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 labs with the...
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.
We know that not all technology transfer deals are created equal. And in some cases, the estimated value of a deal can appear to be so low that it’s not worth going after. So how do you know when to abandon the negotiation and when to push for a more lucrative deal? That’s the focus of this Story from the Field. A prospect was interested in licensing our client’s technology, but in the course of qualifying the prospect, Fuentek learned that the company’s rough estimates of sales would yield very little royalty revenue—approximately $3K per year. This low value was hardly worth the effort of negotiating a licensing agreement, so we saw two options…
Thanks to Fuentek’s social media efforts, our inbound leads for client technologies have been going up dramatically, as have the leads coming in through more traditional marketing mechanisms. I get so excited every time we generate a new lead for one of our customers! But as exciting as that is, we always take a step back and qualify the lead.
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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 know that not all technology transfer deals are created equal. And in some cases, the estimated value of a deal can appear to be so low that it’s not worth going after. So how do you know when to abandon the negotiation and when to push for a more lucrative deal? That’s the focus of this Story from the Field. A prospect was interested in licensing our client’s technology, but in the course of qualifying the prospect, Fuentek learned that the company’s rough estimates of sales would yield very little royalty revenue—approximately $3K per year. This low value was hardly worth the effort of negotiating a licensing agreement, so we saw two options…
