per treatment course. According to Ivan Waissbluth, project manager of Life Sciences at MaRS Innovation, “it’s a massive market that no one has been successful in achieving.”

Source: The Globe and Mail

“We are excited to utilize this groundbreaking invention as we look to commercialize it to benefit the growing worldwide diabetic community,” says John Steel, chairman and CEO of Islet Sciences. Stell says the treatment will be able to identify emerging diabetes “far earlier than clinical presentation.”

Jonathan Soderstrom, director of Yale’s Office of Cooperative Research, says university officials “are pleased that Islet Sciences has made the decision to invest in this discovery and look forward to developing it into a valuable new tool for treating this debilitating disease.

Source: MarketWatch

Central to successful deal-making in China, says Michael Batalia, director of technology asset management at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, is understanding that without a personal connection, deals don’t come easily. Speaking recently during a panel in Winston-Salem, NC, on how to develop Chinese business relationships, Batalia explains that Chinese business draws heavily on a centuries-old practice called “guanxi.” This term refers to the network of personal relationships that form the backdrop of the nation’s business activity.

“It’s hard to distill relationships down to a contract when you barely know each other,” says Batalia. Here’s a good example of the difference between Chinese and American approaches: while Americans typically ask new acquaintances what they do for a living, in China “the first questions are never about business.” According to Shiqin Xu, director of the Global Training Initiative China Program at North Carolina State University, a Chinese person will often ask first about family, even hobbies.

“Such details are important,” Xu says, “because the Chinese view this personal information as the building blocks of relationships. That relationship is what leads to business deals. But it takes time.”

Batalia notes that business relationships in China are built on reciprocity: “a favor done from someone creates the expectation that a favor will be returned.” Wake Forest professor Joseph Molnar points out the contrast to Western business practices, “where Americans relish bargaining for an advantage,” while Chinese negotiators seek to ensure that both parties are satisfied with the outcome.

According to Molnar, whereas the Chinese interpret their own business methods as rooted in humility and understanding, Americans may interpret this as weakness. Molnar claims this culture clash is “misunderstood on both sides,” and that Chinese executives may view the American negotiating style — attempting to gain leverage or wield power — as arrogant.

Gift giving is also an important part of Chinese business culture, and is typically done as a personal gesture carried out “well before the point of executing a business deal.” And though he stresses that it’s the thought that counts, Yin Chen, vice president of U.S. business development at contract research organization Shanghai Medicilon Inc., “you better not bring gifts made in China.”

Source: MedCity News

Early-stage researchers also have a powerful incentive, he notes: “they need a job.”

Fiske also points out that researchers at an early stage in their careers are actually the ones in the lab getting their hands dirty and working to create new technologies, and thereby have the best insights into the details of the inventions, and the technologies’ strengths and weaknesses.

“Unlike principal investigators, who have to split their time and attention across numerous research projects and staff, early-stage researchers can focus all of their time and attention on one project. This single minded focus is crucial for nurturing an invention,” Fiske contends. He describes the graduate students and postdocs who populate the labs as highly motivated, very resourceful and very adaptable, “all perfect attributes for being successful in a small, emerging entrepreneurial venture.”

Established PIs still play an important role, Fiske concedes — namely in providing lab facilities and attracting investors to a project through their contacts and relationships. But   he also observes that today, with more intense focus on commercialization at their universities, “early-stage scientists have more start-up help at their disposal than ever before.”

Source: Naturejobs.com

In early February, NovaUCD reported it expected 300 new jobs to be created at NovaUCD’s Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre over the next two years. The new jobs will bring the total number of employees based at the 37 companies housed at the center to more than 500. The expected employment numbers represent an increase over 2011, when 80 jobs were created.

“The idea behind it was quite simple,” says Micéal Whelan, MSc MBA MPRII, communications manager at the university’s Office of the Vice President for Innovation. “We normally do an end-of-year survey of the companies based in the NovaUCD, looking at their achievements/developments over the past year. This year we decided to include a question seeking data on the number of new jobs each of the companies was planning to create over the next two years based upon their business plans.” A detailed article on the survey appears in the April issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. To subscribe and access the full article, as well as the entire five-year archive of back issues filled with tech transfer success strategies, CLICK HERE.

“This is an exciting and innovative design that, when commercialized, will noticeably reduce the cost of heating apartments and other types of buildings in New England and other cold weather regions,” says Tom May, President and CEO of Northeast Utilities (NU). NU is the parent company of NSTAR, who sponsored the prize competition for student-run ventures along with the MIT and the U.S. Department of Energy to accelerate the commercialization of clean energy technology. “This competition,” May says, “has shown once again that the road to clean energy is being paved by young entrepreneurs.”

Radiator Labs is composed of a team of Columbia students who aim to increase the energy efficiency of steam-fed radiator heating systems, which can waste up to 30% percent of energy by overheating the area in which they are located. To do this, the start-up team created low-cost, drop-in radiator enclosures that control the amount of heat transferred in a room. The design includes wireless control of boiler systems to burn fuel only when necessary and to increase thermal comfort.

“Adopting this cost-effective technology in the millions of existing U.S. housing units with steam radiator systems has the potential to save hundreds of millions of dollars in energy costs per year and reduce carbon emissions by over 6 million tons,” says Marshall Cox of Radiator Labs. According to Cox, this would have an environmental impact “equivalent to taking 1.25 million automobiles off the road.”

Now in its fifth year, the MIT Clean Energy Prize has launched 30 student-run companies, which collectively have raised almost $90 million in funding to develop clean energy innovations. “Winning this competition,” Cox says, “enables us to help bring this technology to the marketplace so these benefits can be realized.”

Source: Columbia Technology Ventures

For students at the University of Washington and Bellevue College, this year-round program is free, but StudentRD is also offering an eight-week summer incubator session for any student with dreams of creating a technology-based business.

CEO Edward Jiang puts it this way: “If you love to read or you love information, you can go to the library and you can walk in and use their resources. Like a library, this place is for people who love science and technology.” Jiang points out that the rapid pace of evolving technology can make it tough for students to keep up if they learn about computer science or tech innovation only in the standard classroom.

“A lot of students think, ‘well, I don’t know how to do something so I’ll just wait to take a class to learn it, and then I’ll learn it,’” Jiang says. “But what we’re trying to do is change that mindset to ‘I don’t know how to do something but I can learn.”

In StudentRD’s casual peer-learning environment, students can toy with projects for fun as easily as they can produce potential breakthroughs. For instance, Bellevue students Kathryn Brusewitz and Brandon Ramirez won a 48-hour competition called Code Day by producing a creative, Tetris-like app that they aim to include in a gaming software studio they hope to launch.

Included among StudentRD’s sponsors are the Medtonic Foundation and Stratos Product Development, as well as Google and Microsoft.

Source: Bellevue Patch

A victory for Macfarlane could cripple the foundation financially, but one board member expressed confidence that the group would successfully stand its ground.

Macfarlane’s attorney has asked Judge Denver Dillard to bar the foundation from bringing up the final verdict’s potential impact on the group or the community. The case is expected to last two weeks; it is also expected that some jurors will have difficulty following the details of the technology and the tech transfer process in general.

Macfarlane’s research led to a major breakthrough in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, but he claims the foundation made almost no effort to market his discoveries to drug companies for further development and commercialization. As a result, Macfarlane says he found two companies on his own that were interested in the discovery.

The foundation, however, rejected his repeated requests to issue a license. When UI later struck a deal with Coley Pharmaceutical Group — one of the companies Macfarlane had sought out himself — the foundation did not require the subsequent research data to be shared with Macfarlane, or for him to be sponsored in his further research, the lawsuit alleges. Thus, Macfarlane argues, the agreement effectively ended his ability to continue developing his discoveries.

Eventually, Coley successfully tested a similar drug candidate in a clinical trial, and Pfizer purchased Coley for $165 million in 2007. Macfarlane’s lawsuit contends that his underlying intellectual property was a major part of the company’s value; the jurors will have to decide whether the foundation’s actions breached its obligations to Macfarlane, who received no portion of the sale’s proceeds. 

An accountant hired by Macfarlane’s legal team reports that Macfarlane could have been expected to realize $24 million from the deal, and that if the drugs he helped discover were to succeed, sales could go into the billions per year and bring millions in royalties to the foundation.

Jack Evans, board member of the foundation, says he will leave the dispute in the hands of the legal process. “We’ve been very well represented by the attorney general,” Evan says. “I have confidence in their abilities.”

Source: Iowa City Press Citizen

1. Get your documentation and lawyers ready to file patent applications on all of your current inventions by March 16, 2013. Sichelman points out that all applications filed after March 16^th, 2013, that cannot trace all claims submitted at any time to an earlier application will fall under the new first-to-file code, which will typically only hurt the applicant. “Thus,” he writes, “it is imperative for inventors and tech companies to start preparing immediately for the new world under the America Invents Act.”

2. Be careful about disclosing, selling, or using your invention in a commercial manner. Sichelman warns about the new bill’s vagueness concerning the amount of time applicants have to file their patents after selling, using, or disclosing their inventions. “While it appears the intent of the new act was to continue [the current] one-year ‘grace period, unfortunately the language in the act is not so clear,” he notes. “Thus, if there is any chance that you will file for a patent on an invention after March 16, 2013, and you want to use, sell, or disclose that invention before you file, then you would be wise to consult a knowledgeable patent lawyer before doing so.”

3. Watch out for departing employees and consultants. Under the previous law, Sichelman says, applicants could prove they were the original inventors and would be protected against “derivation” and theft of trade secrets. The new law, however, is unclear on exactly how protective its provisions will be in practice, particularly in cases where an applicant modifies the anothers’ original invention in some way. “Since the winner of a patent will generally be the one who is first to file, not the first to invent, someone who steals your invention — then modifies it — may able to get a patent nonetheless,” Sichelman comments. He thus advises companies to be careful to keep their secrets close, even when it comes to employees under non-disclosure agreements.

4. File ‘concept applications’ now that can be used for priority purposes after the AIA fully takes effect. “Remember,” Sichelman cautions, “that if an application filed after March 16, 2013, can trace all of its claims back to an earlier applications, it falls under first-to-invent.” Thus he advises incomplete inventions be sent through a “conceptual” application, based on their progress as of early 2013, in order to “support some claims that may prove valuable down the road.” Sichelman also points out that under one of the AIA’s strangest provisions, such an application may allow you to use pre-AIA rules against others that claim the same of similar inventions.

5. Get ready to file early and often. “Once the AIA takes full effect,” urges Sichelman, ”particularly first-to-file provisions, generally speaking, speed to Patent Office will be paramount.” Timely applications will not only to prevent theft but also get ahead of the increasing fees and “overcome potential prior art, like articles that are published and sales and uses of the invention by others in the marketplace.”

Sichelman concludes by putting the AIA in the context of most patent laws: “what was meant to streamline filing, lower costs, and create tech jobs may ultimately make filing more complex, raise costs, and create jobs only for patent lawyers. But preparing wisely,” he says, “will make the landing much softer.”

Source: Xconomy

ALSO COMING SOON:

• Wednesday, May 16: How Universities Fail Women Inventors
• Thursday, May 24: Create a New Revenue Stream by Supporting On-Campus App Developers

“To accept that the functionality of a computer program can be protected by copyright,” the Court reasoned, “would amount to making it possible to monopolize ideas, to the detriment of technological progress and industrial development.” The ruling also allows for increased interoperability between computer systems, allowing software producers to use their understanding of functionality to ensure applications can be integrated with, and work alongside, existing software.

“The decision,” says intellectual property expert Guy Wilmot, “should assist innovation in the software and ICT sector as developers can reverse engineer functions or concepts from competitors and improve them, or integrate them with other technologies.” Software companies that had assumed their products were protected may not be so sanguine about the ruling, however.

This case began when the U.S. software company SAS Institute approached the Court of Justice claiming U.K. company World Programming Ltd. had mimicked the functionality of its business intelligence product, SAS System. While the Court said they had originally agreed to protect the “expression” of an idea or product — in this case the source code or object code in which the idea is embodied — they said protection does not apply to the idea or product itself.

“It was only by means of observing, studying and testing the behavior of SAS Institute’s program that World Programming reproduced the functionality of that program,” the Court declared, saying the company had never actually used the original SAS source code.

Software industry observers are concerned that the new ruling further widens the gap between the U.S., where software can be protected by patents as well as copyright, and Europe, where it is much more difficult to get patent coverage.  “One risk of this decision,” says Wilmot, “is that in an increasingly international software and app market, established businesses will try and protect their software by obtaining U.S. patents, which might restrict competition even in Europe, as most European developers will not be interested in developing software they can’t sell in the world’s biggest software market.”

Source: Science Business

“In its simplest terms, a value proposition is a positioning statement that describes for whom you do what uniquely well. It describes your target buyer, the problem you solve, and why you’re distinctly better than the alternatives.”

Skok argues that a solid value proposition requires focus and detailed analysis. “One of the classic mistakes,” he says, “is diving headlong into the solution before you really understand the problem you’re looking to solve.” He offers four key questions to ask yourself before building a value proposition — he calls them the “four U’s.”

Is the problem unworkable? In other words, does your idea address a faulty business process where there are serious, tangible consequences to inaction?

Is fixing the problem unavoidable? Meaning is the problem a problem because some kind of governance or regulation says it is, thus making it unavoidable?

Is the problem urgent? Skok warns of the difficulty of getting a deal done without addressing this question: is the problem one of the top three priorities among potential customers?

Is the problem underserved? In other words, is there currently a significant lack of other solutions to the problem you’re targeting?

“Problems worth solving yield a decisive ‘yes’ to the majority of these questions,” Skok writes. The next step is defining your solution, or as Skok suggests, “your compelling breakthrough.”

He points to successful innovations like Groupon and 3D that are discontinuous, defensible and non-disruptively disruptive — “technologies that offer game-changing benefits without requiring any modification to existing processes or environments.”

Skok observes that, absent a promise to deliver a stellar improvement over the status quo, customers “will typically default to ‘do nothing’ rather than bearing the risk of working with a start-up. That’s the harsh truth.”

He concludes by roping all the questions back to the center: you and your business. What problems are you uniquely suited to solve? What is that unique solution you offer? What kind of business model can you (and only you) bring to the table? “Be true to yourself,” Skok says. “A little self-awareness can go along way in crafting a value proposition with power.”

