Speaker 1  0:01  
Good morning. Welcome to marketing successful practices presented by Autumn. My name is Holly Lundgren. autumns online professional development manager and I will be your staff host for today. Just a couple of quick housekeeping items. All lines have been muted to ensure high quality audio. We will be recording today's session. And if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to use the q&a feature at any time. I'd like to take a brief moment to thank autumns annual webinar sponsor, Marshall, Gerstein and Borun and we thank them for their support. Our speakers for today are Paul tamarkan of University of Arizona. Todd Keeler of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Ella ethereal Odachi of Queen Mary innovation, and Brian shed of Houston, of University of Houston. At this time, I'm going to turn it over to our moderator, Paul to mark in for further introductions. Welcome Paul Todd. Elif theoria. And Brian.

Speaker 2  1:05  
Thanks, Holly. Welcome, everybody. It's great to be with everybody this morning. I'm, I think it's wonderful. Right now we're showing like 94 people on the call, which is wonderful. So again, thank you for being here. I'm called to market. I'm the Assistant Director of Marketing, and communications for tech launch Arizona, at the University of Arizona. I am also on the audit marketing course committee, as well as the essentials committee. And just again, we're really excited to be doing this for everybody this morning. Also, a special shout out to my TLA family members, especially Eileen and Anna, my marketing team, they're on the call. So great to have you guys here. Just to say I straight up. It's hard that we're all here and having to meet this way. But I miss seeing everybody's faces in person at the annual meeting meeting. But we will look forward to being with everybody together next year in Seattle. I hope everybody's families are safe and well, and being well cared for. So again, as Holly said, as we move forward, enter your questions in the chat. And I've introduced myself. So I'd like to have each of our panelists introduce themselves. And then we'll dive into the content. What we'll do is each of us are going to give a quick overview of our offices, and then we'll provide some case studies for the best practices, and then we'll have q&a. So, Todd, I'm gonna turn to you for a second then. Right.

Unknown Speaker  2:35  
So my name is Todd Keeler. I'm a Director of the Office of Technology Commercialization at Worcester Polytechnic, was Worcester is the most mispronounced name from people outside of Massachusetts. I've been a member of autumn since 1990.

Unknown Speaker  2:55  
I am an affiliate of IKEA. I work for Queen Mary innovation. It is the Technology Transfer Office of Queen Mary University of London. So I'm based in the UK at the moment. And I have been a lifeguard on technology transfer last year. And I'm also part of this small technology transfer offices committee of autumn. So I have found firsthand how much help I have received from the autumn committee and the autumn community. And I look forward, you know, to support you guys, you know, on my ASP in the work that I do currently at the moment.

Unknown Speaker  3:33  
Hello, this is Brian Chad. I'm the director of licensing at the Office of Technology Transfer and Innovation at the University of Houston. I want to echo kind of what Paul said, you know, very, very sad that we can't, we can't do this in person. I think the autumn annual meeting is kind of like one event that I really look forward to every year. But with everything going on, it's completely understandable. And I am glad that we had the opportunity to kind of bring this online. Do you have everybody safe? You know, working from home, I got my wife, two kids and a dog here. So if you hear noises in the background, I'm sure everybody can, can can understand what that what that's what that's all about.

Speaker 2  4:16  
Thanks, Brian. Well, jumping into things. Todd is going to give our first section to talk to us about whisker. Right.

