I had the pleasure to recently co-host an Innovation Roundtable on ‘Managing Corporate Innovation Across Sites’ with Wellspring Worldwide. Attended by a diverse cross-section of innovation leaders from industries including finance, high tech, and manufacturing, this interactive forum provided a unique opportunity to exchange best practices, ideas, and challenges in driving innovation.
Whether you want to improve your own business or introduce a new product or service line, technology/innovation is usually a major part of the solution. With all of the R&D at universities and government labs, it’s not always necessary to start from scratch to create that new solution or improvement. In fact, it’s best to always start by looking outside your company using open innovation—or better yet, Symbiotic Innovation—tactics.
Every university technology licensing officer dreads that moment when a company has expressed interest in a piece of intellectual property (IP)… but doesn’t want to sign a license. Fuentek has found that industry-sponsored research can be a useful tool to get things “unstuck” in these situations. We moderated a session at the AUTM annual meeting that provided insights on this approach from two universities and a pharmaceutical company.
We at Fuentek are big proponents of actively managing the intellectual property (IP) portfolio as a strategic asset. This is as important for companies as it is for universities, government agencies, and the like. So, Fuentek teamed up with PatSnap to offer a series of free webinars to help companies get the most out of their IP portfolios. Today’s post provides an overview of—and, more importantly, easy links to—that webinar series.
Fuentek has two webinars you won’t want to miss. Both focus on how to enhance the relationship between the researchers developing intellectual property (IP) and the technology transfer office (TTO) professionals tasked with protecting and commercializing it. Because by doing so, both departments can be more successful. The live webinars from summer 2017 were recorded and are available now.
This Friday, March 4th at noon EST, the Industrial Research Institute (IRI) is focusing its 1-hour “Brown Bag” webinar on Collaborating with Universities and Government Labs. This is a great opportunity for companies to gain tips and useful resources for navigating the partnerships between industry and research institutions. And you don’t have to be a member of IRI to attend Friday’s webinar – it’s open to all. I’m pleased to be a panelist for this interactive, web-based discussion along with Dr. Richard Chylla of Michigan State University. Rich and I co-authored an article published in IRI’s bimonthly journal Research–Technology Management on this very topic. Our conversation on Friday will focus on how to pursue collaborations with academic and government organizations…
It’s no secret that universities, research institutes, and government labs are excellent sources for innovations that can jump-start new product development. Rather than sink significant resources into starting from scratch internally, companies can leverage others’ technologies. Doing so can not only save money, but it also reduces the risk associated with the early stages of the innovation pipeline….
Universities and government labs — especially in the United States — are keen to transfer technologies into commercial ventures. It can be tough, but not impossible, for corporates to engage with those organisations and find those innovations. So begins an article I was asked to write for Intellectual Asset Management (IAM) magazine. Entitled “Cutting-Edge Tech: A How-To Guide for Corporate Licensing Officers,” this article is now available for downloading from our In-Depth Insights page. Thanks, IAM, for granting reprint permission….
There’s a big difference between how research organizations and private corporations communicate and think about technology transfer. Research organizations tend to focus on how to manage and share their intellectual property (IP). Technologies are often embryonic, development moves at a deliberate pace, and the focus isn’t so much on developing a product as on developing the next innovation. For industry, IP has to serve a purpose and advance the bottom line, whether it’s creating new revenue sources, improving net profits, or moving products quickly into the marketplace. Research organizations that act proactively can…
As I get ready for Fuentek’s new webinar on implementing open innovation best practices in technology transfer offices (TTOs), I am reminded of conversations I’ve had with a wide range of tech transfer professionals over the years. What has struck me time and again in these discussions is the broad applicability of open innovation concepts to tech transfer and the value of implementing these concepts in a proactive manner. Despite the fact that government, university, and corporate TTOs vary in their missions, perspectives on innovation, goals/metrics, and economic and entrepreneurial climates, they all have the potential to benefit from implementing sound principles related to open innovation.