Source: VentureBeat

“Our partnership with CSU Ventures,” he says, “will match top faculty and graduate researchers with our network of more than 1,000 mentors and advisors, one of the largest entrepreneurial support systems in the country.”

The deal focuses primarily on commercialization of bioscience, clean-tech, engineering, aerospace and IT/software technologies. President of CSU Ventures Todd Headley says the new partnership reflects a wider trend of collaborations between industry and academia. According to Headley, “the continuing build-out of Colorado’s entrepreneurial ecosystem of university research, industry leadership and venture investments is a big win for everyone.”

Source: Northern Colorado Business Report

Having worked in the field of visual perception for 30 years, Pizlo believes “there is a fundamental principle for human vision, and that is, we rely on a prior knowledge about a physical environment, so we’re trying to program this knowledge on the physical environment into a robot’s artificial intelligence.”

One of Pizlo’s research assistants, Tadamasa Sawada, says there are certain human cognitive functions that are inherently difficult to compute, such as how “we quickly and easily perceive the world in a 3D shape and figure-ground organization.” By this Sawada refers to our ability to simplify a scene or photo into a main object and cognitively shift everything else into the background.

“Until [robots] can see like us,” says Pizlo, “they can’t truly interact with us. Once they can interact with us, they can begin doing all types of tasks such as drive a car, help surgeons in hospitals, assist the elderly, provide sight for the blind, replace people in high-risk situations like making repairs in a nuclear power plant. And, yes, bring us coffee in the morning.”

Source: MarketWatch

Dao argues that economically, incubators are better off throwing minimal viable entrepreneurs into the market and waiting to see who sinks and swims rather than teaching them how to ensure a successful launch. According to a 2011 study, Dao says, 44% of incubators had never seen a single client company raise an institutional round of funding.

As for the expert mentors advertised by these incubators, to Dao “they seem like little more than the photos of fit personal trainers on the wall at the gym. The trainers look great, while the people working out are still flabby and out of shape because they don’t actually get much guidance.” While Dao admits the obvious legitimacy of incubators such as Y-Combinator and TechStars, he also wonders how some other can claim that they plan on graduating over a hundred “companies” annually.

“To give you an idea of how absurd this is, the largest angel network in Southern California receives fewer than 1,000 raw pitches per year,” Dao notes. “This includes crackpot, non-tech-related pitches. When you factor in the competition for talent posed by more credible programs in the area, it simply isn’t possible to find more than 100 solid teams to incubate from this pool. With such massive throughput, how much guidance and training is each team actually receiving?”

Dao concludes by advising would-be entrepreneurs who are looking to join an incubator to ask themselves: will the program really improve my situation, or “like an art degree from a state college,” are the experts and mentors in the program just selling me on frail credentials?

Source: VentureBeat

The center is also challenged with developing drugs that are failing in clinical trials after millions have been invested in their research, and it has formed this latest initiative — titled Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules — to identify faltering drugs that can be salvaged and repurposed.

The effort hopes to repeat the efforts that led to the eventual success of azidothymidine (AZT), which failed to effectively treat cancer but later became an effective treatment for HIV.

In about a month, NIH will announce the drugs that Pfizer, Lilly and AstraZeneca want to make available through the initiative, and it will begin accepting applications from scientists who wish to study new uses for the compounds.

Source: Xconomy

• MSU Technologies, the tech transfer office at Michigan State University, recently hired Richard W. Chylla to serve as executive director. Chylla had previously served as director of tech transfer at the MSU College of Engineering. In his new position, Chylla, who has spent over 20 years in the specialty chemical industry and holds several U.S. and international patents, will be responsible for managing the university’s intellectual property portfolio. He’ll also work directly with the staff of MSU Business Connect, the university’s center for collaboration between academia and business, and with the newly formed start-up accelerator Spartan Innovations. All of these are part of the MSU Innovation Center. “Our challenge,” says MSU vice president for research and graduate studies J. Ian Gray, “is to take MSU’s far-ranging scholarly and creative products and identify the ideas that should be developed further in order to achieve more value in real-world applications. Rich [Chylla] brings a distinct blend of corporate and academic experience to MSU Technologies that makes him idea for this leadership role.” Source: MSU Technologies

The program is part of a new yearlong course for first-year MBA students titled FIELD (Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development) that began in late January, when the entire first-year MBA class of roughly 900 students was assigned to six-student teams, each given $3,000 in seed capital and told to come up with business ideas. Byrne points out that while many business schools including Harvard have featured competitions and elective courses that help students create their own enterprises, “no school has made the launch of a real business a requirement until now.”

According to Youngme Moon, a Harvard marketing professor and chair of the MBA program, “it’s kind of like entrepreneurship on training wheels.” The program essentially tells the students “you are going to start something up, we’re going to give you support and teaching along the way, but you will experience everything in this process in an accelerated fashion,” Moon explains.

Among the “micro-businesses” picked up by FIELD so far are a Facebook app in which Jewish mothers can set up their children for marriage; a premium undergarment business named after sexologist Albert Kinsey; and an online network designed to match language tutors with students across the globe.

The only guidelines given to the teams are that there can be no businesses that create or sell pornography, weapons, alcohol or tobacco, and none that offer financial advice.

During the course of the term, Harvard technically owns the student ideas, but on the last day, the intellectual property will transfer to each student team, as long as they are in unanimous agreement.

FIELD is a major departure from the Harvard Business School’s traditional in-class approach. But Moon points out a potential misperception that Harvard simply wants “the next Facebook” to be shot out of its gates. “We tell our students that if you are a budding entrepreneur and you have a great idea that you think will be the next Facebook, don’t use it in this [program]. This is a learning exercise that allows you to experiment in a relatively risk free environment,” she stresses.

That environment includes a simulated stock market where teams pitch their best ideas to a group of 90 students from their class who, acting like investors, begin trading on the start-up concepts. Over the next 24 hours, each student has $100,000 of virtual money to invest in any of the companies pitched. While some ideas will succeed and continue to develop throughout the term, those that don’t will enter a separate track where the teams spend the term reflecting on what went wrong.

“It’s impossible to imagine that 150 businesses based on teams that had never worked together would create 150 successes,” says Harvard professor and program co-designer Alan MacCormack. “The going-to-market track is about selling and going to customers and proving your idea,” he adds, “and the other is understanding that failure is a very natural outcome in entrepreneurship.”

Source: CNN money

The pledge was announced five years ago to help Purdue commercialize its biomed research, and details of the recent termination are few. “We are not down about it,” says John C. Hertig, executive director of the Alfred Mann Institute for Biomedical Development at Purdue (AMIPurdue), where most of the funding would have been targeted. The Institute focuses on the commercialization of life-science technologies.

“We got $15 million in donations [from the Mann Foundation], we own all the patents and have our own nonprofit,” Hertig says. “We are very excited. These changes will make it easier for us to work within the Purdue environment.”

Though the specifics of the original 2007 agreement are undisclosed, it is known that Purdue agreed to release the Foundation from its $100 million pledge, and that the Foundation is allowing the university to retain all IP developed under the collaboration.

Purdue will also receive another year of funding despite the pledge’s nullification.

Some have questioned the Mann Foundation’s contracts in the past. Several schools, including Emory University in Atlanta and North Carolina State University, turned down funding to establish a Mann institute on campus. A few universities reported disagreements with the Foundation over revenue splits and intellectual property rights.

“There is generally this cultural tension of this incentive structure between privates and the colleges,” says Josh Powers, a professor of higher education leadership at Indiana State University. Specifically Powers refers to the worry among colleges that funding partners have too much influence over the direction of research, as well as the worry among funders that their investment may not see an adequate return.

David Hankin, president of the Mann Foundation, issued a statement on its termination of the deal with Purdue:  “It’s been five years, and there have been many changes in the world as well as in our foundation’s focus,” he says. “Purdue has been an exceptional partner in this joint research commercialization initiative, moving discoveries from the laboratory to the marketplace, and we wish them continued success.”

According to Purdue professor R. Graham Cooks, help from the Mann Foundation has been “an enormously beneficial undertaking” at the school, despite the project’s termination. Through the Foundation’s funding, Cooks and fellow Purdue professor Zheng Ouyang were able to develop a device for enhancing the speed and efficiency of therapeutic drug monitoring. Their new company Quantlon Technologies Inc. is one of four AMIPurdue spinoffs based on campus research.

For now, says Hertig, AMIPurdue will continue seeking out research in Purdue labs that could be translated into a winning product. “We are treating it as business as usual,” he says. “It will change a little bit; we will have to consider the future, right? My attitude is, we are OK for now.”

Source: jconline.com

This decision directly affects how universities approach patent decision making for diagnostic method patents, and will almost certainly impact the Myriad case, as well as a whole range of method claims surrounding other technologies. To help you make sense of the complex patentability issues raised by the decision, and to guide you in drafting future claims, we’ve scheduled a critical webinar TOMORROW, Thursday, May 3: In-Depth Analysis of Mayo v. Prometheus: What it Means for the Future of Medical Diagnostic Patents, featuring Kevin E. Noonan, PhD, author of the PatentDocs blog and a partner with McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP. For complete details and to register, CLICK HERE.

ALSO COMING SOON:

• Tuesday, May 15: Disclosure Assessment and Triage: “An Innovative Model for Patent Decision Making”
• Thursday, May 24: Create a New Revenue Stream by Supporting On-Campus App Developers

“I stretch Mark’s job back into the research component,” says Miller, “where Mark largely let that run itself.” Miller also plans to make collaborations with private companies a priority, both to commercialize university technology and to seek funding for university research. “We have been perceived,” Miller says of Case, “as a little rigid in our policies, and a little bit rigid in our expectations in terms of engagement with corporate partners and the value of our [intellectual property].

“One of my strategic goals in the coming years,” says Miller, “is to make Case a very attractive place for our partners to work with.”

For context, Case’s 2010 licensing income of $14.3 million placed it a little outside of the top 20 research universities in the nation; in 2011, its income dropped 49% due to patent expirations.

“We want more disclosures, and that requires us to communicate more effectively with faculty,” says Miller. “Not all of them recognize the value of commercializing their innovations. We need to do a better job of convincing and showing faculty the benefit of that.

He adds:  “One thing I’m trying to do is get the message out that we’re taking a much more flexible approach to business partnerships. I hear people say we’re too difficult to work with, we’re not willing to negotiate. I’ll negotiate,” Miller concludes, “and I’ll get it done fast.”

Source: MedCity News

Along with the assignment issue, the landmark case put the spotlight on the potential for trouble when faculty enter into agreements with industry regarding research, but don’t take their obligations to the university into account, or don’t understand those obligations. In response, many TTOs have heeded the recommendation voiced by Michael A. Gollin Esq., a partner at Washington, DC’s Venable LLP: “Advise faculty, students and staff that before they sign industry agreements, they should review university policies on intellectual property assignments and conflict of interest, and they should contact the TTO if they have any questions.”

To prepare for due diligence by existing and new licensees regarding chain of title for both older and newer inventions, he adds, universities should, “for licensed technologies, check if there’s any indication in the record that a faculty inventor has an industry research contract and, if so, ask for details about obligations that may conflict with the university’s claim of title.”

But the big one, confirms Janna C. Tom, associate director for research policy analysis and coordination in the Office of Research and Graduate Studies at the University of California, is making sure to “include a present assignment of invention and patent rights in employment agreements, if you have not yet done so.” Before the groundbreaking case, in fact, only about one in five schools used that type of “I hereby assign” language, according to survey data from the Association of University Technology Managers presented by Gollin, Tom and colleagues at the organization’s recent annual meeting in Anaheim. At the time, a majority of schools used so-called “future assignment” language — stated more like “I agree to assign.” In fact, about a quarter of universities prior to Stanford v. Roche didn’t have specific assignment language that inventors were required to agree to; rather, many relied on overall university policy to make sure ownership stayed on campus.

Indeed, Gollin says one of the big surprises from the survey is how many institutions apparently still don’t get it. “A lot still use a passive form of assignment like, ‘the university shall own,’ instead of an assignment obligation,” he reports. “And a surprisingly significant number of respondents still don’t plan to change.” A detailed article on assuring IP rights in the wake of Stanford v. Roche appears in the April issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. To subscribe and access the full article, along with a five-year archive of best practices and case studies for TTOs, CLICK HERE. 

The new technology, which UM has trademarked as CO2 Plume Geothermal, creates electric power by capturing carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, and injecting it deep underground to tap geothermal energy. If successfully integrated, the invention could seriously offset the high cost of capturing CO2 in a coal-fired plant.

“That was always the problem,” says Martin Saar, an earth sciences professor at UM. “The extra cost of adding carbon capture and sequestration to a plant was so high that it was prohibitive. [CO2  Plume Geothermal] potentially turns a fossil fuel plant into a clean power plant,” Saar adds, calling the technology a possible “game-changer.”

Though the idea of capturing carbon dioxide before it reaches the atmosphere isn’t new, most plans call for the fossil fuel to be nearly extinguished upon injecting it underground.

UM’s technology, however, pumps the carbon dioxide into ultra-deep saline aquifers, where high heat and pressure put the fuel in a super-critical stage so that it becomes dense like a liquid, but remains porous as a gas. That gas is eventually siphoned from the rocks above the saline aquifer, then sent through turbines to become electricity.

Heat Mining calculates that the carbon dioxide emissions from a typical 500-megawatt coal power plant could be utilized by the technology to turn a small turbine and generate 25 megawatts of power.  While company officials admit that’s not much power, they say that with more CO2 wells and compact units added to the system, there could be thousands of megawatts of extra power produced after a couple decades.

“This is an absolutely novel approach,” says company founder Ken Carpenter, “which is why the patents were filed for this technology.” Carpenter also notes that by using enough of this technology, coal and natural gas-fired power plants could become carbon neutral or even carbon negative over time.

Heat Mining and UM also plan to market the technology as a cheaper alternative to the similar technologies oil companies in West Texas use to recover trapped oil. Another idea is to use the technology as a kind of underground battery to combat the problem of intermittent power loss from sustainable sources like wind or solar farms.

Source: TwinCities.com

The new facility unites core members of the medical device community — universities, clinics, research centers, investors, established device and pharmaceutical companies, as well as startups — with the goal of sparking tech transfer in the field of innovative clinical technology.

