Broader marketing efforts—those that demonstrate your tech transfer know-how—can elevate the profile of your technology transfer office (TTO). It can also cultivate productive relationships with your organization’s researchers, management, and potential partners/licensees. To help TTOs be successful with these efforts, this post shares the best practices that Fuentek has found to be effective time and again with our clients.

Our regular readers know that metrics for technology transfer offices (TTOs) is a frequent topic for the Fuentek blog. Today I’m going to provide some how-to tips for getting the most out of your tech transfer metrics tracking efforts — specifically, gathering, analyzing, and using metrics.

In preparing to give a new webinar on actively managing IP portfolios, I have been thinking a lot about efficiency. Because time is always limited, you must make the most of what you have. So, today I’m offering Fuentek’s insights about the time associated with strategically managing the IP portfolio.

Having spent 15+ years helping major research universities manage their intellectual property (IP), Fuentek knows a great deal about efficient and effective tech transfer. We’ve also seen that many universities struggle to explain this complex process to their stakeholders — administrators, researchers, and even legislators.

Gathering and analyzing market data may be at the heart of developing the technology transfer strategy, but its value is not limited to the go/no-go decision and planning how to move forward. There are some less obvious but extremely impactful ways that market data can be a useful tool for a tech transfer office (TTO). Here are four projects I’ve worked on recently that illustrate some of the powerful ways your TTO can make use of market data.

Most technology transfer offices (TTOs) want to — or have to — respond to frequently asked questions (FAQs) about the technology portfolio. Whether they are routine or ad hoc, these FAQs often come from key stakeholders and focus on TTO performance. As the F in FAQ suggests, these questions are asked frequently. Yet if a TTO frequently is scrambling to answer and struggles to generate the needed reports, then this indicates something is amiss.

As I discussed in early December, I’ve been curious about the experiences of those starting (or restarting) their TTO. So we created a short survey and invited the tech transfer community to use it to share their experiences. Two dozen folks responded — not bad considering it is a niche question– and today I’m sharing these responses along with some of my insights and experiences.

Today brings us to my final Metrics Monday post on metrics for new — or newly reorganized — technology transfer offices (TTOs). Today’s focus is on how you are doing on those all-important final steps to commercialization: marketing and licensing. The TTO at virtually any university, non-profit, or government R&D lab is striving to maximize the benefits of the institution’s research to the public. This overarching, long-term goal is coupled with maximizing the “return” to the institution and perhaps the larger community. Of course, the metrics used to calculate that return can…

I’m back with another Metrics Monday post about the types of metrics that new (and newly reorganized) technology transfer offices (TTOs) can monitor while waiting for the long-term metrics to make sense. Ensuring that invention disclosures and your technology portfolio are being processed effectively is key to keeping the office running efficiently. As your office matures, the TTO’s productivity in processing cases should increase. So this is a key short-term goal to focus on. One of the general metrics for monitoring for case processing productivity is the percent of…

When it comes to invention disclosures, a TTO’s overarching goal is to ensure that any and all commercially viable inventions discovered within the R&D labs are disclosed to the TTO. In order to successfully achieve that long-term goal, the TTO must ensure that researchers (1) recognize their obligations relating to intellectual property (IP), (2) are aware of the existence of your office and how to work with you, and (3) understand (in general) the process and benefits of commercialization. To achieve these three sub-goals, new TTOs especially must do…