Often, the tech transfer office is considered the home for intellectual property management. A place where researchers can log discoveries. What happens next? In today’s tech transfer office, the answer is: a lot. Specifically, the tech transfer office manages the full cycle of new innovation communication, management, and promotion. It’s not just about logging the discovery, it’s about broadcasting that discovery to drive growth, recognition, and, in some cases, profit.
To address the expanding role of tech transfer offices, many institutions have determined that manual processes no longer cut it. Instead, digital solutions that can ease the overall administrative burden are rising in popularity and necessity. Let’s take a closer look at what that means for small tech transfer offices.
Necessary Change: When You Know, You Know
In this scenario, our tech transfer team manually conducts 10-15 disclosures per year and manages four to five patents. Although the team has leveraged the same processes for years, those processes are no longer serving them. In fact, they are actually hindering efficiency, pulling people away from other priorities, and causing unnecessary frustration among the team.
Something has to change. The team decides to investigate alternate options.
Establishing Goals for the Future
The team has several goals associated with a new solution. First, they need a solution that addresses the full tech transfer process in one electronic system to give principal investigators greater insight into where their inventions are in the process. Additionally, the team needs a solution that will enable them to increase capacity to focus on other components of the process, such as licensing and marketing. Finally, the team wants to further demonstrate their commitment and pride for their institution by spreading the word about their growing research program and project outcomes.
Delivering Results and Spreading Influence
After evaluating several options, the team settled on Cayuse Inventions as the best technology solution to help them achieve their goals. Not only can Cayuse support the complete journey for innovations, it can be used to further spread the word to fellow research institutions about the growth and success of the tech transfer process at their institution.
Of particular interest for the team were the start-up tools included with Cayuse Inventions. The team quickly saw value in these tools with the ability to track equity and economic impact, as well as find commercial partners. This helped to streamline the process and truly amplify the tech transfer office activities to drive interest and support among their peers and community.
When it comes to smaller tech transfer offices, the end result is not necessarily a massive profit on research; but rather, about delivering a tech transfer program that spreads influence in the region.
Small, But Mighty Tech Transfer Teams
Limited time and resources are all-too-common among small tech transfer teams. With the right technology in place, however, those small teams become truly mighty in their own right. In the above example, we walked through the process of one tech transfer team identifying a problem with resources and capacity, recognizing goals and priorities for their institution and team, and selecting a digital, cloud-based solution in Cayuse to help. What’s more, they were able to not only meet their known needs of managing the innovations process, they saw greater opportunity to leverage Cayuse to broadcast their work to research institutions. That’s the power of Cayuse – helping teams achieve more with greater efficiency and ease.