Matt S. Eskrine, the acting U.S. Assistant Secretary for Economic Development, flew in from D.C. and spoke to the large crowd gathered for the Center’s opening. Eskrine pointed to the GCMI as an example of the type of successful partnerships between public and private groups that generate jobs and a strong return on investment. “We have had to rethink economic development,” he says. “There is a new economic reality, and communities can’t thrive by returning to the status quo. We have to find new ways to create jobs, and that growth is coming from entrepreneurs.”

According to Eskrine, the federal economic development officials are convinced “that supporting regional resources like GCMI offers the best return on investment by driving innovation and increasing exports.”

General Manager of GCMI Doug Schumer, PhD, adds that “the greatest thing GCMI will do is to help bring to life devices that otherwise might never see the light of day. There are many doctors out there with good ideas but who don’t know how to bring that idea to commercial fruition. GCMI will be able to help.”

Source: MarketWatch

Zwilling also points to a “common ‘failure to start’ situation” where the co-founder who conceived the initial idea or technology insists that the idea is 90% of the company’s value. In reality, says Zwilling, the “idea” is a miniscule part of the big picture, while execution of the idea is the most critical success factor.

Keeping that in mind, Zwilling offers five “dominant variables,” or individual contributions that he believes should determine who gets what share.

1. Experience running a start-up business. No company will achieve lift off without a solid business plan, a good rapport with investors, and the ability to make a lot out of a little. These, suggests Zwilling, are indispensable traits.
2. Domain expertise and connections. “If you are recognized as an expert in the business area of your start-up, with a good reputation, and you know all the key vendors and customers,” writes Zwilling, “your value is huge.” Founders must remember that simply designing a product doesn’t get it to the market, Zwilling emphasizes.
3. Pre-existing intellectual property. This “great value,” Zwilling writes, belongs to those partners who started early, bringing existing patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets — any “important completed piece of work” — to the table.
4. Sacrifice and time commitment. Here Zwilling points out an obvious but crucial criterion when considering a co-founder’s value: are they fully committed, or just part-time? This is an especially important question when there’s a risk involved — then, he suggests, you’ll know who is truly valuable.
5. Funding. Serving as the main funding source in a start-up, Zwilling writes, “usually trumps all the items above in demanding some equity.” Considering the decision making and sheer commitment involved in providing major funding, Zwilling recommends entrusting at least 50% of the equity to these partners.

He also cites the distribution of equity as a good point in which to introduce outside help, such as legal counsel, start-up advisors and potential investors. On top of providing experience, such sources offer “an unbiased view that the entire team can trust,” Zwilling writes. In addition, Zwilling advises co-founders never to dodge the discussion of equity up front, nor should they come to a rushed decision. If you can’t come to an agreement in a timely fashion, he says, it probably wasn’t meant to be anyway. “Start-up decisions only get harder later,” Zwilling writes, “not easier.”

“Even still,” he says, “regardless of the initial equity split, you should seriously consider vesting your founders shares over at least two years. This means they will be metered out month-by-month, and a partner who changes his mind or defects early will not walk away with half the company.”

Zwilling concludes: “All partners should never forget that their allocated shares are only the beginning and will be diluted proportionately when outside funding is later required from angels or venture capitalists. Investors will be quick to remind you that a small percentage of something is worth more than 100% of nothing. The same logic applies to splitting equity with co-founders.”

Source: Startup Professionals Musings

“UNL and NUTech have gone out of their way to encourage entrepreneurship to make this technology available to clinical imaging centers around the country,” says inventor and UNL professor Stephen DiMagno.

The new process is basically an enhancement of positron emission tomography (PET) technology, or imaging devices capable of reflecting specific organs’ metabolic activity through the injection of radiotracers. PET scans are typically applied to patients with cancer, heart disease and neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Though highly effective, PET imaging agents with short-lived radioactive isotopes lose that effectiveness after just a few hours, and therefore need to be produced rapidly and close to a hospital or imaging center where they are used.

“Our methodology allows us to create more potent imaging agents more rapidly, reliably, and in high yield. These agents were previously unknown or were very difficult to synthesize,” says DiMagno. “Ground Fluor Pharmaceuticals’ technology should boost the availability of existing experimental PET agents and support the more efficient development of new PET imaging agents.”

The new method may also expand the kinds of diseases PET scans can diagnose, which would lead to more effective treatments and better management for these illnesses while using lower doses of PET agents, thus reducing the risk of side effects as well as the costs to patients and insurance companies.

Source: UNL News Release

Needless to say, these two academic entrepreneurs defied the odds in a big way.

McGinity later went on to score the university almost half its licensing revenue last year, or $11 million out of its $26 million total, through his patent of a technology that makes it more difficult to abuse the painkiller OxyContin by crushing and snorting it.

That patent, however, expires in 2016 — a daunting date that represents a potential cliff for UT’s tech transfer revenue. Speaking recently before the House Committee on Economic and Small Business Development, McGinity estimated that the university could have earned nine times the $11 million in annual revenue if it had created a start-up from his OxyContin patent rather than licensing the technology to Abbot Laboratories.

The House committee is currently looking for ways to encourage Texas universities to convert their research into products, companies and jobs. McGinty, along with several witnesses from the field, suggested ideas such as creating research parks with more labs, and granting tenure to faculty members based on entrepreneurship or innovation.

“Part of my concern is the failure rate,” says McGinty, who himself went into debt in creating PharmaForm. “We don’t know what the outside risk is.”

He suggested to the committee a “pre-venture capital” policy where state money from the Emerging Technology Fund is granted to support early stage, faculty-generated start-ups.

“I think there are other entrepreneurs at UT who may not go out and borrow $1 million but, with help from the Legislature, could have successful companies,” McGinty says.

Another issue brought up at the meeting is the shortage in staff at UT’s tech transfer office. As McGinty puts it, “how can five people deal with the patent applications across 100 disciplines?”

Edward Powell, CEO of the Autsin-based company IPX, suggested the Legislature instill financial incentives for the tech transfer officials who decide which patents are worth pursuing.

Source: statesman.com

In her article for The Wall Street Journal, Lizette Chapman points out that in the past, entrepreneurs often took two years to create a product, hire a staff and analyze the market for business strategy. But according to Chapman, a new breed of entrepreneurs like Systrom, mostly in their 20s and 30s, strategically “pivot,” or try out new ideas, shed them quickly if they don’t catch on, and move on to the next concept.

That most of these entrepreneurs work in the mobile and web sectors also means they can tinker with their technologies quickly and cheaply, Chapman points out. What’s ironic, she says, is that the term “pivot” has been used around Silicon Valley for years — mostly to describe failing gracefully. But some investors say these new founders making quick turns based on market feedback and other information are generally more experienced, less fearful of risk, and often more profitable than past generations of tech entrepreneurs. By making mistakes, investors say, the young entrepreneurs gain knowledge and wisdom that increase their chances of succeeding the next time around.

“You pivot as many times as you can, as fast as you can, until you run out of money,” says Evan Kuo, a 27-year-old entrepreneur from UC Berkeley.

To Tony Conrad, a partner in the early-stage venture capital firm True Ventures, pivot “is not a four-letter word.” Rather, he says, “It represents some of the best methodology that the Valley has invented. Starting something, determining it’s not working, and then leveraging aspects of [that] technology is extremely powerful.”

Another case in point is Mike Ouye, who worked at three start-ups before launching his first product, a mobile social-gaming app, through his company Red Robot Labs. Though the app wasn’t even halfway completed and he was dissatisfied with it, Ouye says he went ahead because he needed feedback before seeking funding. By collecting player data and using the suggestions to touch up the product, Ouye eventually scored a $2 million seed round for Red Robot.

“I’ve learned how to apply metrics to products, iterate quickly and make decisions without overthinking it,” says Ouye, who has now raised over $10 million.

Source: WSJ.com

As  Jeff Hargarten of the Minnesota Daily points out, the firm charges other companies fees for utilizing the technologies owned by member organizations, and also gathers revenue from the lawsuits it wages against companies it accuses of infringing on patents from the firm’s behemoth portfolio. And despite IV’s posturing as an innovation-driven company, it has done little if any true innovating, except perhaps in its business model, the critics charge.

Melba Kurman, founder of the university consultant company Triple Helix, questions the ethics of university investment in IV’s strong-arm approach, given the mission of universities to promote the translation of research into commercial products that improve society.

According to Mike Masnick, president and CEO of technology analysis publisher Floor 64, institutions that commercialize technology are being pressured to invest in Intellectual Ventures. If they resist, he claims, they are threatened and sued for innovating. “That money,” Masnick says, “should be going towards building better products and serving the market.”

Hargarten cites a key argument against “patent trolls” that was explored in a recent Northwestern University study: not that these companies’ lawsuits are invalid, but that their position to negotiate licensing fees is greatly out of proportion to their actual contribution to products or services embodied in the patents they own. “Among the mass aggregators,” says University of California law professor Robin Feldman and co-author of a 2011 Stanford Technology Law Review paper about Intellectual Ventures, “there are almost no cases of patents turning into products, as far as we’ve been able to see. It appears to be a dead end.”

Officials at Intellectual Ventures defended their operation in a Forbes article in February.

“To hear some critics tell it,” says Kenneth Lustig, IV’s vice president and head of strategic acquisitions, “the explosion of patent suits in the smartphone industry is evidence of a patent system that is fundamentally broken, at great cost to U.S. innovation. Such histrionics, however, ignore a crucial but little known fact: throughout American history, the buying, selling and litigating of patents has always been essential to U.S. economic success.”

While there are a few schools that invest directly in Intellectual Ventures, according to Hargarten, it’s much more common for them to license or sell patents to the firm, which recently reported its involvement with over 3,000 inventors and 400 universities and companies worldwide.

Cornell University is a limited partner in one of the firm’s investment funds, said Alan Paau, executive director and vice provost for technology transfer and economic development at the school. He said the university’s relationship with Intellectual Ventures is at “mostly arm’s length.” The University of Texas invested a total of about $28 million in two Intellectual Ventures funds, according to a 2010 performance analysis from the school. It showed negative returns from each investment of 73 percent and 10 percent.

In their deal with the University of New South Wales in Australia — a “typical” deal, according to firm spokesperson Naomi Zeitlin — Intellectual Ventures sends researchers “requests for invention” (RFIs), basically asking them to invent something the firm can patent. IV has paid millions to universities for their inventions and in many cases has profit-sharing arrangements in place to provide schools with an ongoing revenue source, she said.

Masnick says that while there are tax benefits for schools licensing innovations through Intellectual Ventures, for the most part these deals are being struck because “a very large percentage of university tech transfer offices have been pretty big flops.”

The New York Times recently quoted IV president Adriane Brown saying, “Our company is challenging the status quo. Our business model is disruptive, and like any other product or service that disrupts established markets, we’ve invited our share of controversy. But we are no different from any other company working to deliver on its mission.”

According to Feldman, “what created the incentive for mass aggregators is the current patent system” and how difficult it is to discern what technological developments a patent actually covers, all of which leads to “a bargaining of epic proportions.” He claims that the rise of companies like Intellectual Ventures was an attempt to tackle these issues and create liquidity for patent holders, but that it has since moved in “a destructive direction for innovation.”

Source: Minnesota Daily

But is the situation that dire? Some experts, like Mark J. Nuell, PhD, a partner with the law firm of Birch Stewart Kolash Birch in San Diego, CA, say the decision could have a devastating impact on what is increasingly seen as a promising avenue of research.

“It’s a disaster as far as I can tell for the biotechnology industry as a whole,” he says. “It’s going to push development of diagnostics back to the universities and privately funded research institutes that don’t care if they sell a new product or not. They’re just interested in finding new knowledge. People operating for a profit won’t be able protect what they’re doing without falling prey to copycats.”

The decision effectively raises the bar for any patent claim derived from a natural law, Nuell says. The Court has made clear that simply adding a known technology to the natural law is not enough to make the process patentable. “If you’re going to write a diagnostic claim now, you’re into a realm where you need some sort of a new reagent for affecting that test,” he says. “Saying that you achieve the end result through polymerase chain reaction won’t pass muster. You’re going to have to show that you’re using some kind of new, super reagent in the polymerase reaction or something like that. Diagnostic claims will have to rely on a new reagent or a wholly new methodology in order to become patent-eligible subject matter.”

Commercialization efforts at research institutions will shift more to the incremental improvements in diagnostics, reagents, and analytic methods, Nuell predicts. Those could be patentable in their own right, he notes.  A detailed article on the decision’s impact appears in the April issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. To subscribe and access the full article, along with a five-year archive of best practices and success strategies for TTOs, CLICK HERE.

Although the first-to-file provision of the AIA does not take effect until next March, waiting too long to prepare your organization and your researchers for this historic shift will only leave you playing catch-up later, or worse yet putting your valuable IP in jeopardy. It’s critical that you start preparing for the changes now, and begin the process of adopting researcher education and patent prosecution practices to conform with the new regime. That’s why we’ve recruited renowned patent attorney and tech transfer expert Charles R. Macedo for an April 26 session that will arm you with the strategies and tactics you need to prepare effectively: Moving From First to Invent to First to File: Understanding the Opportunities and Challenges. For details and to register, CLICK HERE.

The landmark Mayo decision directly affects how universities approach patent decision making for diagnostic method patents, and will almost certainly impact the Myriad case, as well as a whole range of method claims surrounding other technologies. To help you make sense of the complex patentability issues raised by the decision, and to guide you in drafting future claims, we’ve signed up patent law guru Kevin E. Noonan, PhD, for a May 3 program where he’ll dissect the Court’s decision and help you understand how to adjust your patent strategy in light of this development. For details on In-Depth Analysis of Mayo v. Prometheus: What it Means for the Future of Medical Diagnostic Patents, CLICK HERE.

ALSO COMING SOON:

• Tuesday, May 15: Disclosure Assessment and Triage: “An Innovative Model for Patent Decision Making”
• Thursday, May 24: Create a New Revenue Stream by Supporting On-Campus App Developers

Pedago.gy is the creation of Bret Fund, co-founder and CEO of Gogy Inc. The product’s name is inspired by a teaching philosophy called participative pedagogy, or “the idea that students learn best when they take an active — not the usual passive — role in the learning process,” Fund says. “Pedago.gy makes it easy for educators to enable and encourage this active learning,” he continues, “by making class presentations and lectures social and interactive in a collaborative environment.”

