The article below appeared in the October 2008 issue of Technology Transfer Tactics.

What Cummings terms a “realignment” began on January 20, 2005, when university president Michael K. Young announced the establishment of the Office of Technology Venture Development (Tech Ventures) and named business school dean Jack Brittain, PhD, to lead the new entity, which is operated separately from the TTO. Just over three years later, the university’s AUTM data for the 12 months from July 1, 2006, to June 30, 2008 boasts two dozen new university start-ups formed.

“Proper alignment is critical,” says Cummings. “The president of the university is the one who said we had to change the way we do business and be a driver of regional economic development; he clearly set the path when he created this new organization.”

Part of that organizational change has the TTO and Cummings reporting directly to Brittain, which “gave us great alignment with the business school and entrepreneurial individuals,” Cummings explains. The move increased the TTO’s exposure to faculty, staff, students, venture capital companies, angel investors, and corporate CEOs.

“As far as I can tell this is a unique attribute of how we have done things,” comments Brittain. “We had a new president. He looked around and saw that the dean of medicine ran our hospital and it worked, so he figured why not have the dean of the business school run commercialization? This brought a different perspective within the unit.”

Brittain says the technology commercialization mission and the university’s education mission are highly integrated. “Last year we had 774 students involved in our programs,” he notes.

Students actively help commercialize technologies. “We have teams made up of business, engineering, and science students,” Brittain explains. “They develop commercialization plans for specific early-stage technologies, providing market research, writing business plans, and getting additional translational research; it’s been hugely successful.”

Asking for help

To get the most out of the realignment, says Cummings, it was important to engage the entire university community. “We look at ourselves as constantly trying to facilitate meaningful quality interactions — the more people get involved, the more good things happen,” he observes.

So the ‘Tech Venture Development’ team reached out to the faculty, students, investors, and corporations, as well as to state legislative and economic development officials, and asked these simple questions: “How can we engage with you?” and “How can you help us create more companies and jobs?”

“We established an open-door policy,” says Cummings. “We communicated the fact that this was a new and creative venture, and we wanted them to be involved.”

Networking events were an important part of that outreach, says Brittain. For example, one regular event, called “Technology Tuesday,” brings 50 leading venture capital firms and corporations together with 50 top university researchers.

Start-up growth initiatives

Another key to the success of the realignment, and the more intensive focus on start-up development, was establishing more than 20 separate, specific initiatives designed to support new companies and faculty inventors. Here are a few of the most effective of those initiatives:

• Restructuring royalty ‘splits’ to support start-ups: The university had been using a typical 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 arrangement for royalty splits, notes Cummings. “But we asked the foundation to give some of their money back to us because we felt we could spend it better,” he says. His office was granted 20% of the foundation’s share and used it to develop internal grant programs.
• Micro grants: Part of that extra funding was used to distribute internal micro grants to help bridge the funding gap for early-stage research. “We found these little $5,000 pools of money to be one of our most valuable assets,” says Cummings. He recalls hearing from TTO managers at other universities — more accustomed to huge grant awards and even larger endowments — how surprised they were at the impact of small gap funding awards. “They did not realize the value in tiny amounts of money; they are so important to inventors in translational research,” he comments. Many universities are missing this low-cost, high-impact opportunity, Cummins adds. As time went on, larger grant programs were developed, like a $35,000 grant for technologies that have progressed enough to begin seeking licensing opportunities, and a $50,000 program specifically directed to university start-ups. “We also started a seed fund called ‘Kick Start,’” Cummings adds.
• Departmental liaisons: The office established a point of contact in different departments to enhance communication. “We actually measure our outreach — how many times we go to see these faculty members to see what’s going on in their area,” says Cummings. “For example, in the School of Medicine they selected a person who is savvy in internal medicine and is also an entrepreneur. They give him a portion of his salary to serve as an interface for commercialization.”
• Entrepreneurial faculty advisory group: The TTO established this faculty advisory board, composed of 10 university researchers who have already been through the commercialization process, to counsel colleagues involved in start-ups. “They go out and talk [to founders] and tell them what to expect, what problems and hurdles they will face, and how to deal with them,” says Cummings.
• ‘Venture Bench’: The office has organized 15 to 20 services within the university that are all centered around supporting the new companies. “They include an internal graphic designer and web hosting, a ‘cookie cutter’ accounting system, market plan assessments, secretarial services, and corporate document set-up,” says Cummings. “We also have outside contract CEOs,” adds Brittain. “We let the founders stay totally focused on the critical path.”

You don’t need a business school

While the situation at Utah is clearly unique, “you don’t necessarily have to have a business school to model what we’ve done,” says Brittain. “You’ve got to be open to other people participating. If you are totally closed and want to hold [onto your IP] too tightly, you can just strangle it.”

In simplistic terms, he offers, it’s a lot more fun to go to the playground when other kids are there. “The tech transfer model is often very closed, but there are students, the business community, VCs, and others to work with,” Brittain stresses. “We look at other [tech transfer] operations and see them worrying too much about protecting things. You develop a kind of invidious logic of not letting anyone else touch it. We understand that we have to steward the IP and use it to the benefit of the broader public, and we know it benefits student and faculty ventures. But the best way to do this is to have a lot of participants.”

Many TTOs are simply too inflexible, he continues, particularly when dealing with sponsored research. “We have three business development people who proactively go out and get commercial sponsors,” Brittain reports. “We try to be really flexible; we ask them their expectations in terms of timing, and when they say they want something in seven days we do it in seven days.” A few years ago, he notes, the university was doing $15 million in sponsored research; today, that figure is $40 million — 15% total research dollars. “This success also comes with alignment,” he says. “We call our lawyers, and get our faculty engaged. Everybody is better aligned.”

Even license negotiations with the start-ups are more flexible, adds Brittain. “We’ve really done a lot more optioning structures — keeping a lot of options [open] for the companies, and for us too,” he says. “Rather than beat out a hard agreement, we do more [optioning] than we’ve ever done in the past.”

He credits much of this more flexible approach to Cummings’ vision. “He gave me the language of the library,” Brittain recalls. “Some TTOs are like libraries — full of books, and not wanting to let them out. But you need to get them out and get them in use; they don’t do anybody any good sitting on the shelf.”

Contact Brittain at 801-587-3836 or brittain@business.utah.edu; contact Cummings at 801-581-4701 or jean@tco.utah.edu