What are some major trends you are seeing in Tech Transfer?
Bryce: One of the exciting things about Tech Transfer is how fast things are changing. So, we are seeing several trends. One is a significant increase in the quality and quantity of startups. There are several reasons behind this. One is that existing industry is doing less early stage R&D so more times than not a promising technology will be too early-stage for incumbents. Therefore, the best next step for the technology is a startup in order to continue to advance the technology outside the university to the point where an existing company will acquire the startup. The increase in startups is also driven by more entrepreneurial faculty and grad students, and the prevalence of school-specific entrepreneurial training. Our faculty and grad students are much more versed in the concepts of validating value propositions, customer discovery, and identifying a repeatable, scalable business model. Around Ann Arbor we have also seen more early stage investors interested in funding technologies out of our labs (although we still need more).
The other trend is volume. The number of inventions and deals is skyrocketing across all disciplines. Further, we are seeing more innovations from outside the traditional tech transfer participants of engineering and medicine. The prevalence of software and data science has made everyone an entrepreneur, so we are seeing significantly impactful innovations from the social sciences.
Another trend is the prevalence of translational funding. We are blessed with over twenty-five translational funds on campus and these funds and the associated expertise they attract through their oversight committees play a large role in our commercialization efforts.
The SearchLite: The University of Michigan has seen a 5-year rise in licenses and start-ups. In fact, 2019 was the best year ever. What’s driving this?
Bryce: It wasn’t something that happened overnight– Michigan has invested heavily in research commercialization in the last few decades, taking a long-term view. This includes better faculty education on commercialization, which leads to higher quality inventions. There have been a number of institutes and centers established with aims towards research commercialization. On the Tech Transfer side, we’ve been fortunate to recruit some amazing talent. We have people in our office that can make things happen that wouldn’t happen but for our involvement. We have also changed our approach. We are disciples of Steve Blank and the customer discovery methodology. So, at the earliest stages of working with an innovation we are interacting with industry experts to gather feedback and assess the potential for product-market fit.
The SearchLite: How long is the long game?
Bryce: Obviously it varies but it’s longer than most people think. Take one of our top success stories; we had a mid-90s invention/drug therapy, and the product was finally approved FDA in 2013. No one involved in that license is here anymore. Knowing that, it takes an institutional investment today to create the inventions of tomorrow, the licenses of the next five years, and the products or services of the next decades. (That’s not even mentioning the revenues which will trail all of the above.) It can be hard to make the necessary investments when the feedback loop is so long. For a tech transfer office perspective, you need to invest in your personnel so that you have the type of staff that can add value to a researcher’s work. You also need a significant patent budget to place enough bets.
The SearchLite: How do you think about ROI?
Bryce: We don’t have a short-term ROI. In fact, economic ROI is not the driving factor at UM. In my opinion, the research university should be focused on societal impact. If you are truly able to keep that in mind, it’s easier to have a broad view of “value” — one that includes impact, brand value to the university, talent attraction and retention, economic develop, student opportunities. All of those things provide really meaningful value to an institution and a region. If we do the right things, there will be some economic ROI over the long-term, but that’s not the initial goal.
The SearchLite: If it takes so long to see an ROI, how do you know what you are doing now is working?
Bryce: We don’t. We like to run experiments and see what works. But when you are talking about getting a product to market over the course of decades, you need to run experiments that test certain aspects of that process. At UM, we’ve doubled down on inventor focus- if we are providing amazing customer service to inventors, we think all of the other metrics will fall into place. That means mentoring, responsiveness, providing thoughtful, data-driven decisions that are made in conjunction with the inventors, and giving resources to faculty. All the other good things will come from that.
The SearchLite: Anything else you want to mention or advice you want to give to other Tech Transfers?
1. Faculty education helps a lot- almost every college at Michigan has entrepreneurship programs
2. Tap into vast networks- e.g. reach out to Alumni. Tech Transfer can’t be experts in everything so tap into your networks
3.Have the budget to help support all of this and know an economic ROI might be 10+ years and shouldn’t drive decisions
4.Encourage customer discovery for both tech transfer employees assessing inventions and faculty
