We’ve blogged often about how planning for technology marketing helps TTOs be more proactive and efficient in selecting innovations to market. If your TTO is like most, you have more active marketing projects than you have the resources to handle. Therefore, prioritizing (and reprioritizing) your projects is the key to developing a strategic and agile marketing process that will provide long-term value. In today’s Stories from the Field post, I share details of how to apply what we’ve learned through years of identifying high-priority projects.
We’ve blogged often about how tweets, blogs, and “likes” are key paths by which a technology transfer office’s (TTO’s) messages reach the general public as well as about how effective use of social media can connect TTOs with licensing prospects and potential partners. But federal TTOs face unique challenges. Aside from tight budgets and overloaded staff, these TTOs have to operate within the confines of the highly controlled federal government. So what’s a federal TTO to do?
Although we’ve been blogging a lot lately about effective technology marketing strategies (especially given our new webinar on this topic), there’s another kind of marketing that we at Fuentek believe is essential for technology transfer offices (TTOs). It might feel like bragging, but communicating the results of technology transfer is as important as executing tech transfer deals. Effective communication tools that illustrate your TTO’s positive achievements demonstrate to your internal and external stakeholders both the value of tech transfer and how successful your TTO is in supporting the mission of your institution. We recently completed a project for NASA that illustrates exactly this idea.
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. Fuentek has 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. Our white paper entitled, “Leveraging Social Media for Technology Transfer Marketing.”
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.
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).
If you’ve kept up with Fuentek’s webinar series, you know by now that we are committed to perfecting and sharing technology transfer best practices. In our previous webinar, we gave step-by-step, how-to details on performing market-based technology assessments so that tech transfer offices can be more proactive and efficient in selecting the technologies to market and identifying the key next steps. Now, our new webinar, “Effective Technology Marketing: Getting to the Negotiating Table,” goes a step further in helping you make the most of a limited marketing budget.
I’m pleased to bring you this month’s list of articles that we at Fuentek feel are worth reading. Many of these are pretty new, while some are oldies but goodies. Several of the pieces hovered around a similar theme, resulting in a slightly longer list despite the shorter month. Good thing we have leap day this year!
Fuentek is gearing up for the annual meeting of the Association of University Technology Managers® (AUTM®) annual meeting March 14-17 in Anaheim, California. This year we’ll be participating on two interesting panels, and we couldn’t be more excited about it! Fuentek president Laura Schoppe is hosting the panel “Tailoring Your Web Site to Match Your Technology Transfer Office’s Goals.” The panel will give attendees lots of ideas for ways in which they can redesign their own sites. Next up, I’m pleased to join the panel “Frequently Asked Questions about Intern Programs.” This session will draw on industry best practices to answer questions about the Who, What, When, Why, and How surrounding internship programs.
Though it may be tempting to jump immediately into marketing an exciting technology that seems bound for tech transfer success, it’s important to look before you leap to ensure you’re making the best decisions about where to allocate your finite time and resources. Proactive research and planning is critical for developing marketing strategies that are efficient and cost-effective. We’ve blogged about this in our posts about the initial rapid screening and the more in-depth market-based assessment—the two steps for making informed commercialization decisions. The market-based assessment is so essential to technology transfer success that Fuentek has released a free webcast about it.
