Earlier this month I laid out an overview of the 2012 Strategic Alliances Program Plan for AUTM.
One of the 2012 initiatives for Strategic Alliances—a Global Technology Portal—aims to increase our ability to actively facilitate networking and collaboration between corporations and universities.
The goal of the Global Technology Portal (If anyone has a suggestion for a catchier name, I’m all ears!) is to provide a one-stop shop for corporations to find university technologies available for licensing. The portal will help facilitate license agreements, collaborative research agreements, and investments or partnership arrangements for university startups.
The portal should make it much easier for universities and corporations to find each other and begin licensing and partnership discussions. Corporations will also be able to search the portal to find universities with the capabilities that they need and then connect with them directly. The portal will provide information that companies and universities could previously find through the Partnership Forum at AUTM’s Annual Meeting—only now, it will be available to them anytime they need it—online. What’s more, both companies and universities will be able to quickly identify information for partnership success stories to aid their communication efforts.
The portal is scheduled to launch late this year, and I'm excited to be a part of this project. It should help AUTM members work toward licenses and partnerships much more effectively and consistently.