AUTM Annual Meeting: A Before-You-Go Checklist

Becky Stoughton is a Fuentek vice president, specializing in entrepreneurship and establishing/building TTOs. She worked for
5 years at the Office of Technology Commercialization at the
University of Texas at Dallas, playing a key role in launching the office.
She also has served on the board of directors for TeXchange and as assistant VP for strategic alliances for AUTM.

Are you ready? Updated January 2017

In my last post, I offered recommendations for connecting with potential partners while you’re at the annual meeting for AUTM^®. Today I’m sharing more general advice for having a productive experience at the AUTM national meeting. I know it’s hard to make time for these things when you’re frantic preparing to be away from the office for several days and trying to clear the decks. But a little time invested up front will be well worth it.

Learn about Your Learning Opportunities

Do you need to get better informed about a specific aspect of technology commercialization? Check out the track-based schedule to identify sessions and events that are of particular interest to you.

Exhibit Efficiency

Review the list of exhibitors ahead of time and identify those you have particular interest in. That way you can make best use of your time in the Exhibit Hall. Note: Be sure to stop by the Fuentek booth to learn more about Fuentek and what we do.

What Worked Best for Me: After reviewing the sessions and exhibitor information, I used AUTM Connect™ to add specific events to my schedule. By tentatively planning your schedule ahead of time, you won’t waste precious time figuring out where to go next.

Online Scheduling

As I noted before, AUTM Connect™ lets you create a schedule from conference events and meetings booked through the tool. You can also integrate it with your personal calendar. Remember: For any sessions you add to your schedule in the system, AUTM Connect will publicly display you as an attendee.

Mobile Readiness

Download and set up the AUTM Connect apps for whatever mobile devices you’ll have with you so that you can quickly access it during the meeting. When I explored the mobile version, I found many new features and an improved interface that make it definitely worth checking out.

Preparing to Take Notes

If you’re like me, you’ll take a lot of notes while at the conference for follow-up later. Think about the best way to do that to make them most actionable when you’re back in the office. Pen and paper is tried, true, and easy, but those notes are not searchable later. There are many note-taking apps available, although sometimes using them can be awkward. AUTM Connect allows you to make and save notes in the record for a specific session, and later you can retrieve them for searching and/or printing. What’s your plan?

Whatever your plan, consider downloading and/or printing the slides from key sessions ahead of time. Making notes on the presentation itself may make for a more meaningful takeaway. You can access them by logging into the AUTM Live Learning Center.

On a related note, a few weeks after the conference the AUTM Live Learning Center will offer session recordings (audio synched to the slides) a few weeks after the conference.

Let Me Give You My Card

Be sure you have plenty of business cards and copies of relevant handouts for when you’re networking with potential partners.

Good luck and good meeting!

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AUTM Annual Meeting: 6 Networking Tips for Industry and TTOs

By Rebecca Stoughton

Becky Stoughton is a Fuentek vice president, specializing in entrepreneurship and establishing/building TTOs. She worked for
5 years at the Office of Technology Commercialization at the
University of Texas at Dallas, playing a key role in launching the office.
She also has served on the board of directors for TeXchange and as assistant VP for strategic alliances for AUTM.

Preparation Checklist The annual meeting of the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM^®) has significant industry representation, including key new participants from outside the life sciences. This provides an ideal opportunity for university technology transfer offices (TTOs) and high-tech companies to lay the groundwork for establishing mutually beneficial collaborations and licenses. I recommend these six actions to make the most of your AUTM meeting networking opportunities.

1. Find Your Fit with Other Attendees

Think strategically about your near-term goals and needs so you can plan and prepare accordingly. Do a quick check of who is attending and then cross-check that with your intellectual property (IP) portfolio. Which available technologies would have strong appeal to particular attendees? Which attendees have the capabilities to address gaps in your current resources? Recognizing your goals ahead of time helps you to best focus your on-site efforts and get the most out of the meeting.

2. Narrow Your Focus

You probably won’t be able to meet with everyone who aligns with your tech/need portfolio. So prioritize your list to focus on the ones who are the best match. Obtain an update or refresh your memory about the technologies or needs on which you’ll be focusing so you can best articulate them to others.

3. Schedule Time with Your Top Targets

AUTM Connect™ is a huge help with this:

Set up your profile. Be sure to list your key technologies, products, etc.
Keep your schedule up to date. Block off time for any sessions you don’t want to miss so your targets (and those targeting you) can see when you’re available. (Note that AUTM Connect will publicly display that you are an attendee for any sessions you add to your schedule in the system.)
Send invitations to your targets. Remember to explain how they will benefit from meeting with you.

4. Bring Handouts to Industry/Academia Partnering Forum

Organized a bit like speed dating, the Partnering Forum involves companies presenting 5-minute outlines of their current needs and how to work with them, followed by a reception and one-on-one networking. When I’ve seen this type of format used, I noticed that the audience was scribbling notes furiously and likely missed some of the finer details.

