As we head into the new year, now is a good time to revisit and prioritize tech transfer best practices—that is, efficiently and effectively moving technologies out of university, government, and even corporate labs and into the marketplace. Today we’ve gathered together 10 of our key posts to give you easy access to these tech transfer best practices. Happy reading, and contact Fuentek to learn more about how we can help your technology transfer office (TTO) apply them.
Managing IP proactively is essential for any R&D organization, regardless of whether it’s a university, private company, government lab, hospital, or not-for-profit research organization. Being proactive helps you focus on achieving your goals rather than reactively putting out fires, and it enables more efficient and effective operations. To make your TTO or other IP operation more proactive, consider the following recommendations and guidance.
When thinking about the value of a licensing agreement, it’s easy to focus on the financial terms, such as up-front payments and royalty rates. However, licensing revenue isn’t the only area to negotiate financial terms. And in many cases, non-financial terms can have significant value. Financial terms beyond licensing revenue are pretty straightforward to negotiate. For a university…
The past few months have seen several of us at Fuentek supporting multiple clients with negotiating licenses for their technologies. One project that I’ve been helping a client with embodies several best practices of license negotiations. Ironically, these concepts are so essential… that they’re sometimes forgotten. So here is a list we’ve put together to ensure that the most important aspects of license negotiations stay front and center.
What’s a reasonable royalty rate when licensing a technology? Good question! Those of you with years of experience negotiating licensing or other technology transfer agreements know that there are many approaches for determining the value of a potential deal and therefore what the royalty rate should be. Which method is best? When we provide deal-making support to our clients, Fuentek uses a combination of three deal valuation techniques: market assessments, cost assessments, and income evaluations. Let’s consider each element.
Understanding how prospects perceive value will help you gauge their true interest in a potential licensing deal. Just because you’ve designed a cool widget doesn’t mean somebody out there is willing to invest in commercializing it. Potential licensees will be interested only if the technology delivers meaningful value for their company. For the best results, licensing managers should be able to identify the key factors that influence prospects’ decision-making processes — a good bit of which is already on hand if a market-based assessment of the technology was conducted. There’s no substitute for being prepared as you head into negotiations. I explain further in our new “Why Prepare for Licensing Negotiations” webcast, which also includes tips for the kind of research you should conduct in advance. (The webcast is free — all you have to do is register.)
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 …
I’ve been thinking recently about deals. Well, obviously, we’re almost always thinking about deals! But specifically, I’ve been thinking about those deals that seem to fall into your lap. The bird-in-the-hand deals certainly can save time and marketing resources. And sometimes they make sense given the specifics of the technology, as we’ve blogged about previously. But sometimes the quick deal that seems to make sense at first blush is not the way to go.
We’ve talked quite a bit about Fuentek’s philosophy of a phased, step-by-step approach to many aspects of technology commercialization. Case in point: we begin by screening whether a technology is fit for commercialization before ramping up for marketing. With this approach, we invest as few resources as necessary in weeding out technologies that are far from ready for commercialization to quickly and cost-efficiently find the golden apples that are ripe for licensing.
