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7 Technology Transfer Officer Tips For Tough Economic Times

admin — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 15:33:01 +0000

There is no doubt that these are tough economic times. Unemployment is high and credit is tight. Key indicates show that is the worse economy in a generation. Many technology transfer offices have seen potential business partners reduce their innovation portfolios and expenditures. This coupled with a reduction in funding sources, from grants and investors to university sources are blowing the technology transfer research commercialization efforts into the perfect storm.

There are difficulties and challenges, but these times also create opportunities. Here are seven tips to help your technology transfer office succeed in these tough economic times.

1. Maintain a list of problems that are relevant to the research and technologies in the pipeline.

Technology transfer offices typically get involved in research commercialization efforts late in the research and testing process. Get involved earlier in the process and start developing a list of problems of which the research can be applied.

This is really an early brainstorming exercise. Don’t just talk to the researchers. Get business input from those who are not involved with the research or the research teams. Independent ideas can be worth their weight in gold.

2. Develop long-term business relationships.

“Dig the well before you are thirsty.”

-Chinese Proverb

Start developing business relationships with business leaders from a wide range of industries. Do this even before you have any applicable research or solutions for them. These relationships will pay off in two ways.

? You will have a better understanding of the types of challenges that these businesses face.

? When you do have promising research technologies and solutions you already have a relationship with the business or their contacts.

3. Pair researchers with business mentors.

Researchers think like researchers. Business people think like business people. Getting the two to communicate with each other versus talking to each other is a common technology transfer office challenge.

Providing a business mentor to promising research leaders will help alleviate this common problem. This continuous conduit will go a lot further than a long forgotten entrepreneurial seminar.

4. Develop alternative commercialization strategies early.

Good business people know that there is always a chance that their efforts may fail. Technology transfer officers know this too. Unfortunately, many researchers and inventors do not think about this, much less plan for it.

Most inventors think that their invention is world changing and worth millions. They have visions of establishing a company based on their research or technology, selling it for millions, and retiring in the lap of luxury.

The truth of the matter is that nine out of ten spin offs and startups will fail. You, can as the technology transfer officer can improve these odds.

I sit on the advisory board for some start up focused investment funds. One of the strategies that we have developed recently is to go for the big distribution partnering deal with large companies. When that doesn’t work – we find out why and have alternative proposals available.

This alternative could be limited distribution agreements on licensing deals. It really doesn’t matter what the alternative is. What does matter is that you get to stay in the game and get a return on the sunk costs.

5. Reduce risks for all involved.

It wasn’t that long ago that many universities shunned the entire technology transfer process. They wanted their faculty teaching and doing research, not commercializing their intellectual property. My, how times have changed.

Now universities love the revenue that comes from royalties and equity distributions and sales that are associated with intellectual property commercialization. Businesses are always looking for a competitive advantage and right now innovation is the soup de jour, except for one thing …RISK!

In order to get more businesses interested in potential technology look for new ways to reduce their potential risks. Right now cash is king. Instead of negotiating a lower royalty percentage, offer your potential licensor a deferred royalty agreement at a higher percentage. This is the business innovator’s version of “no interest payments for 3 years”.

This approach allows the business to conserve cash today and the university to reap more money in the long run. It’s better than the technology sitting on the shelf waiting to become obsolete.

6. Teach bootstrapping to your startups.

All technology startups need money. That is a known fact. The truth is that many could get by with less money than they think that they need. There in lies the art of bootstrapping. Bootstrapping basically means to start and operate a business without lots of investment funds. It requires the entrepreneur to focus on sales and to hold fixed costs to an absolute minimum.

Bootstrapping requires a unique mindset that few lead researchers turned entrepreneurs can relate to. It takes a special entrepreneur to be able to successfully bootstrap a business.

Help your lead researchers and startup teams. Get some experienced bootstrappers on your advisory and consulting teams and pass the knowledge on to your startups.