 “Tech-based learning has tremendous potential to make education richer, deeper, and more valuable,” says David L. Ikenberry, dean of Leeds School of Business. “A technology like this, which extends the classroom experience and creates new ways for students to collaborate, is a breakthrough idea. I’m thrilled to be part of a faculty that has this kind of world-class imagination and dedication.”

The Leeds School is one of the first institutions to put Pedago.gy to use in select classrooms, and this fall the program will spread to additional classrooms across the Leeds campus, as well as a handful of local secondary schools. In July, Gogy Inc. will release a commercial beta version of its platform for purchase; at the present, the company is offering a private alpha version of the program by request.

Source: University of Colorado Boulder

A wind energy radar and a solar wafer screening machine were included among the technologies featured at the CU Cleantech Incubation Open House, an event put together by CU’s Deming Center for Entrepreneurship, the school’s TTO, and its new CU Cleantech program, which is aimed at promoting and commercializing the university’s clean and renewable energy innovations. “Our goal,” says Cleantech board member and CEO of Skyfuel Rick LeBlanc, “is to make [Cleantech] the number one such organization at the university-level in the country.”

The six technologies featured at the open house were handpicked from 120 innovations developed at CU and NREL. The selected technologies will now go through CU Cleantech’s Market Assessment Program, in which a team of students, researchers and industry veterans will work to identify each invention’s commercial potential.

Source: Boulder Daily Camera

The partnership will release DHA technologies and research discoveries to entrepreneurs in hopes that these innovations will form the basis for promising new start-ups. As part of the deal, AZ Furnace will offer the start-ups a package worth over $50,000 in cash and services — $25,000 in seed funding, a space in the ASU SkySong incubation facility, an intensive six-month mentor-led accelerator program, and a number of additional support services.

The unique program will involve a worldwide competition to select and fund new Arizona-based companies based on one or more patents or technologies developed in Arizona research institutions. AZ Furnace officials hope that supporting these new start-ups will boost regional economic developments and create local jobs.

Technologies coming from Dignity Health — the fifth-largest health system in the country — will be listed alongside the IP available through Arizona Technology Enterprises (AzTE), ASU’s tech transfer office. This will increase the number of high-tech innovations available for entrepreneurs looking to start new companies.

“High-value technologies provide no benefit to society if they remain in research laboratories across the country,” says AzTE vice president of venture development Charlie Lewis. “ASU Venture Catalyst, AzTE, and Dignity Health are taking a proactive step to ensure that Arizona’s most valuable technologies are given all the assistance they need to realize their full potential. We are excited to be partnering with Dignity Health on the Furnace Accelerator and anticipate some very promising companies being launched as a result.” The worldwide competition launches in the second quarter of 2012.

Source: ASU News

Vanadium Investing News recently interviewed Vincent Sprenkle, chief energy materials engineer at PNNL, who noted that the lifecycle cost of the battery is still too high, while also offering an optimistic assessment of the technology’s progress. “Cost dictates out research,” Sprenkle says. “The primary metric is dollars per KW hour per cycle. Right now pump hydro costs $0.01 per KW hour per cycle. For vanadium batteries, it is $0.08 per KW hour per cycle. We think a suitable target for vanadium batteries is less than $0.04 per KW hour per cycle. At this price, these batteries can be relevant and have application.”

He continues: “PNNL’s research is focused on improving the degradation of the vanadium redox battery’s electrolyte solution mix while increasing the energy you can store in the battery. This ultimately lowers the overall cost of the battery system.”

Regarding the time horizon for commercialization, he says “the big thing is going to be the stability issue with the battery. It is going to take some time to get these new chemistries incorporated in the battery. I think there is still a lot of effort and research needed to drive the cost down. In the next five years,” he adds, “you will see more commercial application. Right now what you are seeing are demonstrations where vanadium redox batteries are application critical — where you cannot have something shut down. What you are going to see, ideally, is systems at the residential and community level, where homeowners can store power and use it when needed.”

Ultimately, Sprenkle says, “there is no other viable candidate. Vanadium redox batteries are going to change the way we integrate renewable energies into our current grid structure.”

Source: Resource Investing News

“The program is unique because it allows business students and science students to come together and work on a project for Mayo Clinic,” says Trent Miller, MISP project advisor.

Along with providing Minnesota undergrads with training and research opportunities, MISP aims to help Mayo’s Office of Intellectual Property assess new product submissions by Mayo researchers.

According to St. John’s University senior bio major Dalton Buysse, the MISP program is “a way to put the material learned in class toward a project with real world implications.

As a science student,” he continues, “it was nice to have some experience with the business side of health care. I can’t think of a better organization to have the opportunity to work with than Mayo Clinic.”

Source: College News

• Percentage of income derived from research grants
• Percentage of faculty who have ever received income from patents/licensing
• Cumulative earnings from patents/licensing
• Perception of fairness in licensing income distribution
• Perception of TTO effectiveness
• Attitudes regarding the TTO
• Number of invention disclosures filed
• Incidence of conflict or disagreement with university over intellectual property
• Perception of clarity in IP-related rules and policies

The report, published by Primary Research Group, is available to e-News readers in print or PDF for just $195. For more details and to order, CLICK HERE.

The Framework, which launches next year, will rank universities based on the research output of individual faculty. Those faculty chosen by their departments as the most likely to rank highly will submit their four best papers to a panel, which will then assess and publicly rank each faculty member by a star system, one being lowest and four highest.

“Of course,” Kurman writes, “money has to enter this picture at some point: the more four-star faculty a university employs, the more government funding the university will receive. Four-star academics will be worth their weight in pounds — literally.”

The catch, Kurman says, is that the faculty assessments are not quantitative, and that the panel determining the rankings is composed of government-appointed, nominated judges. Scoring will be based on reported activity in three major arenas: Individual faculty research output (65% of total score); a university’s total social and economic impact (20%); and a university’s environment and facilities (15%).

Though Kurman has no quarrel with the UK government’s desire to improve the quality of university research and education, she believes “a key shortcoming of the REF assessment process is its subjectivity” and that “two of the three portions (faculty research output and university impact) are qualitative.”

Mainly, Kurman fears that such a process is “ripe to become heavily politicized, rendering it perhaps yet another empty exercise in who’s who in a particular academic fiefdom.”  Kurman suggests that any future U.S. ranking process — “motivated by a current harsh economic climate and public concern over bloated, irrelevant and costly universities” — should include simple quantitative data transparency.

For an illustrative model, Kurman points to Microsoft’s Academic Search engine, where you can compare the productivity of individual faculty from around the world; see the intellectual links between faculty who are citing and collaborating with one another; and see how universities themselves compare. Kurman proposes her own assessment system, “just for fun,” that would evaluate both universities at large and their individual faculty.

For universities she proposes these measures:

1. University-wide scholarly impact (based on total h-indexes).
2. Total, combined faculty research output (total papers).
3. Ability to turn research into public benefit (# of active inventions per federal research dollar).
4. Industry impact (amount of industry funding received for collaborative research per federal research dollar).
5. Tech transfer impact (commercial health index, jobs created by startups health index, speed to licensing index).

For individual faculty she proposes:

1. Scholarly productivity and impact (individual h-index).
2. Innovation impact (number of innovations and books in external use).
3. Ability to add value to industry (amount of industry funding received in past year for collaborative research).

Source: Triple Helix Innovation

“This is a kick in the teeth for the city,” a Winnipeg executive was quoted saying.

Over the years, the NRC’s research in Winnipeg produced some significant commercial spinoffs based on MRI technology, including IMRIS Inc., which generated about $52 million in revenue from its novel surgical-theater MRI devices last year. Ian Smith, the NRC’s former director general in Winnipeg, was quoted last September saying researchers there had spent years working on low-field, high-performance magnetic resonance systems that could sell for one-tenth the cost of conventional MRIs. The coming sale of two NRC buildings in Winnipeg would seem to put an end to that project.

“I guess the NRC did not want to be a landlord,” says a nearby Winnipeg executive.

“These changes are going to be challenging,” says Tracey Maconachie, executive director of the Life Sciences Association of Manitoba, “but there could be great opportunities with a more focused approach for Manitoba and Canada as a whole with the work that is being done at the NRC.”

Source: Winnipeg Free Press

“Like the little engine that could,” they write, “Bayh-Dole keeps quietly chugging along moving our economy forward. Strangely, the Kauffman Foundation decided it has been running on the wrong track.” Here the authors refer to Kauffman Foundation’s “free agency” idea, originally floated in 2009 and now a part of the Startup Act making its way through Congress. In short, the idea is to give university inventors the right to shop their technologies to outside developers — other TTOs or third-party entities — even though their universities would retain IP rights. Tragically, Dole and Allen write, despite a complete lack of evidence that this would improve tech transfer productivity, or that it would not actually damage U.S. competitiveness, “some in Washington seem to be buying their message.”

Conversely, they note, there are reams of data showing just how important and crucial

Bayh-Dole’s construct has been to the generation of products, revenues, companies, and jobs over the past 30-plus years. Bayh and Allen urge Washington policy makers to listen to leading universities themselves, citing a letter responding to the concept from tech transfer stalwarts MIT, Stanford, and WARF, reading in part: “It would be inappropriate for us to handle inventions from inventors outside our own institutions. And we would have no interest in doing so.”

Bayh and Allen point out that it takes years for university inventions to hit the market, and that “even successful discoveries are unlikely to make significant money in the short run.” For this reason, the authors fear that if inventors turn to outside firms to license their inventions, “only the lowest hanging fruit may be commercialized,” with crucial yet difficult fields such as biotech falling by the wayside.

It’s crucial factors like these that are ignored by Kauffman and other free agency advocates, Bayh and Allen argue. “To those who have never commercialized a university invention, it appears a simple task. They imagine companies beating down the doors looking for the next big thing. The reality is greatly different,” they write. “If you want to improve a system,” they add, “it’s best to ask those actually playing the game — not those yelling from the sidelines.”

The authors conclude with an ominous warning: that China recently announced a 26% increase in basic research funding. “We abandon the Bayh-Dole model at our peril,” they say.

Source: The Atlantic

ACPHS has filed a $10 million complaint in Albany County Court charging that the partnerships it hoped would bring the drug to the marketplace have instead “substantially damaged and diminished the value” of the invention. The named defendants are the CLF Medical Technology Acceleration Program and the Charitable Leadership Foundation (CLF).

The complaint maintains that in 2006, unbeknownst to the college, the Ordway Research Institute, who collaborated with ACPHS on the invention, granted CLF Medical an exclusive license. The college later consented to this agreement, but only if it could be kept up to speed throughout further licensing negotiations — a promise that was never kept, the college argues.

The complaint says that eventually CLF Medical ceased funding research aimed at commercializing the invention and declined to pay for ongoing intellectual property protections. In April 2010, according to ACPHS, CLF gave Ordway an exclusive sublicense to use the thyroid hormone in cancer prevention and treatment — again behind the college’s back. Thus the $2.2 million CLF received as part of the deal was never share with the college, the complaint states.

A year later, when Ordway filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, ACPHS requested custody of the patent files for the thyroid hormone invention, but the CLF and CLF Medical rejected the request.

The complaint states that “fraudulent transactions were made without fair consideration, leaving the defendants with insufficient assets to fulfill their obligations under these agreements and therefore these transactions were fraudulent as to ACPHS.”

The college also claims that the defendants “formed a conspiracy to fraudulently obtain, convey, conceal and dispose of the interest of ACPHS in the joint invention.” It is asking the court to find the 2006 and 2008 agreements and the later sublicense agreement to Ordway void and unenforceable, through “fraud in the inception” or due to material breaches by the defendants.

Source: Courthouse News Service

A small but growing number of universities have identified this growing trend as a way to enhance TTO revenue and better serve their researchers – and now’s your chance to join them. Technology Transfer Tactics Distance Learning Division has secured two top-level university tech transfer professionals with first-hand experience in app development, support, and negotiations with Apple and Google. Join Dr. Svetlana Sowers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Michael Halbrook, senior project manager at Purdue’s Office of Technology Commercialization, on Thursday, May 24 for a 60-minute webinar that promises to get your TTO on the path to an entirely new source of income: Create a New Revenue Stream by Supporting On-Campus App Developers. (Note: This program has been rescheduled from its original date of April 19.) For complete details and to register, CLICK HERE.

MORE DISTANCE LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES:

• Thursday, April 26: Moving From First to Invent to First to File: Understanding the Opportunities and Challenges
• Thursday, May 3: In-Depth Analysis of Mayo v. Prometheus: What it Means for the Future of Medical Diagnostic Patents
• Tuesday, May 15: Disclosure Assessment and Triage: “An Innovative Model for Patent Decision Making”

Steven Wood, CEO of CTA, says the germ of the idea began when he and his team noticed that “OCU-centric investors, especially alums, wanted and needed a vehicle to participate in their alma mater’s efforts.” Based on that observation, “a unique leading edge model was developed whereby Cowboy Technology, serving as an embryonic first investor in OSU tech, could have a sister fund that could benefit from participation and engage the wider OSU family.”

Thus CTA was born, comprised of OSU alumni and supporters who pool their funds together to create a single fund, which is then available to provide early-stage capital to new businesses spawned by university research.

Investors are broken down into two groups: “Orange” investors, or those who contribute at least $100,000 to the fund; and “Power” investors, who contribute at least $10,000. The initial goal is to raise somewhere between $3 million and $5 million.

“If we are successful,” says OSU alum Jim Troxel, “the CTA fund will put OSU on the map across the country for developing an innovative way to provide investment and financial support to the university.” Troxel is also team leader at Development Capital Networks, which is providing CTA with connections to technology and capital, and tending to CTA administrative procedures.

“Cowboy Technology Angels,” Troxel continues, “is not replacing donations from alumni to the university, but it offers another way to give back that might give a return on their own investment to themselves as well.”

Source: The Lipper Current

As part of the deal, Merck gets access to the developments of new biotech companies that aim to launch groundbreaking new treatments — a potential source of new agents to bolster its pipeline. Flagship, on the other hand, with its elite team of entrepreneurial-minded researchers, gets a major company to provide essential support when needed.

Afeyan sees the project more in line with the open innovation movement than purely financial motives, with Merck going out of its way to lend a hand to fresh start-ups “long before [they’ve] taken the shape of an asset [Merck] may want to do a deal with.”

