In my last post, I offered recommendations for connecting with potential partners while you’re at the national meeting for AUTM®. Today I’m sharing more general advice for having a productive experience at the conference. I know it’s hard to make time for these things when you’re frantic preparing to be away from the office for several days and trying to clear the decks. But a little time invested up front will be well worth it. Learn about your learning opportunities: Do you need to get better informed about a specific aspect of technology commercialization? Check out the advance meeting program to get the lay of the land, identifying sessions and events that are of particular interest to you. If you’re a paper person, print pages

Thanks to the proactive efforts by AUTM® the past few years, the national meeting will have significant industry representation, including key new participants from outside the life sciences such as Samsung and Raytheon. This provides an ideal opportunity for university technology transfer offices (TTOs) and high-tech companies to lay the groundwork for establishing mutually beneficial collaborations and licenses. To make the most of your time at the AUTM meeting, I recommend taking these six actions right away.

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.

Last week I had the great opportunity to participate in a social media panel at the 2013 meeting of the Association of University Technology Managers®. My fellow panelists and I were thrilled to have a large audience with very engaged participants. I’d like to share a few of the themes that I found to resonate most strongly with our audience, based on both their questions and their facial expressions!

Well, we made it through the first half of the AUTM® annual meeting. It’s been a great conference so far, and I expect the next two days to be likewise. It’s a little bittersweet for me, as this meeting marks the end of my tenure as VP of Strategic Alliances. I am grateful for the many people who contributed to all that’s been accomplished in the past two years, particularly the successful development and launch of AUTM’s Global Technology Portal. Speaking of the GTP,…

It’s a bit like a Tolstoy novel: Happy internship programs are all alike. Well, maybe not alike. But they are pretty consistent across the technology transfer spectrum. This was the consensus of panelists and attendees at a session of the recent Association of University Technology Managers® (AUTM®) annual meeting in Anaheim, California. The dynamic and interactive Frequently Asked Questions about Intern Programs session about effective internship programs attracted quite a crowd, especially considering it was one of the final sessions on the last day of AUTM 2012 (an indicator of how important this topic is to university TTOs).

Danielle, Julie, and I are settling back into the swing of things now that we’re back from the AUTM® annual meeting in Anaheim. We’ll blog about our panels (which we previewed earlier) in the days to come. But today I wanted to recap some of my favorite moments from the conference. Positive Responses to the Global Technology Portal: I was happy to hear from so many AUTM members and industry representatives about the value of the GTP. It’s clear from the feedback I heard that…

As VP for Strategic Alliances, I was pleased to host a special-interest group (SIG) discussion yesterday morning at the AUTM® annual meeting. It turned out to be a popular session, with more than 40 attendees split about evenly between university and industry tech transfer offices (TTOs). All of them offered great ideas about the various initiatives that Strategic Alliances is pursuing.

Greetings from Anaheim, California, where Fuentek’s Danielle McCulloch, Julie Markoski, and I are attending the annual meeting of the Association of University Technology Managers®. The conference has barely started, and we’re already very busy at this great meeting! AUTM 2012 began yesterday with a joint session with the Licensing Executives Society, which had its Winter Meeting here in the first half of the week. (And, no, it’s not coincidence that the LES and AUTM meetings are aligned like this. This was just one of several efforts this year in AUTM’s Strategic Alliances.) The two associations hosted a pair of sessions together on Wednesday. The first was called…

Fuentek is gearing up for the annual meeting of the Association of University Technology Managers® (AUTM®) annual meeting March 14-17 in Anaheim, California. This year we’ll be participating on two interesting panels, and we couldn’t be more excited about it! Fuentek president Laura Schoppe is hosting the panel “Tailoring Your Web Site to Match Your Technology Transfer Office’s Goals.” The panel will give attendees lots of ideas for ways in which they can redesign their own sites. Next up, I’m pleased to join the panel “Frequently Asked Questions about Intern Programs.” This session will draw on industry best practices to answer questions about the Who, What, When, Why, and How surrounding internship programs.