Earlier this week I participated in the Raleigh Innovation Summit, which was held to create a unified vision for the city’s future in the areas of innovation and entrepreneurship. Groups discussed creating an innovation center in Raleigh, branding Raleigh as a city of innovation, creating partnerships, and bringing more money to the region. A lot of great ideas were generated, and participants have been encouraged to keep sharing them. So in addition to what you’ll see in tweets (#innovateRAL), here are some of my ideas:
Last week I gave a presentation at a tech transfer workshop for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). This workshop was well timed, given President Obama’s recent memorandum announcing a new directive requiring all federal research labs to bolster and streamline technology transfer efforts to increase the likelihood and efficiency of getting research results to market. Attendees at the DoD meeting discussed the memo as well as possible solutions, as each agency has been tasked with presenting a plan back to the President on how they will achieve his goals. Possible solutions have been at the top of my mind recently as well….
Yesterday I went to Washington with about two dozen other North Carolina small businesses to meet with several of our country’s legislative and executive leaders. It was a great opportunity—one that I hope will eventually lead to genuine action that supports the transition of innovations developed with federal funding into commercial applications. And I have a few ideas about how to do that.
You may have noticed that several universities and government labs are forming ready-to-sign patent licensing programs or other initiatives with new licensing terms. Many of these programs target startup companies, like the University of North Carolina’s Express License program or the DOE’s America’s Next Top Energy Innovator Challenge program, which offers startups options to license patents for $1K.
Interesting news in the world of technology licensing: the Department of Energy recently announced ‘America’s Next Top Energy Innovator Challenge’—a licensing program offering special terms to startup companies on a set of patent licenses from national …
College sports fans in the Triangle could learn a lot about healthy competition from the kids we saw at the North Carolina FIRST Robotics Competition. Embodying the concept of Gracious Professionalism™, these students helped each other despite being in a competitive event. It was fabulous to watch. I’ve been thinking about this after participating in a roundtable discussion with members of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and in thinking back on a conversation I had over coffee with a local entrepreneur.
Yesterday I had the great privilege to participate in a roundtable discussion with several members of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness in Durham’s American Tobacco Historic District. As he kicked off the meeting, Obama’s top economic advisor Austan Goolsbee said that we “will never have a clearer line to the President’s ear than with the members of his Jobs Council that are here today.” Those members included AOL founder Steve Case, Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg, Citigroup chairman Richard Parsons, and UBS Americas chairman Robert Wolf. The topic? Entrepreneurship.
Monday kicked off the AUTM Eastern Region meeting in Baltimore. It was a day of good discussions and debate about how to encourage economic development through university technology transfer — the theme for the meeting. A series of sessions ran in logical succession on the topic of start-ups, the poster child for economic development.
If you read yesterday’s blog entry, you know we have a new poll running, and the topic is the overlap (or lack thereof) between economic development and tech transfer organizations. (Editor’s note: Here are the poll results.) TTOs’ compatibility with E …
Next week I’ll be one of three panelists in a live webinar hosted by Technology Transfer Tactics. The topic: how your technology transfer office can establish successful partnerships with government agencies. This is a topic I’m quite passionate about, …
