stheriault's blog

There is nothing like waiting in a doctor’s office waiting room to catch up on some light reading. I must say that my last trip to the hospital was worth it because I fell on this refreshing article in the September issue of Biotechnology Focus entitled “Canada’s Biotec Ecosystem”[i]. Finally reading about TTOs playing an integral part in the commercialization ecosystem and in the country’s economic development made my wait to see the doctor bearable.

Taking advice from BigWeld Industries My life is consumed by cartoons. The other morning as I was watching the Robin Williams movie “Robots” with my son, it dawned on me that even cartoons are emphasizing the necessity for technology transfer offices to think outside of the box and change the way they do business. There is an opportunity for TTO’s to be able to offer better assistance to university researchers in obtaining funding for their research activities and it all starts with Big Weld Industries. The traditional techniques of university technology transfer consist of pushing university inventions onto industry in the hopes that we can convince industry that these inventions are in fact what it needs. We perpetuate the process of receiving invention disclosures, assessing the proposed invention to determine if there is a commercial potential and if so, what is this commercial potential.

I started my career as a divorce lawyer, but recently I was hired as Director of Technology Transfer at Three Oaks Innovations, Inc. It turns out divorce and technology transfer are amazingly similar. Every marriage and every research project starts out with initial butterflies, anticipating the possibility that something good is going to happen. Researchers are starting a relationship, like any couple does, and the stakes can be pretty high. But sometimes research projects are rushed into without taking any of the important legal steps to protect the researcher’s intellectual investment. Then the funding comes in, and the collaborators settle into a comfortable relationship, both contributing to the final outcome. These projects can take months or, more likely, years. During this time, both parties bring ideas, inventions, and new developments to the relationship: they are making a substantial contribution to the final outcome of the project. But it’s not just any project. Besides the publications that will come out of the project, the project’s outcomes are going to sell and the inventor is going to make money.