7. Partner with other technology transfer offices.

Technology transfer offices provide a valuable service to both the university and their research communities. They play a vital role in the economic development of their respective communities and states. Unlike many organizations involved in the invention commercialization process they do not compete.

Some technology transfer offices such as Stanford and MIT are the envy of their peers, however most technology transfer offices do not reside in a geographic area that harbors entrepreneurship in its DNA.

Partnering with other technology transfer offices offers many unique benefits that cannot be found though other means. It opens up dialogue and support for represented research and technologies to new areas and new commercialization ideas. It develops relationships with other potential business partners and fosters potential research synergies.

Targeted TTO partnerships can lead to specific research pairing with higher degrees of commercialization potential. This focused effort will, in the long run, yield a high degree of return on investment.

These 7 technology transfer officer tips can help you reduce your operating costs and increase your revenue generation success rate. It’s a win for society, the researcher, the business community, the university, and YOU!

Change caller ID with spoof card

admin — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 00:35:19 +0000

This is not a bad idea when you want to change caller ID phone number so that you can call someone without knowing that you are talking with her or him. If you want to do so, you can use spoof card, special tool to provide you this feature. You can use this feature when you have paid them, but to ensure its quality, you can try their trial feature and shortly you will find something interesting there.

You can spoof your phone number as you like, but you cannot use this for illegal purpose, this is the most often prohibit action that is always reminded to all users and future users so that you will not ignore or even do illegal action. To avoid this action, the provider has been made special feature that will detect your spoof card, just to evaluate your usage of spoof phone number tool.

So, this is your turn to have fun with you friends and family, you can arrange birthday surprise by using this feature, alternatively you can also get latest information and product price to compare them. Besides that, you can use this feature to hide someone’s identity from unwanted person, so you have to try this.

“oligopoly”: Competition Among the Few

admin — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 23:12:33 +0000

There are different types of market orientation in different geographies and for different products or verticals. It can be perfect competition or monopolistic or may be a duopoly. But in the reality, probably the most important and common nature of competition and the market structure is “Oligopoly“.. can also be defined as “Competition Among the Few”.

Defining loosely, oligopoly is a good example of imperfect competition. It is said to prevail, once there are few firms or sellers in the market, selling or producing the same type of product line. Although there is no borderline to describe few and many, but we can consider the number of firms in an oligopolistic situation between two to ten. By the nature of product, oligopoly can be of two types, pure oligopoly, where sellers sell almost similar type of product and differentiated oligopoly, where firms are in the same line of business but products are not absolutely homogeneous.

In an oligopoly, some exciting market features and characteristics are found which are not present in the other market forms. Following are some of them:

1. Interdependence: The most important feature of oligopoly is the interdependence in decision-making of the firms in the market. This is because, when the number of competitors is few, any change in price, output or product features etc. by a firm causes direct effects on the fortune of its rivals, which will again change the business policies of the other firms. So it’s a fact that in oligopoly market situation, market demand is not the only force which can cause product pricing or packaging change, but also the cut-throat competition that a firm faces from its rivals. This proves that Interdependence is a very important factor to determine the solution to price-output fixation.

2. Importance of Advertisement and Selling Cost: A direct effect of interdependence of the oligopolists is that the different firms have to employ various aggressive and defensive marketing weapons to gain a greater share in the market or to prevent a fall in that share. According to Prof.Baumol, “…it is only under oligopoly that advertising comes fully into its own”.

3. Group Behaviour: Another important feature of oligopoly is that, for its proper solution analysis of group behavior is important. Theories of perfect competition, monopoly or monopolistic competition pose no difficult problem of making suitable assumptions about human behavior. In case of perfect competition or monopolistic competition, firms run after profit maximisation and amongst the huge number of firms in the market there is absolutely no scope of interdependence. Again in monopoly, theories deal with a sole individual and it is appropriate to consider that there does not exist any kind of interdependence.