According to Merck senior vice president of worldwide licensing and knowledge management Roger Pomerantz, “the collaboration with Flagship underscores Merck’s commitment to fully engage with the entrepreneurial ecosystem at the earliest possible stages and to access breakthrough science for the development of novel therapeutics.”

Source: FierceBiotech

Georgia Tech will provide support from its business and economic development arm the Enterprise Innovation Institute and will share its expertise from the GA Tech Nanotechnology Research Center. 

The French government along with the Lorraine region, the department of Moselle, and the European Union are funding the Lafayette Institute, where some important work is already underway. Several hundred students, both French and American, are now enrolled on the Metz campus, and more than 2,500 students and 100 faculty members have spent at least one semester there.

GA Tech’s international reputation also helped the Loraine campus connect with European companies interested in developing new technologies. “It’s very important to build a global network,” says Leopold Demiddelereer, director of business initiatives at Solvay SA, a company focused on incorporating alternative materials to silicon (such as graphene) into printed electronics. Demiddelereer adds that the internationality of the students at GA Tech-Lorraine is attractive to multinational firms.

Steven McLaughlin, GA Tech’s vice provost for international initiatives, says the Lorraine campus is a strong example for other universities looking for a viable model for overseas collaboration. “It is no longer an experiment,” he says.

Source: Global Atlanta

Madison, a member of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s (PNNL) Economic Development Office, notes that prior to Innovate Washington, a few tech-related organizations made efforts to serve the state’s economy. But each had their own goals, their own sources of funding, resources to offer, and so on. Under Innovate Washington, says Madison, these disparate groups have been restructured into a cohesive organization that can interact directly with industry partners.

According to Mike Schwenk of the PNNL, “This was no small undertaking. Many parties from all over the state, including business leaders from right here in the tri-cities, did a lot of heavy lifting to bring together the state’s universities, high-tech and business associations, clean energy businesses and environmental organizations to make this significant restructure happen.”

In 2011, the Legislature codified Innovate Washington and Gov. Chris Gregoire signed it into law. Now operating as a non-profit rather than a state program, the organization can partner with and receive funding from a much wider range of sources, according to Madison. “The organization employs an outcome-focused, sector-based approach aligning research, industry, financial, regulatory and others involved in the technology transfer lifecycle in a new and exciting way,” she notes. “The first sector in its sights? Clean energy,” Madison adds.

She goes on to cite the important role the tri-cities could play in the organization. “The abundance of renewable and clean energy sources and the breadth of related expertise and innovation available via partnership with the state’s only national laboratory are two major reasons.”  With the new Tri-Cities Research District in continuing development and the proactive efforts of the Mid-Columbia Energy Initiative to help local tech startups take off, Madison foresees real progress coming out of the area.

Source: Tri-City Herald

Named Granulocyte Colony Stimulating Factor (GCSF), the medication is used to stimulate the production of white blood cells in cancer patients undergoing cytotoxic chemotherapy to help battle infections. “Once the patent is filed,” says IIT professor Anurag Rathore, “we will approach industry through Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer [FIIT] and auction the technology.

Rathore notes that the path to market may be much quicker that a typical new agent. “We have established bio-similarity to [an] approved drug via exhaustive analytical testing. Since the majority in India do not have health insurance and cannot afford expensive drugs, we hope to bring down the cost by at least 40-50%.”

Rathore adds that despite this drastic deduction, the price “will still give the company about 10% margin because the production costs will be halved.” The institute “has created a high throughput process development platform that enables one to work 50 times faster than traditional experimentation,” he explains.

Source: Hindustan Times

Based on nanovesicles that target specific cells and tissues, V-Smart treatment will be applied to a variety of diseases that attack the central nervous system, such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), and brain malignancies. Its controlled release technology is designed to increase efficacy and reduce adverse effects.

There currently is an unmet need and a significant medical challenge for a safe, effective, and trustworthy drug delivery method to apply chemotherapeutic agents to patients with Parkinson’s, brain cancer, and other central nervous crises. “Our goal,” says co-inventor and BGU professor Eliahu Heldman, “is to target, protect and restore dopaminergic neurons [or nerve cells] in the brain that deteriorate during the course of Parkinson’s disease. The success of this project should improve Parkinson’s patients’ lives.”

Source: EurekAlert

“The initiative,” says J. Ian Gray, vice president for the MSU Office of Research and Graduate Studies, “demonstrates MSU’s commitment to bring more of our best research ideas to the marketplace, while we foster the development of critical skills for our students and help improve the Michigan community.”

Led by executive director Charles Hasemann, the MSU Innovation Center will now coordinate the activities of three units — Spartan Innovations, MSU Technologies, and CONNECT, the tech transfer portal at MSU — under one roof. “By bringing these diverse resources — business outreach, business commercialization and business creation — into one well-orchestrated effort through the MSU Innovation Center,” says Hasemann, “we feel that we have a very strong program for making the most of MSU’s intellectual capital.”

According to Hasemann, MSU faculty and students, along with the Michigan business community, will now have better access to the resources and networks they need to take MSU technology to market.

Source: MSU News

Technology Transfer Tactics,
Vol. 6, No. 4, April 2012

• TTOs line up against free agency provisions in Startup Act. The concept of free agency — the idea that university inventors should be able to commercialize their innovations however and wherever they prefer — has been sparking heated debate ever since the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation unveiled their thoughts on the matter in 2009. But now there is new urgency in these discussions.
• Mayo v. Prometheus: A looming ‘disaster’ for tech transfer? Researchers and tech transfer leaders were shaken by the recent Mayo v. Prometheus decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, which suggests that any research development based on a law of nature is not patentable. If the decision is interpreted broadly, an untold number of promising research projects could have no prospects for commercialization.
• Make sure your IP is fully protected in aftermath of Stanford v. Roche. Most, but definitely not all, university technology transfer offices have apparently learned — and implemented — the key lesson from Stanford v. Roche: Require faculty and staff assign the rights to their inventions when you hire them.
• Irish TTO’s survey touts future job potential of start-ups. Most technology transfer offices talk a lot about the number of jobs their start-ups and other initiatives have created in the recent past, but the University College Dublin’s NovaUCD has taken a different tack. The UCD commercialization arm recently surveyed its entrepreneurial faculty on the prospects for the future, rather than the results of the past, asking start-ups to estimate their projected impact on jobs.
• Legal Consult: Take these steps to ensure your TTO is ready for AIA.
• Consulting firm calls for new, more proactive model of tech transfer. The traditional model of tech transfer is evolving into a more proactive process — one in which a growing number of universities recognize they can no longer “sit and wait” for the development of ecosystems that will not only benefit them in the short term but lead to greater long-term economic viability.

Under the new Ohio State Innovation Foundation (OSIF), the university will begin to invest in start-up companies and invest $20 million in funding and facilities to kickstart entrepreneurial activity and venture generation in Ohio. According to university officials, the overall goal of the OSIF is to create a platform that can support the commercial efforts of OSU’s tech transfer office, enabling the university to accept equity as compensation for licensing its technology.

OSU president E. Gordon Gee hopes the university will soon move from being a public land-grant college to a charter university, thereby enabling the school to act more like a corporation. A marked increase in university revenue could also mean lowered tuition for in-state students, whose current migration from OSU’s high cost has earned the phrase “brain drain” among state and university officials.

“Now more than ever,” says Gee, “it is clear that our shared future lies in sustained investment in education, creativity, and innovation, all of which directly fuel economic growth… For our part,” he continues, “and for the lasting benefit of Ohioans, we at Ohio State continue to move aggressively in both advocating for regulatory freedom and reconfiguring and reinventing out institution.”

A major investment that’s part of the overall OSU effort is a new Technology Commercialization and Knowledge Transfer Center, where researchers and students will be able to meet with entrepreneurs to brainstorm ideas for start-ups. Upon entering the $2 million institute, formerly a grocery store, visitors will be greeted by retro, lime-green décor, with light bulbs hanging symbolically from the ceiling and TV screens displaying breakthrough discoveries in agriculture, bioengineering, medicine and other areas.

A kitchen, laptop bar, and conference rooms are all available to students, professors and business leaders alike; there’s even a ping-pong table to loosen up the brainwork.

According to Geoff Chatas, chief financial officer at OSU, the university’s old tech transfer office was “dark, depressing and completely inaccessible to students and faculty… Very few people even knew it existed.”

Despite being ranked highly in research spending among other schools with tech transfer programs, OSU hasn’t seen much return — only $1.4 million in licensing revenue in 2010 despite a whopping $756 million in research expenditures. “OSU is a leader in research,” says Brian Cummings, the university’s newly hired vice president for technology commercialization, “but it has not converted that research into commercially viable businesses that generate jobs, tax revenues and a higher standard of living for Ohio’s citizens.”

Sources: The Columbus Dispatch and Examiner.com

PLUS, A GREAT LINE-UP OF ADDITIONAL WEBINARS COMING SOON…

• Thursday, April 26: Moving From First to Invent to First to File: Understanding the Opportunities and Challenges
• Thursday, May 3: In-Depth Analysis of Mayo v. Prometheus: What it Means for the Future of Medical Diagnostic Patents
• Tuesday, May 15: Disclosure Assessment and Triage: “An Innovative Model for Patent Decision Making”
• Thursday, May 24: Create a New Revenue Stream by Supporting On-Campus App Developers

• Tease or spam the investor. Don’t be too persistent or distasteful in your self-promotion, Zwilling says, offering a particularly cringe-worthy example: “Give me a call to hear about the most disruptive technology since the wheel.” He also advises against asking an investor to check out your website first and comment.
• Send the plan without a summary. Here Zwilling points out the importance of an Executive Summary, a simple one-page elevator pitch of the entire plan and key business parameters. “Too many plans don’t have a summary section,” he adds, “or the summary is all you get. You lose in either case.”
• No plan in the business plan. Avoid turning your business plan into a modified product description that tells you “more than you want to know about the internals of the product,” says Zwilling, “but almost nothing about how and when you plan to sell it and make money.”
• Embarrass your English teacher. Zwilling insists that an unprofessional-looking business plan draft with misspellings, grammatical errors and obvious draft markings will only convince an investor that your business will be operated in the same unprofessional manner. “Remember,” Zwilling writes, “investors invest in people before ideas.”
• Fill the text with acronyms. “Remember that the people reading your plan are smart, but not intimately steeped in the acronyms of your technology,” offers Zwilling, advising that using too many acronyms often looks “inconsiderate, lazy or maybe an intentional obfuscation of facts. Stick to laymen’s terms.”
• The base plan is a book. Zwilling cautions against mucking up your plan with wordy or redundant writing, and to stay somewhere in the 20-page range. “Stick to the facts,” he says. “At best, long plans make your business seem complex and more risky.”
• It’s all in an appendix. Though investors won’t mind seeing supporting documents with your base plan, Zwilling notes, the plan needs to be complete and cohesive before you jump to a heavy, hundred-page appendix. It won’t impress.
• Trash your competitors. Here Zwilling warns against saying something negative about your competitors you wouldn’t be able to defend if they were in the same room; statements about “poor usability, poor quality, fat and slow” will be read as unprofessional, or even unethical unless supported by third-party data.
• Prototypes and demos attached. “Remember,” says Zwilling, “that early prototypes and demos usually break or don’t work for unfamiliar users.” They also don’t convey all the work and passion you’ve put into the project, he argues. “Pictures and words leave a much better impression at this stage.”
• Letters from your friends. Networking through the investors themselves, acquiring praise from their friends, is one thing; but positive letters from your friends “don’t carry the same weight,” Zwilling says. “Customer testimonials and vendor contracts are much more impressive.”

Source: Startup Professionals Musings

Docetaxel is used in prostate cancer patients who have been unresponsive to hormone therapy and is currently delivered by infusion, which floods the body and affects both cancerous and healthy cells. But by using targeted nanoparticles as part of the new treatment, called BIND-014, healthy cells can be largely kept from harm.

BIND-014 has been shown to deliver ten times more docetaxel to tumors than an equivalent dose of conventional docetaxel, translating to major improvements in antitumor activity and tolerability. “The development of BIND-014 represents a unique public, private and philanthropic funding effort to fast-forward and realize the potential of nanomedicines for the benefit of cancer patients,” says Jonathan W. Simons, MD, president and CEO of the Prostate Cancer Foundation.

In 2007 the PCF supplied MIT’s Koch Institute with a $5 million grant to develop BIND-014.  “PCF’s funding leveraged an early and significant NCI nanotechnology investment in this prostate cancer therapeutics research,” Simons continues. “With this exemplary new work across institutional boundaries, BIND-014 represents an entirely new, programmable platform for targeted, cancer drug delivery — and it moved to the clinic in a strikingly short period of time.”

Source: MarketWatch

Strangely enough, just over a year after this speech, Boris Zingarevich, a Russian businessman with ties to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, purchased the Ener1 technology outright, a move that worries some technology experts in the U.S. So far, Zingarevich’s plans are unknown, but as Julie Wernau of the Chicago Tribune observes, “the deal for Ener1 shows how the global economy can blur the lines between private business and national interest.”

Still, U.S. government officials claim there are no regulations against transferring taxpayer-backed technology to foreign parties. According Stephen Blank, an expert on Russia and professor of national security at the U.S. Army War College, “in a company whose ownership is connected to Medvedev, you have a golden opportunity for a military technology transfer and, perhaps, civil transfer from the U.S. to Russia at no cost.” Blank also points out that under Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Russia is second only to China in its efforts to acquire cutting-edge energy-related technology from the U.S. — both illicitly and legally — to reduce its own dependency on hydrocarbons.

The Department of Energy says it is only concerned about whether or not the company can successfully produce and market its batteries, and the Navy made a similar statement.

However, according to U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, “there is definitely a growing concern about a foreign-controlled or owned company attempting to gain a foothold into our supply chain in the United States.

“We need to make sure,” he continues, “that the federal government isn’t an unwitting accomplice to the theft of our own national secrets by providing them with multimillion-dollar government grants.”

Ener1 is the second major case of a foreign takeover of U.S. technology, the first being the acquisition of Solyndra, a maker of solar panels that were aimed to spark alternative energy growth in the U.S., by a Chinese competitor. In a case like Solyndra’s, Stearns comments, “instead of producing thousands of ‘clean energy’ jobs, the administration’s loan guarantee and grant programs are yielding bankruptcies and the squandering of taxpayer dollars.

