In-depth analysis - Technology Transfer

Article 1 - The Office of Technology Transfer at Mason

The first article in our series on technology transfer will examine the Technology Transfer Office at George Mason University. Recently, we caught up with the Assistant Vice President for Research and Economic Development and George Mason’s Director of Technology Transfer, Jennifer Murphy. Jennifer started the Office of Technology Transfer at Mason and has seen a steady growth in invention disclosure activity, patents issued, and commercialization opportunities. Jennifer and her staff regularly meet with faculty to learn more about their scholarship at Mason, and the potential commercial applications of those discoveries.

Why are universities engaged in technology transfer?
Increasingly technology transfer offices are being recognized as central to the overall mission of the university research enterprise. Of course every university engaged in technology transfer hopes to create revenue that it can recycle to support further research within the institution. But, in fact, revenue is not the real driving factor. Rather, there are other, non-financial reasons to support technology transfer that can arguably be considered more critical to the institution’s overall goals. To begin, tech transfer is now recognized as an important avenue for disseminating research results. Traditionally, research outcomes are disseminated through publications in scholarly journals, but today, technology transfer efforts translate research results into tangible products and services so that those very results can benefit the public in substantial ways. Technology transfer also gives institutions further means to attract and retain a highly motivated and bright faculty. Most institutions share all net proceeds from commercialization with the inventors. We, at George Mason, share 50% of our tech transfer revenue. That kind of financial reward can be very important to a faculty member’s choice of institution. Finally, technology transfer promotes the university’s interaction with its community through economic development activities. Increasingly, universities are engaging in creating start up companies around their technologies, bringing investment dollars and jobs to the areas in which the university resides.

How does your office reach out to faculty researchers?
We regularly schedule two open training sessions each year. These events focus on the university’s efforts in technology transfer, university policies governing intellectual property ownership and include a patent primer. We also visit regularly scheduled department faculty meetings where we can be more specific about issues particular to a given discipline. Finally, we have recently started an "Open House" every Friday where faculty can sign up to spend an hour or so with several of the Tech Transfer staff and brainstorm their new ideas.

How does your office identify potential investors of university technology?
There are three distinct sources of potential interest in the commercialization of university technologies. The first of these, and perhaps the most obvious, are existing companies that might be interested in licensing in the technology to create a new product line or enhance a current product or service. Finding these companies and good contacts can be challenging. Typical tools include conducting market research to identify the players and then searching through web sites to get to the right people. The second group is the Angel and early stage VC community that can see the potential of a technology as a start up company. Usually we find these individuals at networking events and then invite them to the university to look at specific technologies. Networking events are the means of reaching out to the third group – namely entrepreneurs. While they generally do not have cash resources to invest, they do invest a huge amount of human capital in getting technologies to market. Their energy and hard work are critical to the success of many commercialization efforts

“We need funds to cover the costs of the many patent applications we are filing. We have a prolific group of inventors at George Mason who are making important breakthroughs in areas ranging from cancer diagnostics to network security.”
—Jennifer Murphy, Director of Technology Transfer Office at GMU

Why do you think people in the business community often criticize Tech Transfer offices as being difficult to work with in transferring technology out to commercial entities?
Interestingly, I have heard this comment before, but I have never experienced it, so I can really only speculate as to its origin. My initial guess is that it may have come from the decade of the 90’s when most tech transfer offices were being asked to be self sustaining. Naturally, then, those operations would often ask for high up front fees in order to ensure an immediate cash intake, rather than sharing the risk with the commercial entity by asking for a low up front fee and perhaps a slightly higher royalty rate where everyone gains from a successful product. I would like your readers to know that we very much ascribe to the latter model at Mason. Another issue that may contribute to some of the “negative” perceptions of the business community – especially the Angels and VC’s is a misalignment of expectations with regard to the “state” of university technologies. Because of the faculty imperative to publish or perish, inventions are often disclosed early in their development so that patent applications can be filed and then publications submitted to scholarly journals. At universities, then, we have a lot of very early stage technologies that often don’t even have a working prototype. I do believe, though, that more and more the business community is beginning to understand the university environment and that this misalignment of expectation is beginning to disappear.

Describe some of the ways that you are currently exposing University technology/research to the business community?
Of course we maintain our website (http://techtransfer.gmu.edu) where anyone can look at our available technologies. However, we also attend trade shows where we think there may be a community of interested companies or investors. Recently, of course, we have been fortunate to be able to feature a “technology of the month” in this Newsletter. Finally, we are very excited about a non-life science EXPO that ALCOVe (the Academic Licensing Community of Virginia) will be hosting on May 22. Inventors and researchers along with the staff of the Commonwealth’s tech transfer offices and several federal labs will present their technologies at George Mason. We will have more on this event in the next Patriot Entrepreneur.

We know you assist faculty and staff with their inventions. Do you also work with student inventors?
Yes, we will handle (i.e., pay for patenting costs and marketing the technology) if a student has an invention that he or she would like the university to manage, and the Tech Transfer staff believes the technology has commercialization potential. In such cases, the student assigns the invention to the university and we share 50% of all proceeds after patent costs with the student, just as we do with faculty and staff.

What are the three most pressing needs of your office?
We urgently need funding to pay for three specific needs:

1. We need funds to cover the costs of the many patent applications we are filing. We have a prolific group of inventors at George Mason who are making important break throughs in areas ranging from cancer diagnostics to network security. These costs do often get reimbursed when the technologies are licensed, but the initial up front cost comes from our budget.
2. We need a prototyping fund so that when the invention comes to us at an early stage, we will have a source of money to get the prototype created or get the proof of concept taken the one or two steps further that are needed to convince the commercial sector of the viability of the technology. The use of funds might include animal studies in the life science area, software coding to implement algorithms, implementing cores on a chip and testing them, etc. This need is now the focus of a new effort to create a gift fund to which alumni and the business community can contribute and actually see very specific results of their donations. I hope we can talk more about this opportunity in the next Patriot Entrepreneur.
3. Finally, we need funding for additional personnel to license our technologies. We have found in benchmarking studies that there is a strong correlation between the number of licensing personnel in a tech transfer office and the income of the office. As commercialization successes grow and income begins to accrue to our tech transfer efforts, we will be able to solve many of the patent and prototyping funding challenges I have just mentioned.
   

Where can our readers find information about your office?
Please visit The Technology Transfer Office website for more information.

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