Blogs

7 Reasons Why Your AUTM Annual Meeting workshop, educational track or special interest group proposal was NOT Accepted

By Claire Driscoll posted 09-13-2011
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The AUTM Annual Meeting (AM) Program Committee is responsible for lining up all of the educational content at the AM—we chose the plenary speakers as well as select the workshop, educational track (ed track) and special interest group (SIG) sessions that will be presented at the AM. In addition, the committee is responsible for coordinating various special events that will be run at the annual meeting (such as the venture forum, the Texas Hold 'em poker tournament, fireside chat, partnering activities, etc.). The 20 or so members of the committee are tasked with choosing a balanced mix of beginner, intermediate and advanced-level sessions on timely and appealing ...
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AUTM Leadership Forum: A Huge Success!

By Todd Sherer posted 11-19-2012
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The AUTM 2012 Leadership Forum took place Nov. 13-14 in Napa, CA. The event provided a great opportunity to connect and discuss taking a leadership role in accelerating commercialization. Our keynote speaker, Richard Bendis, Founder and CEO of Innovation America, gave the opening keynote address: The Global Innovation Imperative. Bendis discussed the evolving role of universities in driving the innovation ecosystem around them. He discussed the importance of universities in regional innovation clusters and how critical it is for them to be active participants in private/public partnerships that are leading the growth of innovation-based economic developing ...
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Debate topics HOT for upcoming Annual Meeting!!!

By Alan Bentley posted 01-26-2010
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As many have heard, the AUTM Program Committee has scheduled 2 debates for the upcoming Annual Meeting. The Committee endeavored to select relevant, controversial and interesting topics – little did the Committee know how on-the-mark it would be! Both of the debate topics have recently received wide public attention. The SACGHS report came out last year providing suggestions to limiting the patenting of genomic inventions, and the final report is due in short order (surely to spark controversy). More recently the Kauffman Foundation Harvard Business Review snippet and subsequent letter to the Commerce department surfaced suggesting that university inventors ...
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Are Webinars a Passing Fad?

By Marcel Mongeon posted 03-17-2009
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Not a day goes by without an invitation to yet another webinar. Some are 'free', others are paid. The free ones are clearly marketing come-ons. Goodness knows, I've considered them myself for some training services that I offer. The paid ones intrigue me and I'm curious what people are doing with them. Both AUTM and other organizations are offering webinars (or web-assisted teleconferences) on at least a monthly 'paid' basis. We are offered those who are labeled as experts in many fields that appear useful to our work. But there seems to be little accompanying material that will be part of the webinar and the few webinars that I have been on seem to be plagued ...
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Howard Bremer's Legacy Should be Celebrated

By Sean Flanigan posted 10-11-2013
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Our profession has suffered a great loss today, and everyone here at AUTM—the Board and staff, are mourning one of technology transfer's most well-known and beloved icons, Howard Bremer. While this news is heartbreaking, we should focus on Howard's stunning accomplishments during his 53-year career in technology transfer and the tremendous legacy with which he leaves us. There is very little that I can say that would do justice to Howard's impact on the technology transfer profession and AUTM. He began his career working on well-known and enduring products including a few very famous detergents and toothpastes that many of us use every day. He helped evolve ...
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Just Say "No" to Free Agency

By Todd Sherer posted 04-13-2012
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Dear AUTM member: It was two years ago when we first saw a proposal from the Kauffman Foundation referencing a concept that is now referred to as "free agency." It appeared in a memo to the Department of Commerce and Harvard Business Review. Arun Pradhan, as AUTM president at the time, wrote an excellent response to Commerce and we saw very little activity around the concept for some time. Last December Senators Moran (KS) and Warner (VA) introduced S. 1965 , The Startup Act, to the Senate. This bill is a good one—providing much needed support to accelerate the formation of startups and removes some unnecessary hurdles. However, there is one ...
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Recommended change to AUTM bylaws to make Board nomination process more transparent

