Successful awards nominations require strategic thinking about the types of awards to apply for as well as persuasive writing and a solid process for internal reviews. We continue our series on tech transfer awards with this post offering key writing tips to employ when you craft an award submission that will set you apart from other nominees.
Applying for awards is a great way to gain recognition for your innovators and to further the goals of your technology transfer organization. We have prepared nearly 200 award applications in the last 20 years and have learned a lot along the way. Here are our top tips to make your awards applications process a good one.
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.
We at Fuentek are thrilled to share some exciting news for one of our clients. Kolon Industries will receive the Display Component of the Year Award for its Colorless Polyimide (CPI™) film. And later this year, Kolon’s cutting-edge material will be in the pockets of everyone with the Samsung Galaxy X—the only phone in the world with a foldable display.
Although not nearly as costly as hosting tech transfer events, attending a relevant industry conference still requires a significant financial and time commitment. So, it’s important for your technology transfer office (TTO) attendees to achieve tangible outcomes. (Plus, you don’t want it perceived a junket.) Here is some advice based on our extensive experience supporting TTOs.
Earlier this spring, NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center (AFRC) signed a license allowing Vigilant Aerospace Systems to integrate its patent-pending sense-and-avoid system into the startup company’s FlightHorizon™ avionics platform. This deal is noteworthy not only because it may improve flight safety for all kinds of aircraft, including UAVs/drones, but also because it provides a valuable tech transfer case study.
On Monday, President Obama signed bipartisan legislation to increase the federal focus on the harmful algal blooms plaguing the Great Lakes and U.S. ocean waters. But progress in understanding HABs is already underway, thanks to an ongoing collaboration between two federal agencies. Researchers from NASA and NOAA have been working together to improve monitoring of HABs, which pose significant threats to humans and wildlife as they form, spread, and disappear.
For my first few posts on the Fuentek blog, I will be writing about several topics that came up at the AUTM® Eastern Region Meeting in Boston earlier this week. It was a great meeting, and it was particularly interesting for me now that I’ve returned to the Northeast, departing my position as director of a university technology transfer office (TTO) and transitioning into a consulting role. Today’s post will focus on AUTM president-elect Jane Muir’s luncheon presentation, in which she offered several updates from AUTM. In particular, Jane mentioned two new AUTM initiatives that should be quite helpful to university TTOs in developing public (and congressional) awareness of the benefits of tech transfer. Jane also talked about a great training opportunity at the 2014 AUTM Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
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.
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.