“Only two days after President Obama highlighted federal investments in high-tech batteries in his State of the Union address earlier this year,” Stearns adds, “Ener1 joined Solyndra, Beacon Power, Evergree Solar, SpectraWatt and AES in bankruptcy — all recipients of taxpayer dollars.”

Source: ChicagoTribune.com

The new structure is being branded as UVA Innovation, a university-wide initiative led by W. Mark Crowell, executive director of UVA Innovation and associate vice president for research. Crowell says the new approach is “designed to enhance the activities of the university’s researchers and entrepreneurs and maximize the impact of innovative UVA discoveries on the global population and economy,” according to a statement released by the university. “In creating my position about one and one-half years ago, which is a university position, the decision was made that we needed to ‘knit’ the Patent Foundation more strategically and to weave it together with the fabric and the priorities of the university,” Crowell says.

The former Patent Foundation is now operating as the University of Virginia Licensing and Ventures Group. The group will emphasize the commercialization of university technologies through licenses with industry and other entities and through start-up companies. The goals are to build stronger ties with faculty, create more startups, encourage a longer-term horizon for making technology investment decisions, and better align research commercialization activity with the university’s goals. “While it was deemed necessary five years ago to have a 501c3, we now feel it’s important to shift to a business model that is not totally dependent on licensing revenues, and that will be more closely aligned with the priorities of the university and of the deans,” Crowell explains. A detailed article on the restructuring appears in the March issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. To subscribe and access the full article, along with nearly five years of archived best practices and success strategies, CLICK HERE.

Hayward listened to Singh’s interests, his new venture, and offered him guidance, external connections, and a list of resources available to students on campus.

“Entrepreneurship thrives at Stanford, but entrepreneurship means different things to different people,” says Hayward. “Each student has unique needs, experiences and appetite for risk.” In other words, she adds, “there’s no such thing as a standard entrepreneurship inquiry. Listening and staying connected to students from all over campus is key to the success of this role.”

The entrepreneurship concierge position is sponsored by Citi Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of Citi. Based in Palo Alto, Citi Ventures will provide students with industry mentors and coaches. “Anything we can do to promote the entrepreneurial spirit at Stanford ultimately benefits all of us in the venture community,” says Debra Brackeen, head of incubation at Citi Ventures. “We work with internal and external partners to develop the highest new growth opportunities that are relevant to Citi customers and businesses,” she adds. “Supporting the next wave of Stanford entrepreneurs through our work with the concierge and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program is a perfect fit for us.”

Source: Innovation Daily

• Company location
• Investment portfolios
• Companies invested in
• Areas of focus
• Primary contact personnel
• Funding areas/indications
• Stages funded
• Total dollars under management

Having easy access to this critical data can mean the difference between getting the funding you need to advance your start-up or develop your technology and seeing it die on the vine from lack of resources. With the new BioWorld Biotechnology and Medical Device VC Directory 2012, you’ll have access to the information you need — covering VCs in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia — so you can find the right financial partner and keep your company on solid ground. For more details and to order, CLICK HERE.

Trademarked Tekcrete Fast, the innovation allows for “almost immediate stabilization of damaged infrastructure,” says Peter Mills, technology leader at Minova. A slightly different formulation, titled Tekcrete Fast M, is used specifically in underground applications to stabilize hazardous, potentially life-threatening mining conditions.

“This is a great example,” says UK President Eli Capilouto, “of bringing UK research and transformational technology to the marketplace. Collaborations with leading businesses such as Minova are very important to UK and the commonwealth in fulfilling our Kentucky Promise as the state’s land grant institution.”

According to Tom Robl, associate director of environmental & coal technologies at CAER, the licensing deal is “an important and productive partnership for CAER and we believe there is even more potential for collaborative R&D projects in the future.”

Source: EconDev

The licensed technology is designed to work in conjunction with geothermal heat pumps, which pump heat to or from the ground by taking advantage of the moderate temperatures found underground. It can also examine weather forecasts, electricity costs, and building usage to calculate when it is most cost efficient to turn on the system.

A less obvious advantage to thermal storage is that it allows building designers to size systems for average loads, as opposed to traditional systems which size for the hottest or coldest days of the year. This cuts out the heating and cooling capacities that would typically go unused for most of the year.

Specifically for AllCell, the new technology will be a perfect application for the waste and scrap PCMs generated by the company’s battery production. Now AllCell will be able to lower the cost of their batteries by utilizing the waste of one product for the production of a second project, while also improving the environmental sustainability of their business.

Source: ECN Magazine

The university sees the new program as a way to spur commercialization efforts rather than reining anyone in, says Russell A. Straate, associate director of the Venture Center in the school’s Office for Technology Commercialization. “We’re constantly looking for ways to improve our commercialization efforts,” Straate says. “There are a lot of things changing for institutions like ours — changing the drivers that determine what we do. There are more pressures from the federal government, and the state government, for universities to help contribute to local economic development, and this is one of several things we’re doing to respond.”

Straate and others in the OTC realized that faculty members were not taking full advantage of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and/or Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grants available to them. In talking to faculty members about why they don’t pursue those grants as aggressively as they could, the commercialization leaders found that the faculty were shying away out of concerns that they could violate conflict of interest policies.

“They just felt uncomfortable with the process and the mechanisms of setting up a company, being involved with it, and how that would affect their positions at the university,” Straate explains. “So we sat down and over the last year and a half worked with our conflict of interest team to put together a program that clearly communicates how to seek those grants and develop a company. It’s a prescribed method and process that takes a lot of the unknowns out of it. It’s a recipe for getting it done.”

Rather than a detailed set of rules and processes, the COI program now spells out how faculty and the university will be involved with developing companies. It specifies who is responsible for certain activities, and who will hold the major interest in the company. The new program also specifies some forbidden activities, noting for instance that the faculty member’s lab may be used for research on behalf of the new company but may not be paid by the company for that lab time. “We don’t allow the faculty member to receive company compensation during the time of the grant, so that helps keep it clean and straightforward,” Straate says. A detailed article on the new COI program appears in the March issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. To subscribe and access the full article, plus hundreds of archived articles filled with TTO success strategies, CLICK HERE.

Through the HPC center, Rutgers and IBM — the university’s partner in the new effort — hope to improve the economic competitiveness of New Jersey’s public and private research organizations, while contributing to fields such as cancer and genetic research, medical imaging and informatics, advanced manufacturing, environmental and climate research, and materials science.

In its first phase, the HPC center will utilize supercomputing equipment and software provided by IBM. Researchers at Rutgers anticipate that, as the center expands, eventually they will have one of the world’s most powerful academic supercomputers.

The three main goals of the new center are as follows:

1)      To create an HPC resource and expert support for industry in New Jersey and the surrounding region.

2)      To educate the New Jersey workforce and students at Rutgers in working with advanced analytics and a high-tech HPC center.

3)     To provide HPC resources to Rutgers faculty and regional organizations who are expanding their use of extremely large data sets.

“There is immense potential here,” says Rutgers VP of tech transfer Michael J Pazzani. “The ability to conduct data analysis on a large scale, leveraging the power of ‘big data,’ has become increasingly essential to research and development.

“Just as important,” he adds, “is the valuable new resource that we are creating for industry. The institute will collaborate with businesses that need high-performance computing capabilities but can’t justify the cost of building their own system.”

According to Phil Guido, general manager of IBM North America, “the application of analytics to ‘big data’ has quickly emerged as the new foundry of the 21^st century economy.” Guido also says that his company “firmly believes that public-private collaboration and research can be critical in ensuring our workforce is equipped and empowered with next generation skills like analytics.”

Located at Rutgers’ Busch Campus in Piscataway, the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer –“Excalibur,” as the faculty at Rutgers call it — will be the only supercomputer available to commercial users in the state. “There is a strong correlation between having this level of sophisticated research infrastructure and research productivity,” says Manish Parashar, a Rutgers professor and the lead faculty member on the project, who will serve as director the institute. “It will enable research at a scale we could not support at Rutgers before, and it will allow students and industry to have access to HPC to a much greater degree. And this installation is the first step in creating a large-scale infrastructure at the institute, so it’s a huge milestone.”

Source: MarketWatch

Although the first-to-file provision of the AIA does not take effect until next March, waiting too long to prepare your organization and your researchers for this historic shift will only leave you playing catch-up later, or worse yet putting your valuable IP in jeopardy. It’s critical that you start preparing for the changes now, and begin the process of adopting researcher education and patent prosecution practices to conform with the new regime. That’s why we’ve recruited renowned patent attorney and tech transfer expert Charles R. Macedo for an April 26 session that will arm you with the strategies and tactics you need to prepare effectively: Moving From First to Invent to First to File: Understanding the Opportunities and Challenges. For details and to register, CLICK HERE.

The landmark Mayo decision directly affects how universities approach patent decision making for diagnostic method patents, and will almost certainly impact the Myriad case, as well as a whole range of method claims surrounding other technologies. To help you make sense of the complex patentability issues raised by the decision, and to guide you in drafting future claims, we’ve signed up patent law guru Kevin E. Noonan, PhD, for a May 3 program where he’ll dissect the Court’s decision and help you understand how to adjust your patent strategy in light of this development. For details on In-Depth Analysis of Mayo v. Prometheus: What it Means for the Future of Medical Diagnostic Patents, CLICK HERE.

ALSO COMING SOON:

• Tuesday, April 10: Successfully Apply “Lean” Start-Up Principles to University Spinouts
• Wednesday, April 18: Using A Network Approach to Valuing Patents and Inventions
• Tuesday, May 15: Disclosure Assessment and Triage: “An Innovative Model for Patent Decision Making”

Barnett notes that “the pressure to publish in academia is so great, and the protections on research that would seek to replicate so poorly represented, that one wonders if university science is, generally and simply put, unreliable in its published form.” In short, Barnett fears this problem is eating away at the credibility of university research and by extension tech transfer, whose staff are put in the unenviable position of pushing for licensing deals surrounding science that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Barnett’s suggests that tech transfer leaders can contribute to a solution to this problem by adopting these changes:

• Every time a “technology available for licensing” is published, the description must indicate if the innovation has been independently replicated by another lab.
• Provide a standard, cost-free, formality-free license for anyone to create and use an invention for the purposes of evaluating published claims.
• Published inventors must disclose all their findings, “not just those that claim a distinctive or apparently valuable result.”
• All backing data should be made available for examination for anyone looking to evaluate a technology available for license — whether for commercialization or research — similar to publications that are relied upon for public rule-making.

“However,” Barnett adds, “these suggestions are just for the conventional patent-marketing technology transfer office.” What the community needs for tech transfer to be a real leader, according to the author, is collaboration. “And by collaboration,” Barnett writes, “I’m not meaning a patent license or hitching up to a state-run economic development resource (though at times these can be quite good)… I mean honest, forthright engagement, so that others can visit the lab, see the data, review the practices… that’s where technology transfer starts.”

Source: Research Enterprise

Wayne State’s tech transfer office will administrate the fund in partnership with Blackstone Launch Pad.

The Warrior Fund will begin with a total of $25,000, which is to be dispersed in micro-awards of between $2,500 and $5,000 to individual start-ups, according to Andrew Olson of the Wayne State TTO. The fund will announce its first investment recipient in a few weeks.

“It’s great to have resources,” says Olson, “but the ability to write checks is what really knocks down barriers. Students have the ability to practically live on air. They can do more with less.”

Through the fund, students will be coached on how to craft a venture pitch, and a panel of WSU advisors, local and regional VCs, and community leaders will judge the students’ ideas. The golden rule throughout will be that no one can tell a student no — just yes, or not yet. “It’s all about paving the road forward,” Olson adds. “We want start-ups to use the money on prototyping or to hire a developer to build a mobile app. We want this money to be need-to-have funding, not nice-to-have.”

The big picture, according to Olson, is that the companies receive funding will remain in Detroit long term, helping to bolster economic growth in the school’s region.

Source: Xconomy

Previously Kurman had introduced five “common challenges in bringing university research to market” that apply to schools of all shapes and sizes, and in the new post she adds five more.

Challenge 1. Town, gown and state may not always see eye to eye. State politicians want their constituents to see them as “fiscally responsible,” says Kurman, and giving money to state universities doesn’t seem to fit with this political litmus test. “As a result,” she says, “the relationship between the university and state government is strained,” yet tech transfer departments often get tasked with creating region-based jobs to appeal to politicians and the public. Kurman’s solution is to make it easier and cheaper for start-ups to acquire university technology. This way, people will see that universities are devoted first and foremost to economic development, not making money.

Challenge 2. Big pharma used to pay big bucks for university patents, now big pharma is becoming personalized pharma. Citing the decline of sweeping, moneymaking patents from biotech research, Kurman looks on the bright side: “personalized medicine and university research may actually be a match made in heaven.” She is referring to the new opportunity for smaller, less established universities to strike deals with big pharma since “making a just a few big investments in elite medical schools” no longer covers the rising demand for niche medicines. This revamped landscape, Kurman argues, “may force both companies and universities to explore leaner and more agile new model models of research collaboration.”

Challenge 3. The best time to learn about a new invention is before you learn about it. Kurman admits that scouting for breakthrough technologies is a bit of a crapshoot, but she offers a few suggestions to hopefully increase your chances. For one, you can easily find the names of the most active faculty inventors and follow their latest projects. Kurman also advises networking with research labs to gain access to promising technologies in development.

Challenge 4. Industry and investors like prototypes, but few universities have prototyping resources.  Kurman observes a kind of vicious cycle, in that schools have a hard time translating the importance and effectiveness of their product to investors, government and the public because they don’t have the money to build prototypes. At the same time, many state governments aren’t willing to fund “Proof of Concept” university prototyping centers. But Kurman sees a hopeful trend:  “rather than waiting around for federal prototyping dollars to rain down, a few universities … are funding prototypes on their own.” She encourages a system modeled on the University of Utah Tech Ventures, in which its faculty receive “small, light, fast money in the form of prototyping grants.”

Challenge 5. Everybody’s got unused patents. What are we going to do about it? For the “hundreds of patents nearing the end of their lifespan” that remain locked away in file drawers, Kurman suggests a multi-university patent pool, a sort of online classifieds listing of orphan innovations. “However,” she adds, “patent pools are a strategy that’s difficult to sell to higher-level university administrators.” This is because each university in a patent pool must agree to a common revenue split, and administrators, who are largely responsible for generating revenue from university patents, are at risk in this situation. If their university’s technology happens to make millions, and the school only reaps the revenue shared by everyone else in the pool, it could be a career-ender. But Kurman offers a politically favorable flipside: “consider that these patents, if left on the shelf of their individual university, would likely never find a home…. By taking the risk of releasing a potentially lucrative patent into the wild, universities would demonstrate that they truly are patenting and licensing research for the greater good and not to earn licensing revenue.”

