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I am a consultant hired, about a year ago, by the University of Minnesota, to do a couple things that you may be interested in and that I feel are relevant to your blog post.

They initially hired me to do an analysis of IP exchanges, like the ones that you referenced. I looked at iBridge, Folio Direct, Flintbox, Knowledge Express and several others. The mission was to try to find a technology exchange that would:

1. Fulfill leads driven to the site by the creators of University of Minnesota intellectual property.

2. Provide the ability for an inventor or department to link to the OTC Express Licenses site, so interested parties may purchase a non-exclusive license, with standard terms and conditions, for commercialized technologies.

3. Enable the OTC to forego negotiation, individual pricing and many manual data-entry processes that are currently undertaken in the licensing workflow process.

4. Offer an efficient and effective storefront

a. Host an online catalog

b. Fully automate much of the purchase, fulfillment and product-information communication function currently performed by OTC staff and University inventors.

5.Create a mechanism to convert users of free versions of certain IP to commercial agreements for the same product.

6.Give administrators the capability to track sales, perform basic site-use analysis and review numbers and types of agreements.

Our research found several providers that claimed to provide these types of services, but none of them did so in a way that specifically fit into our goal, which was, put simply, to enable a potential licensee to:

1. Search

2. Find a Product on our Express License site through an organic web search (using Google, MSN, Yahoo search)

3. Get Detailed Product Info

4. Choose Technology/License Type Combination

5. Enter Customer Info

6. Enter Credit Card or eCheck Info

7. Complete the Transaction

The most important features, that all of these sites lacked were: • The ability to search for and find university technologies simply by going to the web and typing in search terms • The ability to quickly and easily pay for the license, without jumping through all kinds of hoops • The ability to create multiple customized licenses and license types, for each technology, using standard terms and conditions, which are stored in the application itself.

This last one meant creating a completely new application, inside the e-commerce platform.

So, to make a long story longer, we ended up deciding that the University would be better off building an application, from scratch, that would fulfill our needs.

The University then contracted with me to manage the entire design and development of this new site.

As a side note, to anyone who reads this post, I have the entire project documented; from requirements and design process, to resource needs and development plan, documented and should anyone wish to undertake an endeavor like this I would be happy to respond to questions.

The result of our efforts was something that we call CaSTT (Commerce and Search for Technology Transfer) the features and benefits of which I will add in a separate blog post.

So to answer your question about quantifiable results, traffic generation and effectiveness of these efforts, let me say that we have been thrilled with what has happened so far. I will give a couple of examples; First the cost benefit:

The University has a technology listed on our new express license site that has 3 different license types, 1. Free for Academic use, 2. $500 per project for clinics and in-house projects and 3. $2500 per protocol for, for-profit drug companies.

You can imagine that if we had to customize the terms and conditions of each $500 license, then share the revenue with the inventors, the costs associated with doing so would be larger than the income to the TTO. However, by putting the technology online and allowing licensees to license the item with no human interaction whatsoever, our costs are controlled and the licensee gets exactly what they want.

Traffic:

Because we carefully optimize all content on the site, and because of the back-end technology that we use, when someone searches the web for the specific technology or technologies like it, using a standard search engine, the organic search results list the technology-licensing site, on the first page. This is true for nearly all of the keywords that we could think of to search for the technology. This means that someone who is searching for a solution to a problem can come directly to the place where the solution for that problem can be licensed.

Further, we have noticed a significant increase in the traffic for all of the technologies currently listed on the site.

Effectiveness:

This is the process by which we used to license the exact technology that I referenced above; Tell me if this sounds familiar:

Currently, when an individual or organization wishes to enter into a non-exclusive license agreement with the University of XXX, for the use of commercialized intellectual property, a manual process must be undertaken whereby both the potential licensee and employees of the TTO can expect to engage in an inefficient, and occasionally arduous, licensing process.

First, the customer must identify the product he wishes to license and either, contact the inventor for information on how to license the IP, or figure out for himself how to engage the OTC.

Then they must either call or email the appropriate OTC employee and wait for a response in which they receive further instructions regarding the exact license parameters, processes and procedures they must undertake in order to complete what should be a relatively simple transaction. In the best-case scenario, a customer may obtain a couple of paragraphs of background information, a simple set of license instructions and a downloadable copy of the license, from the website.

The customer must then mail, fax or email a signed copy of the license back to the OTC. They must also remit payment for the license, either by mailing a check or via wire transfer (which as its own set of instructions and manual internal processes. In either case, several steps must be taken to reconcile this transaction in the accounting process.

Finally, upon receipt of the Executed License, the University of Minnesota forwards an electronic copy of the reproducible materials and the web-delivered content password to the licensee. However, the website states, “Please allow 2-3 weeks for all processing and shipping.”

This is, simply, a poor way to treat a customer who wants nothing more than to find a product, learn more about it, pay for and execute a license and fulfill his order.

In our new process the customer:

1. searches for the specific technology or does a web search using keywords

2. Clicks on the link that brings them directly to the product details page where they can learn more about the technology and have most, if not all, of their licensing and technical questions answered.

3. They can choose the appropriate license type

4. Agree to the terms and execute the license.

5. Receive their licensed technology.