I apologize to the membership for taking so long to start sharing my thoughts and observations about what is going on in our world. I guess I’m just from the pre-blog generation, but hopefully this old dog can learn a new trick or two. Since I’m rarely short of an opinion, it’s just a question of my getting comfortable with the medium and the immediacy of it.
Let’s start with a positive – an excellent article by Bob Tedeschi that appeared in last Friday’s New York Times titled “The Idea Incubator Goes to Campus.” The story is about the emergence of Proof of Concept Centers on university campuses. The primary focus of the article is on two of the best known Proof of Concept Centers, the Deshpande Center at MIT and the von Liebig Center at the University of California, San Diego, but also discusses centers at University of Utah, Georgia Tech, the University of Kansas and the University of Southern California.
The Kauffman Foundation funded an excellent review of the von Liebig and Deshpande centers in 2008. The study showed that, while proof of concept funding did not seem to improve the overall licensing success rate, which was still around the overall average of 25-30% of invention disclosures received, that is reported year in and year out in the AUTM Annual Licensing Activity Survey, proof of concept funding was highly effective at catalyzing creation of startup companies.
Whereas only about 15% of inventions are reported to be commercialized via startups in the AUTM Annual Licensing Activity Survey, 84% of the successful commercialization of inventions that had been funded through the von Liebig and Deshpande Centers were through startups, a rate almost six-fold higher. These startups went on to raise an average of 80 times the amount of capital that had been invested in advancing the technologies by the Centers.
Data like this, together with data from successful state Proof of Concept programs, is one of the reasons that AUTM strongly advocated for federal proof of concept funding to be made available to academic institutions in our recent response to the Request for Information issued by the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Krisztina Holly (known to her friends and to her e-mail account as "Z"), vice provost for innovation at the University of Southern California and executive director of the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation (and a former director of the Deshpande Center) has been in the forefront of efforts to secure funding for academic proof of concept centers. At her instigation, the NSF has allocated $12 million in its FY2010/11 budget to create innovation ecosystems based on proof of concept centers. She has published a commentary in Forbes on Tedeschi’s article.
Another important observation about Tedeschi’s article is that it illustrates how the role of universities in technology development is changing and how the role of technology transfer professionals is changing with it. We are evolving, in activity if not in name, from being Offices of Technology Transfer – taking what crosses our transoms and getting a license done – to being Offices of Technology Development – helping faculty strategically manage the development of their technologies.
This partnership with faculty – the technology development office taking the lead on the business front and faculty taking the lead on the scientific front – is one of the hardest aspects of the practice of technology development to communicate to the outside world. This collaborative reality stands in stark contrast to the “them versus us” picture painted by the Kauffman Foundation in their fatally flawed “free agency” proposal, which Kauffman was promoting to Congress as recently as June 29, despite the outpouring of criticism it has evoked not only from the technology transfer community but from across the entire innovation ecosystem. Perhaps I’ll blog about this next!