Unknown Speaker  4:28  
So this is the quad. It's minus people right now. Western Polytech Next slide please. We were founded in 1865. We have 4400 undergrad and 1700 grad students. We're primarily an engineering school. Next slide. We'd like to say where the tiny tech transfer office that could. We nicknamed it T three tiny tech transfer in Massachusetts here. We have a very Small research bases $33 million. But we had 67 new invention disclosures last fiscal year a little overwhelming for us. We did 11 licenses with two FTAs. Next slide. And we've totally market focus, we added a licensing associate in July of last year, and our primary duty is marketing, when we advertise, don't want to offend anybody, but PhD was not preferred. In her case, she ran what's called the tech advisory network, which is a group of alumni that mentor our startups and review our provisional patents. And so she had, she brings with us a ton of contacts among our alumni to help market our technologies. We start with the invention disclosure form being totally market driven. So we asked them, what's the need, that they're addressing? What's their approach to that need? What's the benefit of their need, and who's the competition out there. And that helps us with prior art searching. We use a tool called Search real fast.com, which was donated to us by an alumnus, and very grateful that many of our students and faculty use that to do their own prior art searching by putting in just a couple of key words. We went through when Sarah, the licensing associate joined, we did a another review of our portfolio. We've we've done this periodically, when I got here, about six years ago, we had 300 active cases, and not one active license, which is hard to do. So we first passed, we eliminated about half the cases. And then when Sarah Jones, we eliminated 28 more cases that were just kind of dead wood sitting there, so that we could focus our efforts on what's the best things to be marketing. And Linda Kelly, our our caller, the back office person does a rolling forecast of upcoming provisional convergence so that we can look three months out where do we really have to focus our marketing, even though we still get caught like right now, we got a lot of student inventions around their senior projects and senior faculty and students that are inventing things together. Some of our most promising licenses have come from their major qualifying projects or senior project. So we really try to anticipate and do the marketing ahead of time I am finding with this situation, as I'm cold calling on people, I'm actually getting more responses. And it could be because people are sitting at home and reading their emails versus going from meeting to meeting. Next slide, please. We do have a patent catalog like everybody else, we're getting better at getting up to date. On the right is an example of what's on our patent catalog. Next slide. And Sarah develops what we call the tech opportunity piece or tops and this is on a special Val. I'll talk about a my case study how we use this bow tops to market. Next slide. So, in summary, we do have a total market focus. We use the Tech Advisors network, we have about 215 Alumni spread across the country that evaluates after we filed provisional patents that we do have on campus tech advisor network that comes when we have either on thinking of a company or I started a company. They convene on campus once a month and meet with these teams and will volunteer typically, each team will get three or four mentors to help them guide them through. We use our LinkedIn to target WPI grads at places targets and I'll talk about that in my case study and I pick up the phone when people call to inquire about it we really try to be responsive to them. So that's all I have for WPI