Lesson learned: If you’re presenting, share handouts or electronic documents that highlight key points. And regardless, have a handout or other marketing collateral (besides just your business card) to give to the folks you meet with.

Check the AUTM meeting online schedule to see the timing for the Partnering Forum and the lists of company presenters.

5. Update Your Organization’s Online Presence

People I have talked to in industry love that the AUTM Global Technology Portal gives them one place to find university technologies. So be sure your GTP entry is up to date, especially the listings of your capabilities, needs, and most importantly your technology offerings. Technology listings should give a succinct and compelling description of what it is, its benefits to users, and its applications. This technology overview and the value proposition are far more important than lengthy descriptions of technical details.

People you connect with at the meeting will likely follow up by visiting your website, so make sure that’s up to date too. We have lots of insights on building an effective online presence that are available here. Fuentek also can help you with our Marketing and Communications services. For more information, contact us here or schedule a time to meet with me, Laura Schoppe, or Danielle McCulloch at the national meeting using AUTM Connect.

6. Prepare Your Elevator Pitches

Plan — and practice — how you will introduce yourself and your organization. Things to think about:

What takeaway would you like them to remember after the conversation? Say this at least once during the conversation.
What are your organization’s strengths? Maybe the bulk of your research is focused in agricultural areas. Or maybe the strong coordination between your engineers and medical researchers makes you a powerhouse in medical devices.
What will be of most interest to the person you’re speaking with? Maybe it’s a particular technology portfolio or researchers who are leaders in a field that’s key to their industry. You’ll probably need more than one pitch to target different audiences.
Keep it concise and interesting. Your new acquaintances can signal when they’d like to learn more about items that interest them.

In addition to these networking suggestions, check out this general advice for getting the most out of the AUTM annual meeting. Hope to see you there! Stop by the Fuentek booth to learn more about Fuentek and what we do.

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A Pre-AUTM 2014 Reading List

By Laura Schoppe

Laura Schoppe is the founder and president of Fuentek, LLC. She is a past chair of the AUTM Foundation and also served as AUTM’s vice president of strategic alliances and chair of the Global Technology Portal Committee.

Following up on last week’s Worth Reading post, I’d like to offer this postscript for those of you going the AUTM^® 2014 meeting in a couple of weeks. These two items will help you with your networking and prepare you for our panel on incentivizing researcher participation in technology transfer. BTW, have you taken our 5-minute survey yet? Do it now! It closes Feb. 12th.

First off, we have The Innovative and Entrepreneurial University. Released in November, this report from the U.S. Commerce Department and the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE) presents “the increasingly diverse ways in which colleges and universities across America are promoting cultures of entrepreneurship on campus and encouraging students to start companies.”

Although each program featured in the report has a unique character and any emulation would need to be structured to the specifics of a particular institution, the programs do have basic elements that will be common across a wide range of schools.

The report organizes the examples into the following topic areas – many of which we’ve blogged about here, as well:

Promoting student innovation and entrepreneurship – Check out this recent post on making undergrads more entrepreneurial.
Encouraging faculty innovation and entrepreneurship – This is the topic for Danielle’s panel at AUTM (see below), and we have lots of other posts about making faculty more proactive participants in commercialization.
Actively supporting university technology transfer – The report focuses on reducing technology transfer barriers, expanding TTOs level of support to include student interns and entrepreneur mentors, protecting intellectual property, shrinking the funding gap through programs such as Emory’s DRIVE, and the use of regional tech transfer centers and cross-institution collaboration.
Facilitating university-industry collaboration – Again, we have lots of posts on this topic.
Engaging in regional and local economic development efforts – One of our most popular white papers has been “Enhancing Economic Development through Technology Transfer of Federal- and State-Funded R&D“

The report provides a nice list of institutions to talk with as you plan to implement similar programs, so you can learn from their experiences and find the right combination of tactics at your school. The upcoming AUTM meeting may be a good opportunity to talk specifics with your colleagues from these institutions in person. The AUTM Connect™ tool makes it easy to reach out to them.

The second item I’d like to share is a study analyzing barriers to cancer research commercialization by the University of Kentucky. Appearing in PLOS One last fall, this study aligns perfectly with the Incentives Programs panel on Saturday afternoon, Feb. 22nd at the AUTM meeting we’ve put together. Markey Cancer Center faculty’s responses to Kentucky’s survey indicated that “revising university policies/procedures… [and] more emphases on commercialization by academia research field… could potentially increase commercialization activity.” As Danielle mentioned in her blog post, the panelists will discuss precisely how they addressed this at their institutions: the Texas A&M System, the University of Arizona, and the University of North Carolina–Gressnboro.

