Rise and Shine: A Tuesday Morning Check-In from AUTM

The calm before the storm: Laura Schoppe gets grounded at Booth #305 on the first day of AUTM2011.

As you know from my last post, I’m in Las Vegas right now for the annual AUTM^® meeting. Our Fuentek booth (#305) is up, and we’re having lots of great discussions.

Yesterday’s keynote address was by Scott Shappell, a professor at Clemson University and accident investigation expert. He made a connection between accidents and technology transfer.

No, his point was not that tech transfer is an accident or an accident waiting to happen!

Shappell discussed the fact that many accidents stem from a lack of education/training as well as institutional culture. The challenges that tech transfer managers face are often the same:

• Inventors may not understand how tech transfer is relevant to them, so they make mistakes during the invention analysis process, like publicly revealing it before filing an invention disclosure with the tech transfer office. (I’ve blogged before about the importance of providing tech transfer training for your inventors.)
  
  
• Potential licensees may have a culture that is not open to accepting new innovations, thereby missing a good opportunity. (Remember: Your spin-out is someone else’s spin-in.)
  

Well, this was my interpretation of what he said, though I think his point was that he created a tech transfer opportunity from an analysis tool he developed that identifies how mistakes happen and has applied it to many more applications beyond the initial air transportation accident. My interpretation fits more broadly for AUTM. ☺

After that we heard from a panel of pharma and medical device VPs about open innovation.

• The good news: They are using social media to relate their needs and find new innovations.
  
  
• The not-so-good news: They are inundated with requests and ideas.
  

Screening would help them quickly bring the hordes of ideas to a reasonable level, but their comments bring to the forefront the point that launching a social media campaign requires a good strategy that addresses not just what to post where and when but what your process is for filtering responses.

Speaking of social media and screenings, we gave away two free registrations to Fuentek’s upcoming webinars:

• The Office of Technology Transfer, Licensing, and Industrial Ventures at l’Assistance Publique–Hôpitaux de Paris (a network of 37 public hospitals, linked with the University of Paris) won a free registration to our April 7th webinar on using social media in tech transfer.
  
  
• The Office of Technology Commercialization at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute won a free registration to our May 19th webinar on training tech transfer interns on how to perform technologies screenings efficiently and effectively (which frees up the professionals to pursue more intense tech transfer duties like marketing and deal-making).
  

Congratulations, Florence and Arundhati! We’ll have more drawings today and Wednesday. (And if you’re not at AUTM2011 and want to enter a drawing, fill out our social media in tech transfer survey.)

Today is the debate and a special interest group meeting to hear from AUTM membership on their ideas for the newly launch Strategic Alliance portfolio for AUTM. I’ll have more on that in the next post from Vegas.

Oh, and the meetings and networking have been so fast and furious that I didn’t get time to place 1 bet yesterday. Today might be my lucky day!

–By Laura A. Schoppe