Unknown Speaker  9:30  
if area we need you to hang mute

Unknown Speaker  9:35  
I apologize when this happened last time was way I will get used to the Meeting button and I work as a commercialization manager at Queen Mary innovation. We are a wholly owned company of Queen Mary University of London and we are based at the centre of London so we're only 10 minutes from Liverpool straight and this with where we have all the banking firms if I can say And the interesting thing about conveyor innovation is that we don't have things that deal with it's part of the Technology Transfer Office specifically, but its manager has the responsibility to evaluate the opportunities, also the marketing and also abroad licenses, and do the negotiations for the deals. That would come afterward. afterwards. Next slide, please. A little bit of facts about how the university Howard University size relates to the outputs that we get in commercialization. So our university has five sites in London, and we also have sites in Europe and Asia, we have 4500, members of staff to 26,000 students. And the important thing about the impact that we provide is that we are the fifth UK university that has the most impactful research outputs. And this can be seen, I think, from the fact that we are really close to a hospital depart NHS Trust the box and it is us is the oldest hospital in the UK, we have the opportunity when we get an invention to actually validate it in a clinical setting. And we also have access to patient samples. So when a company comes to us, we we have a higher credibility when we provide them with this invention, because we have actually validated it in a clinical setting. As far as our disclosure concern, we have 94 disclosure forms, this is what we get yearly. And we don't have so many spin outs coming out from the university we have around three or four per year. But we have really embarked to spin out so we have been able for one of our for one of our three aim listed companies, we have been able to sell it out for 330 million. And last year, we had 26 commercial agreements signed. Next slide, please. So what I want to mention about our technology transfer of structure is exactly what I said previously. So we had a we have a director that oversees three different teams. We have one biopharma team, one technology and engineering team. And also think that these with, with China and Korea relationships. So what we have done is that we have a team that deals with biopharmaceuticals, only diagnostics, therapeutics and software. And we have a different team that deals with bio engineering technologies and Engineering Technologies. So our director oversees the management of those things. But it specific manager has to work throughout the technology transfer process, they have to evaluate and market the technologies. So we don't have marketing specialists. And I think that this is important for people, for small technology transfer officer don't have the resources to actually get someone on board with the marketing for them. There is a way for its manager specifically to develop the expertise and work throughout marketing their technology on their own, without having someone that is an expert, if we wouldn't have the resources. Next slide, please. So how do we do external marketing? Obviously, we'll have a website. So the important thing about our website is to be able to market opportunities. As Todd mentioned, we have a one page flyer from about in which we have all the all the information about our technologies. Why why they are competitive enough. What is the science? Do we have we filed a patent application. So we have those flyers on the website. And we also updated with information about the conference that we go to achievements that has our team has had our licenses, and whether we have been able to generate funding for spin up companies. And this is important because actually we use this website to market it through LinkedIn as well. And we can send these websites to potential licensees so they can see the value that our technologists bring out of the university. Except for the website, we also find it really important to have the right collaborators and specifically life science companies that are interested in holding events. For example, one nucleus some of you may have heard it because they keep coming into the autumn conferences and they show their value in those conferences. One nucleus holds events and training events and what they do is that they are interested in having a need of having a university party in either in one of their one nuclear kind of settings or use the university as a setting to bring in industry So what happens is that when you clues will find part of the conference, they will find a conduct research organization that wants to market their services, monitors will come with a CRO and the university to co host an event. And in this event, if you can bring in your business development team to identify important academics that can showcase either the technologies or the reasons that they're doing, then key industry leaders would be interested to come at this conference. So these are three different parties coming together to co host an event that can bring value to the university and to the potential technologies we would like to license. Except for that we have also tried using matchmaking platforms, it hasn't been this hasn't been really successful for us. And we're still trying to work on that. I think Paul will mentioned his, you know, how he has worked with them, and it has been successful for them. And what we're currently looking at and especially for opportunities that we haven't been able to license to the regional and national phase entry off of the patent applications, we have seen that we can collaborate with consultants or marketing companies, that would ask for a specific percentage of the deal when this deal is made. So for opportunities that you are thinking of abandoning, it is interesting to actually look through those companies and see whether it is interesting to collaborate in the end, they will just take part of the deal of the final deal when it could be the case that you would have no deal in place. And our last kind of marketing way I would say would be trade go participating in trade shows, specifically our technology and engineering team goes to trade shows before they have actually formed the red state of spin out company, what they do is take they take their product, and they go to the trade show and they validate the market, they they see whether there are customers that are interested, they see what's going on out there in the market and if there is doing this, if they're people that come to the trade show specifically for that product, then they actually read to the company. So, the market is validated and there is true value of this actually becoming a spin on company from the university. Next slide please. Our marketing approach, I think it is quite straightforward. The important thing for this is that in our team specifically its manager presents the opportunity to the rest of the team, we all have to make a common decision on whether these opportunities but enable whether there is a market need whether the competition is not great enough and whether the the the DDF is the technology disclosure form, it is the invention disclosure form, as we call it in the US. So, we would identify whether these opportunities but then about whether there is competition, which would limit us from going forward whether there is a clear commercial value and whether the product would be commercially viable. And once the manager has done this due diligence, they would present the opportunity to the team and we would all have to make a common decision on whether this opportunity would actually be filed. Once we decided to refund this opportunity it is up to the manager to do an in depth due diligence to identify the companies that have a specific gap in their in their products and this product would actually go in and cover this gap we're basically looking mainly for the bull side rather than the put side. So there needs to be a through interest in this company to license this opportunity. Next slide please so I personally mailing we always send we try to send personal emails we try to create our own contacts list an Excel file of contacts from the people that have already made it is really important for us you know to develop a relationship with the other party and know exactly at certain points in time which companies are interested in which products we know that industry sometimes and I mean a lot of time and specifically now with COVID Their interest chains and

