Improving College Technology Transfer Outreach Efforts by utilizing Social Networking

Technology transfer and licensing are integral to business creation and growth in america. The push is on in america to produce more jobs, and largely through creating new companies, and expanding small-to-midcap companies, especially individuals whose classic markets, for example services, have been in upheaval as evidenced in the us government services contractor community.

In the past, small companies hire more and more people than large companies. Because of so many technology readily available for development support, for example cloud-computing as well as an expanding suite of SaaS choices, the price of infrastructure – frequently a significant background cost to some firm – could be better planned, budgeted and managed. This saves time and effort in start-ups.

As the primary sources for licensable technology in america are commercial entities, universities, and internal Federal Labs and Federally funded labs in academia, universities possess the largest variety of commercializable technology, and also the best environments for support of spinouts/new starts.

Local spinouts/new starts have importance given that they bring jobs towards the local economy. A college around the new england would really like the spinout in the backyard, not in California or Or, for instance. The main difference could be very significant in economic value — licensee charges and royalties of x value for any licensee located in and commercializing the licensed technology in California for instance, versus jobs and all sorts of flow-lower economic impact of getting that company within the backyard around the new england.

However in surveying the college marketing landscape there appears to become a insufficient effective outreach and marketing programs through the universities. Many possess a pull approach — excellent sites, on-line databases of licensable technology, excellent reports on their own achievements… but frequently little visibility. You need to know what to do to obtain the information. Obviously, push and pull sales and marketing are in accordance with where you stand standing as well as your perspective, but generally, the university’s name, status, and prior work would be the pull. Yes, many universities attend technology and innovation occasions, and you may search sites, or perhaps a patent portal. But it’s still pull marketing.

Actually, searching at 200 universities` internet sites, none of them had technology transfer around the webpage by mention or link you’d to appear to locate it. I at random checked out several universities Face book pages, and none of them emphasized its technology transfer programs or achievements.

In the Customer 360 conference in LA, Gartner Group forecasted the outcome of social networking on crm — basically marketing/sales. The outcome on firms without social networking programs is important. Since technology transfer Is an extremely real multi-billion/year business, it must be a cornerstone in universities’ efforts, otherwise already implemented or planned.