IMHO, the concerns expressed by the Kentucky faculty are not surprising. And the good news is, most of them can be addressed. For example, concerns about the expense and time involved in commercialization can be address from two angles:

Regarding the too-much-time issue, allowing faculty to have commercialization count toward their performance evaluations will put it on par with other key job objectives, taking it out of the “extracurricular” realm and letting them dedicate “on the job” time to it.
For the too-little-money concern, having the tech transfer office (TTO) implement a triage-type screening process reduces the costs of patenting unproductive IP and allows the TTO to focus its resources on proactively seeking partners as soon as U.S. IP protection begins, which reduces foreign filing costs (if no interest is found) and creates better prospects.

Again, I hope you all will take the 5-minute survey on this topic, even if you’re not going to AUTM 2014. And remember that “incentive programs” can take many forms. Programs such as the DIFF at Purdue recently covered on Tech Transfer Central’s blog, which provides tech transfer mentors to researchers, also counts as the type of incentive we want to hear about.

The survey closes February 12th.

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Worth Reading in IP: Playing Beanball and Patent Stats

By Laura Schoppe

Laura Schoppe is the founder and president of Fuentek, LLC. She is a past chair of the AUTM Foundation and also served as AUTM’s vice president of strategic alliances and chair of the Global Technology Portal Committee.

It’s time again for our monthly Worth Reading post. It’s a short one — just two items — but it’s on a big topic: patents.

Standing Up to the Anti-Patent Beanball: This post by Joe Allen on IPWatchdog was in response to attacks in The Washington Post and on Techdirt. Joe’s post is definitely worth reading. The original pieces that prompted it both take superficial and out-of-context portrayals of the value of patents and university licensing. Unlike such balanced analyses as the post by Kate Tallman we featured previously, the Post and Techdirt authors ignored the real data and success stories that run counter to their arguments.

Their limited perspectives are not surprising given their experience. Post author Timothy B. Lee has a computer science background, which explains his patents-are-evil viewpoint, given that patents can have negative effects in the fast-paced computer industry. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick does not have any technical experience – frequently editorializing on technology doesn’t count.

It appears their pieces deliberately intended to get a rise out of university TTO advocates in order to perpetuate the “dialogue” of their attacks on the patent system. (Mission accomplished, I suppose.) To avoid sounding defensive in reaction to this type of commentary, continually share your success stories with the public. (Check out the sample success stories we’ve done in our communications work for ideas on preparing these for print, online postings, social media, and multimedia.) Consider working with your organization’s press office or PR firm to move out of the realm of damage control and into a more proactive conversation.

If you are going to the 2014 AUTM^® meeting in San Francisco next month, plan to attend one of the following sessions to learn more about advocacy and communication strategies:

B6: Making the Case for Technology Transfer on Thursday at 1:30 p.m., led by Michael Waring of the University of Michigan’s Office of Government Relations
E6: Getting the Word Out – Technology Transfer Works! on Friday at 11:00 a.m., led by Jennifer Gottwald of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF)

The second item I have to share with you today is an infographic of 2013 patenting statistics from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The image shown here is merely an excerpt from the detailed infographic, which FreePatentsOnline.com published and urged readers to download “and hang it on your office wall.” The full infographic includes lists of the top patentees (companies, inventors, and universities), the 10-year annual patenting trend, and some fun facts about patents that stood out in 2013.

Stay warm, all you readers in the northern hemisphere.

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These Are a Few of My Favorite Tweets: Tech Transfer 2013

By Nancy Pekar

Nancy is Fuentek’s communications czarina.

As subscribers of Fuentek’s quarterly e-newsletter The Fountain know, we publish our Top 10 Tweets every issue. Like our Worth Reading posts, we use these to help technology transfer professionals keep up with what we think are some of the most important stories in our industry. So for our last post of 2013, here is our Top 10 of Our Top 10 Tech Transfer Tweets. We hope you enjoy this year in review… 140 characters at a time. (BTW, you also might want to check out our other insights about using social media for tech transfer.)

Tech transfer plays a role in economic development…

Worth a RT! RT @unhinnovation: Why univs matter to the ecosystem? 617 #startups, $2.6B in royalties (>$110B sales) in 2012 alone! #AUTM2013

… and here’s where it all starts:

.@neiltyson on Govt’s role in funding #research RT @emoryott: Science funding can “guarantee your economic future” http://bit.ly/1k4jTCp (Editor’s Note: The old URL doesn’t work anymore, so use this bit.ly to get to the article.)

Lots of Bayh-Dole talk this year – here’s just one:

Bayh-Dole is NOT a price-control mechanism, @SenatorLeahy. http://bit.ly/12HLU46 @ipwatchdog @NIH

Another hot topic, patent trolls – check this out:

What’s yours, #techtransfer? RT @vanderbiltcttc: Our perspective on efforts to crack down on patent trolls http://ow.ly/m32qI

We saw examples of TTOs working more efficiently with licensees…

Templates to increase licensee reporting. Online forms could put data in dbase easily http://ow.ly/ljWSX via @TechTranTactics @UT_Dallas (Editor’s Note: Check out our blog post on templates.)

… and with faculty researchers: