Greetings from Anaheim, California, where Fuentek’s Danielle McCulloch, Julie Markoski, and I are attending the annual meeting of the Association of University Technology Managers®. The conference has barely started, and we’re already very busy at this great meeting! AUTM 2012 began yesterday with a joint session with the Licensing Executives Society, which had its Winter Meeting here in the first half of the week. (And, no, it’s not coincidence that the LES and AUTM meetings are aligned like this. This was just one of several efforts this year in AUTM’s Strategic Alliances.) The two associations hosted a pair of sessions together on Wednesday. The first was called… Continue reading →
Technology transfer offices (TTOs) have much to gain from incorporating social media into their communications toolbox. With adequate planning and preparation, a TTO’s foray into the social media world can be a successful experience, yielding great exposure and benefits. We at Fuentek have blogged often about how social media’s tremendous reach can deliver real value to TTOs. And as of today, we have yet another resource for tech transfer professionals. We’ve released our white paper entitled, “Leveraging Social Media for Technology Transfer Marketing.” 
Now that it’s been little over a year since I took over the Fuentek Twitter® account, I have some advice to share. My previous post covered the basics of tweeting: @-replies vs. mentions, using a scheduler tool to spread your tweets across the day, hashtags, retweeting, and how to get started. Today’s post offers my thoughts about how to tweet effectively. 
I’m interacting with lots of young people these days. Last week I went to Chewning Middle School in Durham, NC, to speak with students about my experiences growing up and working my way into a career in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) field. And later this week I’m returning once again to judge the NC Regional FIRST Robotics Competition at the Dorton Arena in Raleigh. 
I had the good fortune yesterday to attend NASA’s Technology Day on Capitol Hill. NASA sponsors this event each year to demonstrate how investments in space and aeronautics technology help enable agency goals and at the same time create or improve products and services that benefit life here on Earth. This year’s event, “NASA Technology: Imagine. Innovate, Explore,” featured seven technologies developed in collaboration with NASA, including systems used to assess patient health, monitor water quality, and evaluate disaster risk. 
Your Web site is the doorway through which licensees, collaborators, and innovators enter your office, so make sure it enhances the perception of your organization and aligns with your tech transfer goals. This was the message that came through loud and clear from panelists at a session of the recent Association of University Technology Managers® (AUTM®) annual meeting in Anaheim, California. 
I’ve recently connected with Springboard Enterprises, an innovative organization that showcases high-quality, women-led companies that are seeking investors. Springboard has a good track record for facilitating spin-out companies (success stories include Constant Contact, ZipCar, Tikatok, and many more) and is providing great opportunities for women entrepreneurs. 
It’s a bit like a Tolstoy novel: Happy internship programs are all alike. Well, maybe not alike. But they are pretty consistent across the technology transfer spectrum. This was the consensus of panelists and attendees at a session of the recent Association of University Technology Managers® (AUTM®) annual meeting in Anaheim, California. The dynamic and interactive Frequently Asked Questions about Intern Programs session about effective internship programs attracted quite a crowd, especially considering it was one of the final sessions on the last day of AUTM 2012 (an indicator of how important this topic is to university TTOs). 
Danielle, Julie, and I are settling back into the swing of things now that we’re back from the AUTM® annual meeting in Anaheim. We’ll blog about our panels (which we previewed earlier) in the days to come. But today I wanted to recap some of my favorite moments from the conference.
As VP for Strategic Alliances, I was pleased to host a special-interest group (SIG) discussion yesterday morning at the AUTM® annual meeting. It turned out to be a popular session, with more than 40 attendees split about evenly between university and industry tech transfer offices (TTOs). All of them offered great ideas about the various initiatives that Strategic Alliances is pursuing. 