The article below appeared in the September 2008 issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. Click here to subscribe.

The bottom line, according to John Miner, licensing associate in the Office of Research and Commercialization at the Orlando-based University of Central Florida: “You don’t need 25 people in an office. If you leverage what you have and get the best people, you can do great things.”

One of his key tactics for leveraging what he’s got, he explained at the AUTM annual meeting, is his Student Assistant program. Like many great ideas, it was borne of necessity. “My ‘Aha! moment’ was when I almost missed a conversion date because there was so much disorganization in the office,” he says. “So I asked for a student assistant — a common resource here — in 2001 and went from there.”

Of course, using students as opposed to professional staff has significant financial advantages. “A licensing assistant can cost you $58,000 a year, for someone to do things like web searches on companies. A patent manager can cost you another $58,000 a year, for someone to do things like manage disclosure paperwork and input data. And an administrative assistant can cost you $37,000 a year, for someone to do things like maintain paper and electronic files, process paperwork and provide office support,” Miner noted. Can’t swing an extra $153,000? Paying an SA $9 an hour for five hours a day will set you back $225 a week, he calculated, but if those hours are unfilled by support staff, they can result in lost productivity, fewer deals done, shoddy handling of invention files, less faculty support, and a ton of stress for overworked staff.

Originally, Miner approached ongoing SA recruitment as if he was hiring for a standard campus job. But that tended to produce standard campus job applicants — that is, students interested primarily in picking up a few extra bucks. “By shifting our focus to business students, legal students, and honors college students, we pulled in a group of candidates that was more tech-savvy, responsible and hard working — and who had an interest in tech transfer,” he said. “Faculty and deans have both sent students our way.”

In general, he recommends recruiting sophomores or juniors from among the undergrad student body, and grad students when possible. Freshman may be too green, and seniors are too focused on what’s next. Work-study students do make good candidates, he added, so long as they’re as tech-focused as possible. As a rule, Miner shies away from students on academic probation, who may not be on campus too long, and those who are financially secure and may lack motivation. Hiring friends or family of current SAs is a no-no as well, he adds.

The first step after an SA is brought on board, of course, is training. “Students can get by with minimal oversight as long as they have been trained right,” Miner said. “And training is pretty quick. I’d say new SAs are moving things [along] without major issues within two or three weeks. They start out as warm bodies but they gradually become mini experts. In fact, some of them have joked with me that at parties they tell people how to get patents!” That “fun factor,” as he puts it, is an important tool for keeping good SAs as long as you can. “Small raises go a long way, too,”

Student staff a ‘Band-Aid’

UCF’s first SA in 2001 focused on filing, working the phones and “exploring the boundaries of student TTO labor,” Miner reported. In 2003, he added two more SAs and a business intern. Two years later, he added two more SAs and a couple more College of Business interns. Last year, he fleshed out the TTO staff with four more SAs, two drafting students, and six legal interns. “That’s a realistic boundary for maintaining control,” he explains.

Indeed, he told TTT in a follow-up interview, “there is a practical size limit to such programs, and I think it may be different for each office.” At the end of the day, SAs are a BandAid, he emphasizes, though a much-needed one for TTOs struggling to build a small office. “They’re not real employees, and you don’t give them a diploma or anything. At some level, there can always be a place for them in a TTO,” he says, “but the need for long-term employees is pretty important, if not the most important thing, to getting your office to succeed.”

Small TTOs join forces

Barbara H. Eccles, manager of technology transfer in the Innovation Management Office of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, ON, used a dramatically different tactic to leverage her small TTO’s assets. Lakehead and six other small universities joined to form a virtual tech transfer office called the Ontario Partnership for Innovation and Commercialization (OPIC) as an alternative to any one of the schools aligning itself with a larger school.

Each member institution could boast no more than one or two people in its TTO, and the size of each one’s research funding varied, as did the types of research being carried out in each. Along with Lakehead, participating schools are Laurentian University and Nipissing University, both in Northern Ontario; Brock University, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, and Trent University, in rural Ontario; and Ryerson University in Toronto.

There was, Eccles told AUTM attendees, an element of politics in forming the small TTO consortium. “When we were considering creating OPIC, others suggested that we really needed to align with a larger institution,” she said. “But we believed it was important to ensure that our needs would be taken seriously in a consortium, and not lost in comparison to a large institution.”

Smaller offices are not necessarily less experienced than larger offices, she pointed out in a follow-up interview. “We have some very experienced individuals,” she stresses. “However, smaller schools do tend to either have more generalists or to be missing expertise in critical areas. Larger offices have access to more expertise simply because they have more staff. We wanted to show that smaller offices can band together and fill in some of those gaps by sharing expertise.”