By Todd Sherer posted 05-09-2011
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At the behest of the AUTM President, Robin Rasor, I recently co-chaired a task force on the AUTM Board nominations and elections process. Our task force interviewed close to 10 organizations and compared their nominations and election processes to our own. Some of the organizations we spoke to have similar processes and expressed concern over the transparency of their elections. We presented our findings to the AUTM Board of Directors during the Board meeting May 3, and recommended one change going forward: The Nominations Committee (comprised of nine individuals, with at least five being non-Board members) will put forth at least two names for each open position, ...
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AUTM Central Region Meeting in Louisville: July 25-27, 2011

By Mike Allan posted 03-28-2011
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Greetings to the cheering throngs of individuals who are checking out my new blog. (Thanks for reading this, Aaron!) Okay, so maybe it's not easy to think about Louisville in July, but here in the hinterland, we're trying everything we can to conjure up warm thoughts. Enough of winter, already! The meeting is really coming into focus. Thanks to the superb efforts of Holly Clark, our site chair, and her colleagues at the University of Loouhvill (*), the logistics are coming together nicely. Jude Wilkinson and Chase Kasper, our Program chairs, are whipping the sessions (and their moderators!) into shape and we've just posted our schedule online (See ...
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The Great Debates: coming to an AUTM A.M. near you

By Alan Bentley posted 06-08-2009
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Colleages, The AUTM program committee just met to finalize the 2010 Annual Meeting program, and the committee is enthusiastic about a number of new initiatives that should enrich the AUTM experience for Annual Meeting attendees. We will update you weekly on some of these initiatives via blog entries. One interesting and exciting element added to next year's AM will be a DEBATE format for several workshops - the first of its kind at AUTM. We are working out the details of the debate format, and we are finalizing topics ripe for debate - we will post more on this as things develop. Suffice it to say, the debate format is being designed to effectively probe ...
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How to Quickly and Easily Manage Your Schedule in AUTM Connect

By Stephen Susalka posted 02-21-2013
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With AUTM less than a week away, you might be thinking things like “How am I going to get all my work done before AUTM?” and “What exactly is my plan for AUTM?” While I cannot help you with the former, I have written this blog to quickly and efficiently figure out your schedule for AUTM in ten minutes. Ready? OK – let’s go: First print out this blog, unless you have dual screens so you can read this and use AUTM Connect™. 0:00 - Log into AUTM Connect™ here . If you're registered for the meeting, your user name has already been emailed to you. If you can't find it, click on the login link anyway, and select the "retrieve login credentials" ...
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The rumors are true - a Venture Pitch Competition comes to AUTM in 2011

By Alan Bentley posted 11-01-2010
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As we all know, the creation, care and feeding of academic startups is a high profile aspect of what we do as academic licensing professionals. For this reason, new company creation, funding, and governance have become a core part of the AUTM educational program for quite a while. At the 2011 Annual Meeting, we are taking a bold step forward to celebrate our involvement and dedication to the venture portion of our profession by rolling out an exciting new initiative – the inaugural AUTM Venture Forum. The Venture Forum is comprised of start up Venture Pitch Competition, followed by venture capital Panel Discussion. We will be soliciting Executive ...
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Nurturing the (Tech Transfer) Start-Up Vision

By Glen Gardner posted 03-24-2016
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I wanted to share an idea on this blog that I found fascinating. Our neighbors to the north, the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce presented an innovative concept of mandatory entrepreneurial education in middle school. The video was inspired by Manitoba BOLD, a crowd-sourced effort to discover what citizens envision for the future of the community. A Bentley University survey of millennials found 66% wanted to have their own business someday and 37% wanted to work for themselves. Yet the Brookings Institute reports business start-up rates are much lower than in the 1980s. Why is that? More young people want to work for themselves and yet less of them are ...
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Marquis events at AUTM 2011

By Alan Bentley posted 02-02-2011
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It can be hard to get on people's radar screens sometime. I may be preaching to the choir to you loyal AUTM blog readers, but many still don't realize how the AUTM Annual Meeting has been evolving over time - changing for the better. The AM will always be the premier professional development meeting for academic TT professionals - but industry partnership development and venture investing activities are becoming a huge part of the meeting. I have taken the liberty of highlighting some of the not-to-be-missed events at the upcoming AUTM Annual Meeting, in the order that they occur. I know this post is long, but I am crazy excited about how this meeting ...
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AUTM expands Annual Meeting to 4 days - what gives?