Source: Innovation Excellence

Invented by the company’s chief scientific officer Jonathan O’Halloran, the new handheld device can quickly and simultaneously detect large numbers of different cells and biomaterials. Aided by IME’s technology, this new innovation is expected to provide affordable, rapid and accurate clinical targeted DNA sequencing when needed.

“The collaboration,” says IME Executive Director Dim-Lee Kwong, “clearly demonstrates the potential of IME’s cross-disciplinary expertise and capabilities in the bioelectronics industry…. We look forward to working with [QMDx] towards the commercialization of their first nanowire biosensor.”

Elaine Warpurton, CEO of QMDx, added, “Not only will our partnership enable both parties to utilize our respective expertise to further develop and commercialize on-chip DNA sequencing, but it also represents a major milestone for QMDx as we embark on setting up operations in Singapore to benefit from the country’s wealth of biotech expertise and state-of-the-art manufacturing and fabrication facilities.”

Source: Nanowerk

“It’s happening, but we need more,” says Taylor, adding that “for every dollar the state has put in, someone else has given $3.” Recently Taylor testified before the House Technology Committee, where he both touted the fund’s successes and warned that the state won’t see big returns for five or ten years after the initial investment.

According to Taylor, the fund has about $60 million to invest between now and August 31^st, 2013, if it can find the right tech startups — making it “the largest seed investor in Texas.” Taylor also points out that Texas — despite its size — receives only two percent of the early-stage seed funding invested in start-ups across the U.S.

Although the fund has helped spawn 133 new start-ups, equaling roughly 820 jobs plus another 1,063 jobs created in university research labs, some critics claim it’s not enough for the money being spent. But to Taylor, “that’s like saying my two kids are dumb because they are not in college. They are seven and three. This is a young fund.”

To address the lagging fortunes of tech transfer in Texas as compared with the rate of commercialization at schools like Stanford and MIT, Taylor believes Texas universities need to focus more energy on tech transfer offices and tying investments closer to universities and their spinoffs. Taylor cautions: “We can either compete or fail…. We can either diversify our high-tech economy or watch those companies go elsewhere.”

Source: statesman.com

According to the Larta Institute’s CEO Rohit Shukla, “today’s global landscape and interconnected marketplace presents both a considerable opportunity and competition for publicly funded, tech-based entrepreneurs.” Shulka points out the need for collaboration between entrepreneurs and other players in the commercialization arena worldwide. “This agreement,” he asserts, “will encourage a collaborative and shared environment to expand on and harness these opportunities.”

The partnership will identify synergies that exist between independently developed technologies in different countries, and it will explore opportunities to export the benefits of publicly funded research to other countries to address global challenges in healthcare, water and energy.

Source: Ontario Centres of Excellence

Source: MarketWatch

The new treatment — an injection of Botox into the bladder to cause relaxation, an increase in the bladder’s storage capacity and a decrease in urinary incontinence – received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval last August. “Upon that approval,” says director of CU’s tech transfer office David Allen, “we went to a number of investment organizations that purchase royalty streams and we conducted, in essence, an auction.”

A quarter of the deal’s revenue went to the original inventor Richard Schmidt, who is no longer at CU, while 35% went to the tech transfer office and 40% went to the Anschutz Medical Campus, where the inventor worked. Unlike most TTOs that rely on university coffers for some funding, the CU office is completely self-funded.

According to CU President Bruce Benson, an additional $10 million could still be in the offing if the treatment achieves sales milestones. “This has spurred our thinking into how we can do a better job maximizing our licensing of intellectual property,” Benson says. “We have determined to form a science advisory committee to guide our efforts in the area.”

Source: Boulder Daily Camera

The researchers, led by economist Scott Shane at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH, hypothesized that licensing personnel would be more favorably disposed

toward encouraging male inventors to pursue spinoffs around their inventions, and they tested the hypothesis by asking licensing officers from around the country to review invention disclosures that were matched with either male or female inventors. A “treatment” group of licensing officers received disclosures that were each matched with a male name and photograph, while a “control” group received the same disclosures,

but they were each matched with a female inventor and photo.

Using a scale of one to five, the licensing officers were asked to indicate the extent to which they would try to dissuade the inventor associated with each disclosure from starting a company to commercialize the technology. Researchers found that the licensing officers randomly assigned to receive a disclosure matched with a female inventor were significantly more likely to dissuade the inventor from pursing a spinoff than the licensing officers who received a disclosure matched with a male inventor.

Views differ on what is behind this apparent bias, but there is wide agreement that TTOs should consider measures to root it out of their decision-making process. A detailed article on the study and reaction among tech transfer professionals appears in the March issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. To subscribe and access the full article, along with hundreds of other archived case studies, best practices, and success strategies, CLICK HERE.

The patents were invalidated on the grounds that they “add nothing specific to the laws of nature other than what is well understood, routine, conventional activity.” In response to that ruling and the Court’s interpretation behind it, the PTO’s chief examination policy guru Drew Hirshfeld told his staff how patentability criteria must now be applied: “Examiners must continue to ensure that claims, particularly process claims, are not directed to an exception to eligibility such that the claim amounts to a monopoly on the law of nature, natural phenomenon, or abstract idea itself,” he states. “In addition, to be patent-eligible, a claim that includes an exception should include other elements or combination of elements such that, in practice, the claimed product or process amounts to significantly more than a law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea with conventional steps specified at a high level or generally appended thereto.”

For a more concrete example, the document describes why the Prometheus patents failed on eligibility, citing the innovations themselves, which claim “the relationships between concentrations of certain metabolites in the blood and the likelihood that a thiopurine drug dosage will prove ineffective or cause harm.” The ability to decipher this relationship was classified as a preexisting law of nature, enhanced merely by a well-understood step.  The memorandum notes that when laws of nature are involved, an innovation with “additional steps that involve well understood, routine, conventional activity previously engaged in by researchers in the field is not patent-eligible, regardless of whether the steps result in a transformation.”

Dennis Crouch, writing on his blog Patently-O, points out that the document does not address whether patent claims that include an “abstract idea,” such as a mathematical algorithm found in software, should be held to a similar standard under examination.

In a related matter, as expected the Supreme Court, based on the Mayo ruling, vacated the Federal Circuit’s decision in the Myriad case involving gene patents and remanded it to the Fed Circuit for reconsideration.

Source:  Patently-O

ALSO COMING SOON:

• Tuesday, April 10: Successfully Apply “Lean” Start-Up Principles to University Spinouts
• Thursday, April 26: Moving From First to Invent to First to File: Understanding the Opportunities and Challenges
• Tuesday, May 15: Disclosure Assessment and Triage: “An Innovative Model for Patent Decision Making”

“The key aspect of our work is to make this inexpensive,” says Agrawal. Their process involves synthesizing the efficient new solar cell, made from copper zinc tin sulfide (CZTS), into nanocrystals, thereby becoming a kind of dark ink that can absorb light.

A thin layer of the ink — about one-fiftieth the width of human hair — is then applied to the surface of uniquely coated glass squares. After another heating process and the application of nanoelectronics, the cells are good to use.

“It is way cheaper,” says Erik Sheets, a grad student in Agrawal’s lab. “Most of the market right now is silicon solar cell, and it is really expensive and uses a high-energy process. But what we do, to coat it and make it, is very cheap. We can do the entire process here.”

The Purdue team’s solar cells are 1 square inch and achieve 8.4% efficient use of the energy in sunlight. According to Agrawal, “the holy grail is to get the efficiency up to 15%.”

To compete with other energy sources, solar cells must be capable of producing Terawatts — trillions of watts, that is — at a cost of 50 cents for each peak watt of electricity, Agrawal says. According to the DOE, this kind of energy efficiency could result in solar power meeting 14% of the U.S. electricity needs by 2030, and 27% by 2050.

“We all believe that solar will be a dominant player in our energy economy in the future,” says grad student and team member Nathan Carter. “I think we are going to move away from oil or any one [energy source] dominating 70% of energy consumption.”

Agrawal’s lab was the first to begin work on CZTS nanocrystals; last year he received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Obama. Since Agrawal started, dozens of other labs across the world have begun experimenting with the compound, and new technologies based on CZTS are being published and presented at a rapid pace.

Source: Indianapolis Star

1. Big ideas are easier than little ones. “At first this idea might make your brain hurt,” Prince says. But he points out that a project with high ambition and a bold vision will more easily attract talent. “Don’t be YAIA,” he says (as in “yet another iPhone app”).
2. Say no early and often. According to Prince, the danger in not saying “no” to big customers is that your company changes from being engineering-driven to customer-driven. The danger in that, Prince adds, is that talented people are most in their element when they’re driven by the work itself, not the cash. So be strong, says Prince, and learn to say “no.”
3. Under-price and over-simplify. These days, Prince contends, products must be easy to understand and easy to afford.
4. Invest in community service early. Whoever your customers are, says Prince, you need to be genuine, get to know them and make a contribution. This goes for anyone from top political parties to escort services — both of which CloudFare counts as customers.
5. Build learning into your product and team. Here Prince advises adaptability in the face of an unpredictable market, no matter how solid your initial plan was.
6. Be relentlessly cheap (with commodities). Prince advises being aggressive about reducing costs, and just as aggressive about passing the benefits on to the customers.
7. Be obsessively fair (especially with employees). Earning a good, honest reputation for your brand is a valuable but long-term process, says Prince, and it starts at home. At CloudFare, managers approach employees and ask, “What do you need to live?” The answer becomes the employee’s salary.
8. Aim for 10 degrees above the horizon. In Prince’s experience, many start-ups fail simply because they don’t evolve, don’t improve — and then they stall. To avoid this fate, says Prince, don’t just coast — keep your nose up.

Source: Inc.com

Can you build a winning team? Zwilling argues that even with a stellar invention, investors will shy away from a company with a minor league team. They would more likely support a company with a great leadership team, even if its product were average.

Can it even be commercialized? Here Zwilling lays out some critical hurdles you must be able to jump: manufacture and distribute your product in volume, then deal with politics, government regulations, and infrastructure. He uses hydrogen as an example: “a great fuel for cars, but who builds the network of service stations, upgrades vehicle engines, and implements safety regulations?”

Can you sell it for five times the cost? While he admits the multiple seems high, Zwilling guarantees it’s “the rule-of-thumb” most large corporations follow when first analyzing a new product. “R&D is expensive, ‘overhead’ is high, and [corporations] have to cover the cost of the nine out of ten products that fail.”

Is it competitive to the current alternatives? The low cost of energy from fossil fuels presents a major challenge for emerging alt-energy technologies. So perhaps your invention is “ahead of its time,” Zwilling illustrates, but people aren’t yet willing to dish out twice as much on energy costs to “go green.”

What is your barrier to entry? Keeping copycat competitors at bay is a key consideration, Zwilling stresses, and IP protection is your best weapon. “File a provisional patent as a place holder, a full patent, trademark, copyright, or all of the above.” Speed to market, he adds, is the most effective protection, as well as continual innovation.

Is someone ahead of you? Don’t hesitate to ask others in the field, says Zwilling, if they’ve come across an idea like yours. A patent search is a must, he adds, but it doesn’t include patents in progress, or those currently being written, so look to published papers, scientific journals and trade publications for extra measure.

Are you sure you want to be first? Zwilling reminds us that being the first with a revolutionary new technology is a risky — perhaps the riskiest — position to be in, and, as such, investors try to avoid these start-ups. With an untested concept, you’ll likely need to use your own money, or that of friends and family.

“The ultimate test,” he concludes, “is to remember that people buy and invest in solutions to problems; they don’t buy technology.”

Source: Startup Professionals Musings

According to NASA, these patents “hold broad value in any field where a need exists to design highly complex, automated and intelligent systems.” More specifically, the patents include new technologies in software-development, robotics, artificial intelligence, industrial process control, and wireless sensor networks.

NASA Deputy Chief Technologist James Adams believes auctions like this work towards the agency’s goal of “increasing the down-to-earth benefits of its research,” and of course accelerating tech transfer. Goddard’s partnership with ICAP Ocean Tomo is designed to boost NASA’s licensing program, and the public auction format will help the agency meet its commitment to release information on technical innovations and promote NASA technology for further outside use in other sectors — such as in medical, aerospace, automotive and communications industries.

Senior Technology Transfer Manager at Goddard Darryl Mitchell touts the potential scope of the IP on the auction block. “The applications range from something as broad as changing how software is created,” she elaborates, “to applications as specific as autonomic management of smoke detector networks in buildings.”

Winning bidders will have the opportunity to briefly discuss the patented technology with the inventors as part of an effort to expedite the bidder’s adaptation and successive marketing of the technology.

Source: The Sacramento Bee

By analyzing the pitch and tone of voices, the new technology picks up on what experts call the “overtrust” condition, in which a person believes the information given by a scammer. Researchers at Nagoya U built on the phenomenon where a person’s voice tone and pitch become flat in the high-frequency range when he or she is overwhelmed with worrying information. “Overtrust” refers to a person’s impaired ability to evaluate such information. Scammers will often pretend to be related to the victim, and will lead with something like “I’m in big trouble,” or “I’ve been put in jail” to overwhelm their victims. 

When examining 50 simulated phone scam conversations, the university researchers detected overtrust with 90% accuracy using the new technology. They also say it could enhance the ability to detect scams by simultaneously analyzing hot keywords used by criminals, such as “debt” or “compensation.”

Source: Asia One

The new device — a clear chip about the size of a penny — comes from the lab of Sia Vanapalli, an assistant professor in Texas Tech’s Department of Chemical Engineering.

“Right now,” says Vanapalli, “if the pharmaceutical industry wants to identify a drug, the initial step in the process is they have to screen a library of candidate compounds. The number of compounds they need to screen can range from 100,000 or more.” The current screening process uses large robots that deliver one specific concentration of the drug at a time, which is time consuming and expensive. But introducing the chip to the process would allow the delivery of multiple concentrations of the drug at a time.

