As we roll into the holiday times, many of us are starting to toss around ideas that can make our organizations better in 2013 – more productive, more successful, more efficient, and (I hope) more meaningful! In that spirit, I wanted to share with you a tool that may help you as you embark on your strategic 2013 planning. For many organizations, open innovation is one approach that they are likely to implement in 2013, if they have not already done so. I think open innovation is a great approach to R&D in many ways. (You can check out my many musings on open innovation in our insights section.) However,… Continue reading →
The awards banquet for the 2012 R&D 100 — the “Oscars of Innovation” — was last Thursday, and the call for applications for the 2013 awards has been issued. So we want to congratulate the winners of this year’s award (especially one of our clients, NASA’s Glenn Research Center). We also wanted to remind those of you trying to commercialize technologies that awards are an effective means to support your efforts. To help inspire you, I’m going to share one key tip for writing a winning application for this particular award (since we have a great success rate!). 
At Fuentek, we enjoy working collaboratively with our clients to implement innovative outreach strategies. In October 2011, Fuentek had the privilege of helping a forward-thinking team at NASA’s Glenn Research Center — led by Dr. Paul Bartolotta — to organize an Automotive Workshop. Although Glenn had dozens of technologies that would be of enormous interest to automotive companies, they did not routinely interact with major players in the auto industry. And they didn’t want to push out all of their potentially relevant technologies to see which might catch the attention of auto industry executives. Instead, Glenn wanted to… 
“Whether it is a statue, plaque, certificate, or some other memento, there is something about an award that changes other people’s perceptions of the recipient’s value.” So starts a new white paper that we’ve co-authored with the technology transfer folks at NASA’s Glenn Research Center, specifically Laurie Stauber. Titled “And the Winner Is…: Using Innovation Awards to Boost Commercialization,” this white paper explores the connection between innovation awards and the technology transfer/commercialization process. The paper begins by discussing… 
Most of you who have read my posts know that I am a strong advocate of open innovation and its application in conjunction with tech transfer efforts. I truly believe it is through the combining of diverse interests and capabilities that meaningful innovations are developed and important impacts can occur. So today I want to summarize what to me are the most important things to keep in mind as you consider open innovation partnerships in your tech transfer work. 
I always read a lot about open innovation and innovation—mainly sourced from my Twitter® and RSS feed—and then leverage the best practices and lessons learned in my work with our clients as they try to build partnerships and relationships to support innovation. Lately I’ve run across a few things that I think are worth sharing with our readers. 
Fuentek president Laura Schoppe and I are putting the finishing touches on a new webinar that will provide technology transfer offices with specific solutions for securing open innovation-style collaborations and partnerships. It’s called Implementing Open Innovation: Symbiotic Success for Tech Transfer Offices (TTOs). We’ve blogged before about how Symbiotic Innovation is the notion that technology spin-out (commercializing technology) and spin-in (technology sourcing, collaborative R&D partnerships) are interdependent activities that are best pursued simultaneously. Every R&D organization has technologies or expertise that might meet the needs of external users (spin-out) as well as needs that might be solved by external technologies/expertise (spin-in). Spin-out asks, “Who needs what I have?” Spin-in asks, “Who has what I need?” Symbiotic Innovation recognizes that the “who” in both questions is the same. 
Sometimes the most straightforward tech transfer situation can turn into something completely different. Sometimes the simple spin-out of a technology can morph into a larger collaborative R&D partnership. This is why Fuentek always takes a Symbiotic Innovation approach when helping our clients with technology transfer. And today’s Stories from the Field post describes just such a case. 
We at Fuentek are big believers in the power of specific, tailored marketing messages for technology transfer. Our approach focuses on the AMMO: Audience, Message, Mechanism, Outcome. In today’s Stories from the Field post, I’m going to share specific details of how we used this method to help a client accomplish a successful tech transfer outreach event. NASA’s Glenn Research Center approached us about putting together a technology showcase that would introduce Ohio businesses… 
If you are with a high-tech, manufacturing, or other company in Ohio, you won’t want to miss the 