OPIC’s two half-time staff, a coordinator and an administrative aide, are its central assets, Eccles explained. The remainder of the staffers are employees of their respective institutions and have primary responsibilities to them. OPIC is administered partially by the coordinator and the administrative staffer, who’s housed at Ryerson, the lead institution on two of OPIC’s major government funding applications. UOIT was the lead institution on another major funding application, and Lakehead took the lead on another that has been submitted but not yet granted. “Even the funding applications are distributed over the network,” Eccles stresses.

She adds: “To date, a great deal of our time has been spent creating the network, and continues to be spent administering the network. We have determined that there is significant administrative overhead and that’s something that we really do need to streamline in the coming months. We are constantly working to tweak the network to minimize the amount of time spent on network administration.” OPIC will likely have different priorities in the future on how to spend its financial resources, she adds, including “more focus on the blood and guts of tech transfer rather than capacity building.”

Successful capacity building

One of the consortium’s key successes, Eccles says, has been the creation of tech transfer offices at all member institutions and capacity building at offices that existed upon formation but that didn’t have full-time staffers. New offices have been created at UOIT and Nipissing, and activities have ramped up at Brock, Ryerson, Laurentian, and Lakehead, Eccles reports. “In addition, the number of invention disclosures, outreach to our stakeholder groups — including researchers and industry — and other significant activity indicators have increased,” she says.

The consortium has found it helpful to bring in outside help to assist with funding applications. “We found that we all trust each other and have developed very good working and personal relationships,” she explains. “It is therefore sometimes hard to ask the hard questions and ultimately reject someone’s application for funding.”

In the past two-and-a-half years, reported Hitesh Jain, knowledge and technology transfer specialist at OPIC member Brock University, one of the consortium’s major benefits has been “the high level of collaboration between the technology transfer managers from the respective offices. With a confidential disclosure agreement in place, we can freely seek advice, guidance, input and support from other members. We collaborate on specific IP files and jointly engage in program development and strategic planning for the benefit of all offices.”

In addition, he said, the close contact among OPIC members “has created a sense of camaraderie, trust and respect that fosters closer collaborations. That was an unforeseen advantage, but it turns out to be a necessary ingredient for the creation of a distributed virtual technology transfer office.”

OPIC has supported approximately 25 projects from all seven institutions, Jain reported in an AUTM poster, and has committed more than $200,000 in funding to support patents, commercialization studies, demonstration projects, and proof of principle studies. Results of that activity include the formation of one start-up company, filing a half dozen patents, and receipt of “follow-on” funding from a federal agency.

Consortium not without problems

But there have been problems, particularly in the administrative overhead arena, Eccles points out. “Having a distributed model is hard,” she says. “And it took a long time to get a joint database up and running. We’re looking into joint implementation of software for expertise searches, but that’s taking much longer than we expected. We are all small universities with small IT departments, and we are all stretched quite thin.”

Money, not surprisingly, has been a problem too. “The AUTM Salary Survey has shown that there is a marked disparity between tech transfer salaries in small universities and those in larger universities,” Eccles says. “OPIC member institutions must deal with staff turnover, as we hire and train staffers who then go off to higher-paying jobs.”

Moving forward, Eccles says one of the key challenges will be keeping a small-office feel as the consortium grows. Program implementation and moving to “true collaboration” will always be a focus, she added, including a critical consideration: “Branding. My logo or yours?” Here’s how she advises other schools to meet the challenges a consortium of small-school TTOs will likely face:

• Have a coordinator on board at the start. “Members are so busy and thinly stretched in their own home institutions that OPIC administration often ends up at the bottom of the pile. A coordinator is key to ensuring that the required grant reporting and other network administrative tasks get done.”
• Meet face-to-face often, especially at the beginning. “We had the benefit of a year’s worth of monthly face-to-face meetings … prior to forming OPIC. Once the group was formed, regular face-to-face meetings, especially with a group dispersed over a geographical area bigger than France, is critical to developing trust relationships and carrying out the business of the consortium.”
• Implement electronic sharing resources early, such as a web site with a member-only section, a shared IP database such as Inteum, and a private list-serv. “Those approximate internal office structures and are critical to making collaboration relatively easy,” Eccles says.
• Work very hard to build trust, respect and camaraderie. “Think of any normal non-distributed office. Individuals go for lunch together, take coffee breaks together and stop by each other’s offices to chat on their way to a meeting. That contact helps create a healthy internal atmosphere in which people can help each other. When you are dispersed over a large geographical area, you have to work extra hard to create that sort of environment.”

Contact Miner at 407-882-1136 or jminer@mail.ucf.edu; Eccles at 807-343-8184 or beccles@lakeheadu.ca; and Jain at 905-688-5550, ext. 4808 or hitesh.jain@brocku.ca.