“The idea is, if you are able to use a small-scale device, then the volume of reagents goes down enormously. Now because the volumes you are using are so small, as compared to the existing technology, the cost of screening also goes down,” Vanapalli explains. According to a Tech news release, Vanapilli’s lab has been able to test 60 concentrations of a drug within about 10 minutes, and they expect to improve on those numbers in future iterations of the technology.

Vanapalli is working with anti-bacterial chemicals, but he hopes the process will eventually include screenings for new anti-cancer drugs.

Source: Lubbock Online

The university has also attracted more federal and state grants, and developed high-tech research facilities in the Biomedical Discovery District, though Mulcahy himself doesn’t take credit for all the progress. Rather, he says his greatest accomplishment was crafting a culture that led to better results.

“I helped create … the attitude and the environment that’s going to help the output from those great laboratories to benefit the state and the nation,” says Mulcahy. UM aims to find Mulcahy’s replacement by fall.

Source: Minnesota Daily

Technology Transfer Tactics,
Vol. 6, No. 3, March 2012

• New research strongly suggests gender bias a force at university TTOs. It’s just one study, but it has attracted the national press, and it’s got tongues wagging in the technology transfer community. Why? Because the research deals with the hot-button issue of gender bias, and it seems to suggest rather strongly that technology transfer professionals in the U.S. are more favorably inclined to encourage start-ups if the inventors are male rather than female.
• Conflict of interest program aims to allay faculty fears, encourage start-ups. The revamping of a conflict of interest program at a university technology transfer office often signals some sort of trouble, perhaps a scandal that identified weaknesses. But at the University of Minnesota in Saint Paul, the goal was just the opposite.
• UVA restructuring based on longer-term view of IP commercialization. The University of Virginia calls it a restructuring and it is — but it’s really a good deal more than that. The school’s recent shift away from its longstanding foundation model — which operated at arm’s length from the TTO and the university — to a licensing and ventures group that works directly within the university structure represents a virtually complete shift in UVA’s approach to tech transfer.
• Heard in the Halls: AUTM 2012
• Guest Commentary: Could a hub and spoke, home-grown CEO strategy boost the success of university start-ups?
• ‘Ecosystem’ is the magic word in economic development strategy. As an increasing number of TTOs add economic development to their mission statements, new models are being developed for most effectively injecting the university commercialization arm into this process. As a number of experts have recently indicated, one of the keys to success is the coalescing of the diverse audiences that comprise what has become commonly known as the “innovation ecosystem.”

The patents cover methods of determining proper dosing of thiopurine drugs for autoimmune diseases by correlating dosage levels of the drugs with the levels of certain metabolites in a patient’s blood. In making its decision, the justices said the claims covered by the two patents held by Prometheus involve three steps: the administration of the drug to a patient by a doctor; instructions to the doctor to measure the resulting metabolite levels in the patient’s blood; and the description of metabolite concentrations, which can indicate whether a drug may have harmful side effects, or conversely may be too low to be effective, and informing the doctor that the dosage may need to be changed.

The relationship between the levels of certain metabolites in blood and the effectiveness of a thiopurine drug dosage are laws of nature and are not patentable, the Supreme Court said. The decision boiled down to whether they “have additional features that provide practical assurance that the processes are genuine applications of those laws rather than drafting efforts designed to monopolize the correlations,” the Court ruled.

In writing the opinion for the court, Justice Stephen Breyer said, “The question before us is whether the claims do significantly more than simply describe these natural relations. To put the matter more precisely, do the patent claims add enough to their statements of correlations to allow the processes they describe to qualify as patent-eligible processes that apply natural law. We believe that the answer to this question is no.”

He added that the three additional steps described in the patent claims advises doctors about natural laws and to take steps that were already routine, conventional, and previously being performed. The claims of the two patents “when viewed as a whole, add nothing significant beyond the sum of their parts taken separately. For these reasons we believe the steps are not sufficient to transform unpatentable natural correlations into patentable applications of those regularities,” Breyer said.

Prometheus sued Mayo Collaborative Services in 2004 after Mayo announced it would begin selling its own tests, which were similar to Prometheus’ tests. Prometheus holds the licenses to the patents and had granted Mayo a license to use the IP. Mayo had been using Prometheus’ test for several years prior to saying it would sell its own tests. In 2008, a federal district court said that Mayo had, in fact, infringed on at least one claim of the patents, but ruled in favor of Mayo because the patents claimed natural laws or phenomena and as such are not patentable.

Prometheus appealed the decision to the Federal Circuit, which reversed the district court’s decision after finding the patents to be patent eligible because they meet the “machine or transformation test,” a standard based on whether a technology is tied to a particular apparatus or if it transforms an article to a different state.

The Supreme Court remanded the case back to the appellate court, after the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision that certain business method patents are invalid but rejected a determination that such patents must be tied to a machine or undergo a transformation in order to be patentable. The appellate court upheld its earlier decision.

In presenting its argument to the Supreme Court in December, Mayo said that Prometheus’ patents seek to monopolize blood testing for thiopurine metabolites, with the effect of preventing doctors from providing a full range of information about metabolite levels and health for any range of immune diseases. Mayo’s lawyer Stephen Shapiro added that Prometheus’ patents’ “broad preemption of a physical phenomenon … prevents others like Mayo Clinic from offering a better metabolite test with more accurate numbers. And this is a huge practical problem for patients.”

Prometheus countered that its patents are not regurgitations of natural phenomena and its claims are preemptive only in the narrow sense that all inventions are. A ruling for Mayo, it added, could confuse existing views of patent law and hinder innovation. “And there certainly is no reason,” Prometheus continued, “at the dawn of the 21st century, for this court to adopt special rules that would render personalized medicine inventions, or other processes designed to produce useful information, uniquely unpatentable, under 35 U.S.C. Section 101.”

Prometheus expressed disappointment in the Supreme Court’s decision. “Without the availability of patent protection, future healthcare will suffer as companies may opt out of new research and development,” the company said in a statement. “This decision will, in our view, encourage imitation, not innovation.”

The case has been followed closely by the biotech industry, especially for clues about how the Supreme Court might rule if it decides to take on the Association of Molecular Pathology et al v US Patent and Trademark Office case. In that case, Myriad Genetics is trying to protect its patents related to BRCA1 and BRCA2 and methods of analysis for detecting breast cancer.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled against Myriad, but a subsequent Federal Circuit decision overruled most of the district court’s decision.

In a research note today, Peter Lawson of Mizuho Securities said that while the Supreme Court’s decision against Prometheus “adds pressure and risk to Myriad’s BRCA patents … Prometheus’ patents are not directly comparable to Myriad’s gene patents.” Jon Wood of investment bank Jefferies said in a research note that in light of today’s decision, it is likely that the Supreme Court will remand the Myriad case back to the Federal Circuit  for another review and a decision to be made in the second half of 2013 or first half of 2014. He added that he believes that isolated DNA and cDNA will remain patent-eligible materials as the Fed Circuit had determined in the Myriad case.

Source: GenomeWeb

A small but growing number of universities have identified this growing trend as a way to enhance TTO revenue and better serve their researchers – and now’s your chance to join them. Technology Transfer Tactics Distance Learning Division has secured two top-level university tech transfer professionals with first-hand experience in app development, support, and negotiations with Apple and Google. Join Dr. Svetlana Sowers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Dave Washburn, Vice President of the University of Tennessee Research Foundation, on Thursday, April 19 for a 60-minute webinar that promises to get your TTO on the path to an entirely new source of income: Create a New Revenue Stream by Supporting On-Campus App Developers. For complete details and to register, CLICK HERE.

MORE DISTANCE LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES:

• Thursday, March 29: Building Data-Rich Market Validation Plans for University Technologies
• Tuesday, April 10: Successfully Apply “Lean” Start-Up Principles to University Spinouts
• Thursday, April 26: Moving From First to Invent to First to File: Understanding the Opportunities and Challenges

“I was elated when I saw the patent,” says Boozer, “because this marks the beginning of a new era of obtaining affordable patent and technology transfer services. For universities, small businesses and independent inventors, the VTTO is a practical solution to patenting, marketing and licensing new products.

“The most important thing to note about the VTTO,” she adds, “is that it was designed to ensure that the innovations developed by HBCU [historically black colleges and universities] inventors and creators are properly attributed and have the greatest chance of being commercialized.”

Professor and Acting Vice President for Reseach K. Ken Redda congratulated Boozer, saying he believes the VTTO “will substantially enhance the process of bringing new discoveries and inventions to the marketplace.” Boozer also has the support of Ken Tolson, who was appointed to President Obama’s board of advisors on HBCUs.

“In essence,” Tolson says, “her tool will help increase the presence of HBCUs on the Milken index, increase the technology partnerships with majority schools and ultimately answer the President’s call for increased opportunities for HBCUs in the areas of STEM and technology transfer. Kudos to Ms. Boozer,” Tolson concludes, “for having the vision to see it through.”

Source: Florida Agricultural And Mechanical University

The new patent, which allows a substantial increase in the energy conversion efficiency of photonic components, was developed in the lab of Dr. Dieter Bimberg, leader of the Center for Nanophotonics and the Institute of Solid State Physics at UT Berlin.

“This kind of transfer of university know-how is only possible with professional support and execution,” Bimberg says, referring to ipal’s method of evaluating, patenting and marketing university technology.

According to ipal’s managing director Dr. Dirk Dantz, “Big deals with industry are only possible when all stakeholders — inventors, university and technology transfer technology — work together for the same goals.”

Source: photonics.com

A year ago, 3D Bio recruited CEO Laura Schrader to help guide the company through its early stages. Schrader herself signed on because she thought the company looked like a winner. “As I started digging into this company a little bit,” she explains, “I started thinking this is a company that has really great legs. It has the potential to really make a difference in drug discovery.”

The company aims to solve a lab-based issue in pharmaceutical development. As opposed to observing compound formulations on the common flat, two-dimensional Petri dish, researchers find that observing three-dimensional cell cultures is more realistic.

Establishing and maintaining such cultures, however, has proven difficult. That’s why heads are turning toward 3D Bio’s product: a small, thin plastic device pocked with hundreds of tiny “wells” in which surface tension keeps the 3D cell culture in place.

At $25 per device, 3D Bio’s new technology promises to speed up the delivery of accurate results in drug and cancer research. Having made its first sale last August, the company aims to hit $200,000 in sales in the near future — a significant number considering how young the company really is.

“It started out as fun,” says 3D Bio concept developer Meghan Cuddihy, “and as we got into it we realized there was a market here and there really was potential, and it just snowballed from there. It became more and more real.”

Source: Detroit Free Press

“It all gets sort of woven into the economic development argument,” notes Charlie Lewis, vice president at AzTE, the technology transfer office at Arizona State University, Tempe. “Through the public-private partnerships we create, we help advance the research cause of the university and we integrate the university into the local economic scene.”

Not that all spin-ins have to be local, of course; ASU works with several international companies. “But all of the commercialization activity is consistent with the public-private partnership objective we have here at ASU,” he says. “It’s all in support of the university not being a silo, but a partner and a key player in regional economic development.”

The motivation is the same at the University of Wisconsin’s WiSys Technology Foundation, notes Maliyakal John, PhD, managing director there. “This program is not only about making money for the university, although I think it will bring in revenue,” he says. “States have made an enormous investment in undergraduate institutions — infrastructure, expert faculty and R&D facilities, for example — and are now expecting contributions beyond the primary function of education. We need to be part of the local and regional economic engine, and that means assisting local companies to create marketable products.”

He adds: “Working with small companies and local start-ups provides the university with an enormous public relations advantage, too. Our legislators love the idea that the local campus is now assisting a small company to grow.”

WiSys’ spin-in activity began in 2010 with an initiative called the Wisconsin Small Company Advancement Program (WiSCAP), John explains. “We essentially bring technology from outside the university and develop it further in partnership with the company,” he says. “We identify a technology that may benefit from specific technical expertise of our faculty and staff and work with the company to jointly develop and market the technology.”

The program helps small companies that might not otherwise be able to move their technologies or products further along without expert assistance. “Many established companies have sufficient research resources and budgets to go to a university and conduct a ‘contract’ or ‘paid-for research’ project,” John says, “and the company funds the R&D. In our case, we are focusing on small and start-up companies with creative product ideas that do not have the resources to advance their novel product concepts rapidly to the market. So, we fund the joint development and the company provides matching funds in the form of in-kind support.” A detailed article on the spin-in efforts appears in the February issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. To subscribe and access the complete article, along with our nearly five-year archive of back issues filled with best practices and TTO success strategies, CLICK HERE.

Located near top academic centers including the Scripps Research Institute, the Salk Institute and the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, the Calibr center aims to do work in early-stage drug discovery, Schultz says. The new institute is looking to recruit 100 to 150 employees skilled in medicinal chemistry, protein chemistry, pharmacology, imaging, screening, and analysis of basic prerequisite lab and animal tests. According to Schultz, there were over 30 resumes submitted within just a few hours of Calbir’s announcement.

For a long time big pharma companies like Merck have had trouble accessing this kind of early stage R&D. Academic research centers are certainly capable, but due to lack of funding they don’t often perform the kind of “translational” research that industry wants.

According to Schultz, however, the Calibr center will reach out to academics with its industry backing, without having to confront the various levels of decision-making — such as legal and licensing hassles — that tend to muddle interactions with big companies.

“If you’re just two research groups,” says Schultz, “you can enter into collaboration, and it’s simple. Any revenues that may come from the work, we share equally. It’s an easy thing to do, when two equals work together in a complementary way.”

Though he hasn’t specified exactly what kinds of projects the Calibr institute will undertake, Schultz says “the key criterion is that it’s something with a novel approach,” citing immunology, cancer, metabolic disease, cardiovascular disease, degenerative and regenerative medicine as areas of specific interest.

On the other side of the deal, Merck President of Research Peter Kim will be appointed to Calibr’s scientific advisory board, where he will have a window into the center’s research activity. Merck is also getting an exclusive opportunity to negotiate for licensing of the earliest research to come out of Calibr and its collaborators. Any innovations the company chooses not to pursue would then be available to other companies.

“The hope,” says Schultz, “is we’ll do things Merck is really excited about because they’re a terrific partner who can take things to the next level. But if they don’t, they want to make sure any discoveries are fully exploited, so the institute will have the freedom to take those to other organizations.”

Source: Xconomy

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