By Alan Bentley posted 01-20-2011
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As many have already noticed, the timing and structure of the next AUTM Annual Meeting are a bit different than in past years. The AM is deviating from its traditional Thursday-Saturday time slot, and will be held in Vegas on a Sunday-Wednesday schedule. Though there has been talk of experimenting with a different time slot for quite some time, the actual motivation in this case is that Vegas hotels do not want conventioneers taking up valuable hotel space on weekends when the gamblers roll into town. So be it – we are breaking new ground. Perhaps as important to note, however, is that the AM is now a bit longer than in previous years, and jam-packed ...
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Thoughts on my first AUTM annual meeting

By Vinay Tannan posted 09-02-2009
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Dear fellow AUTM members, Having recently attended my first AUTM annual meeting, I was invited to share my thoughts on what I found to be the most enriching aspects of this experience. The AUTM meeting offers the unique opportunity for members to learn the concepts of technology management, develop meaningful relationships with peers, and identify ways to improve their own institutional operations. Come for the education, stay for the networking. The annual meeting has something to offer for members of all levels, beginner to advanced. Based on my expertise in different areas, I was able to identify the sessions that would benefit me ...
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Academic Studies

By Claire Driscoll posted 11-11-2009
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Academic Studies Blog entry #1 (11/11/09) By Claire Driscoll (NHGRI, NIH) and Pat Anderson Cotton (University of California) Our goal is to use this blog to share information about some of the new initiatives being developed and implemented by AUTM to more effectively reach out to technology transfer research scholars. Our profession has now been around long enough to attract a growing body of dedicated researchers who actually study what we do! Ironically many of us who “work in the trenches” do not have the time to read or incorporate findings from scholarly articles and published analyses despite the fact that doing so would likely help us to better ...
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Help us choose a theme for the 2010 Better World Report

By Kristin Rencher posted 09-14-2009
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Help us choose a theme for the 2010 Better World Report 1) quality of life 2) regional economic development The committee believes these themes will allow a wide rangeof technologies and institutions to be represented, while staying true to the Better World Report ’s mission: to promote how academic research and technology transfer benefits millions of people, contributes to a stronger economy, supports new research and encourages tomorrow’s breakthroughs. With its long shelf life, high visibility and far-reaching impact, the Better World Report is one of the association’s signature publications. We need your help in making the 2010 ...
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Excitement brewing for AUTM Annual Meeting 2012

By Alan Bentley posted 11-30-2011
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‘Tis the season to begin the Bentley blog blitz to hype the most excellent AUTM Annual Meeting we have in store for y’all next March (I am living in the south now and am told that the “y’all” is mandatory). The meeting is not that far away, and the hotel has fewer rooms than usual – so it may be worth signing up early to ensure you are in the conference hotel (although there are ample accommodations all around the area)). Last year’s meeting will be hard to surpass in terms of overall satisfaction, and we are definitely bringing back some of the most well received programming elements for this year’s event – the Venture Forum, Texas Hold’em Tournament ...
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Counting Cards at the AUTM Texas Hold ‘Em Poker Tournament

By Jonathan Jensen posted 09-24-2012
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When the first Texas Hold ‘Em Poker Tournament was announced as part of the 2011 AUTM Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, I wanted to make sure I was prepared. I had visions of playing against the likes of Greg “Fossilman” Raymer, a former Pfizer patent attorney and 2004 World Series of Poker champion. I downloaded poker apps to practice on my phone and searched around MIT for Kevin Spacey. When we arrived at the event at Caesar’s Palace, I was ready. I grabbed a drink at the bar and found a table with a good balance of both friendly and poker faces. As the game went on, I chatted with the eight other people seated at my table. We talked about work, we talked ...
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Competition in Technology Transfer

By David Maskalick posted 04-02-2010
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The purpose of this article is to suggest new ways to address the substantive educational issue of commercializing knowledge produced by research universities. All but a few research universities, commercialization centers, and venture capitalists could benefit from a better understanding of this educational issue, so that more discoveries and inventions can be applied more rapidly to the goal of achieving global sustainability. This article also is an attempt to communicate to a broad audience the best way to interpret and translate discoveries and inventions into products that would simultaneously help “the major players to confront and grapple with the ...
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