October Update from the AUTM President

By Robin Rasor posted 10-18-2011 10:52

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We have posted a recap of the September Board meeting on the website for your information. As always, if you have any questions, please contact me, Vicki or any one of the Board members.

We accomplished quite a bit at the meeting, despite the fact that most of us in the room looked like we belonged in a commercial for cold medicine (flu and allergy season seemed to come early this year). Board members presented their first pass of their budgets and this provided an opportunity for everyone around the table to ask questions and request additional information. We still have some work to go prior to approving the 2012 budget at the December Board Meeting.

As you know by now, the Board also reviewed the candidates for the 2012 Board of Directors. To learn more about the nominations and elections process, visit the AUTM website. You can also read Ashley Stevens' blog about why there is only one candidate for each open position.

As I will be handling next year’s nominations, I will be reaching out to anyone and everyone for additional ideas, nominations, help, to continue to improve and clarify the process.

In September, I attended two meetings where commercialization of academic technologies and their impact on the United States and global economy were front and center. At the SUNY meeting on “Universities as Economic Drivers” there were many interesting discussions from academics, university presidents, economists and legislators not only on which measures should be used but how they should be used to study the overall impact of not only technology licensing, but of the entire economic footprint of universities. As expected, there wasn’t consensus (although the metric of “jobs” was everywhere), but the discussions were quite interesting. Vicki and I attended a “Tech Transfer Summit” at NIH where the discussion was far ranging from how to improve the tech transfer process to regulatory issues related to medical devices (such as iPhones) to updates on the venture capital business. Speakers from industry, NIH and academic tech transfer offices worldwide participated in the meeting.

Speaking of metrics, thanks to Shawn Hawkins, AUTM’s VP of Metrics and Surveys, and Arjun Sanga of South Texas Tech Management who recently attended the APLU workshop focused on identifying metrics that show university contributions to regional innovation and economic growth. Prior to the workshop, the APLU Commission on Innovation, Competitiveness and Economic Prosperity (CICEP) identified specific data points in each of seven groups. APLU’s goal is to further refine the list and present a template at their annual meeting for APLU member universities to pilot and potentially adopt. They have no plans to conduct a survey but the draft suggests methods to collect the data and where in the university the data might be found. This is being done in parallel with the government’s Science and Technology in America’s Reinvestment – Measuring the Effect of Research on Innovation, Competitiveness and Science, more commonly known as STAR METRICS. If you are not familiar with this group, it is a multi-agency venture led by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

As many of the topics did not pertain directly to technology transfer, I will focus here on the areas where AUTM may be able to contribute related to faculty and staff economic engagement:

Sponsored Research

Knowledge Incubators and Accelerators

Unfunded Agreements with Industry

Based on the above, the AUTM new metrics taskforce is considering additional questions for the AUTM Licensing Activity Survey, and AUTM will continually monitor these initiatives as it is highly likely that our members will be participating in data collection related to these new analyses for years to come.

As always, I welcome your feedback on these initiatives and more. Please email president@autm.net for any comments or suggestions.

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