Unknown Speaker  19:29  
their strategic interests things because of you know different situations and how their management team changes as well. So we do personally mailings. We use our LinkedIn contacts who we need to make sure that we have where have we met those people. What What kind of exchanges have we had, we use? We try to sow interest without show trust in our academic so we when we speak to academics about their technology, what was asked them Okay, what kinds of companies do you think that this technology can go to, based on your experience based on the, you know, on the competitive understanding that you have about this field, so we always have our academics in close contact. And they have been helpful many times, in a number of cases, we also work with life or life sciences or in the organization. And we have a program with them, they provide us with interns, and in order for them to get experience in the Technology Transfer profession. And they, they support us a lot. So we did stem, we work together on the marketing aspect. And I think it's really important to have those fellows on board as well. What I would like to close this talk with is that I feel that we all have the need to monitor technology meet our targets, but sometimes we forget how important is to get feedback on the technology development, when we get feedback, and when we ask for that feedback, we can then go back to our academics and say, Look, this company asked for these kinds of experiments. If you do these experiments, then they could be a potential licensee, they could be they're seen in your technology. And at the same time you develop the relationship at some point, you can go back to them and say, Look, we have developed this technology further, would you like to take another look, or we'll have something else that may be interesting to you. And at the same time, while we'll develop those relationships and build, you know, our Excel sheet of contacts, we can understand whether this is a good marketing approach for technology transfer office, as new people can come in, we may decide to review our marketing strategy and see what fits us best, both based on the people that we have, and on the experience and the expertise they have and both on the technologies that come in.

Unknown Speaker  22:03  
Alright, so I'm gonna start off with kind of an intro to University of Houston, and get you introduced to the u h, technology bridge. The technology Bridge is a is our research park. So in addition to having all of the kind of tech transfer functions, our group manages the research park activities as well. So it's kind of a it's a different structure. There's some some positives to that. But it's also a lot, you know, our activity sets pretty large as a result of that. So like I mentioned, we're, I'm with the Office of Technology Transfer and innovation. But you know, the technology bridge is kind of the name we go by that kind of encompasses all of the tech transfer activities, as well as the research park activities. And I'll talk a little bit about more of what kinds of resources we have there. But first, I was gonna give you some stats just so you get an idea of kind of the size of our tech transfer activities. Next slide, please. So we're doing about 67 million in licensing revenue. Not too bad, right? You know, we've got a therapeutic, an anti seizure medication that's on the market currently, and has been doing really well for us. So very excited about that. But as with all patented therapies, it's going to be coming off patent protection here in a couple of years. So we expect to see a little dip in this revenue. But you know, we're trying to stay on top of the pipeline and and get the next, the next big winner out there for us. So we'll see how that goes. Doing about 60 to 70 disclosures every year, in this last year had had a nice jump in the research expenditures that were at about 195 million. Next slide, please. So just to get an idea of the size of our group, you know that it'd be helpful to just kind of throw up our org chart. We just got a new executive director center, it says full time search underway, but we found him. He came to us from MD Anderson. So he was a local guy here in Houston. been on the job for about a month and what a time to be starting a new job, right. So you know, we had about two weeks in the office before everybody started working remotely. But yeah, he jokes you know, it's never a good time to start a new job in the middle of a pandemic, but he's been great. We're very happy to have him here. The way the rest of the group is kind of set up is we have three groups, our IP or patenting team, the licensing team and the innovation team. IP the patenting group mainly handles disclosures, and oversees all of the outside patent prosecution communications with their outside counsel. My group handles all of the kind of marketing and licensing activities to the technologies. And then the innovation team is the one that really oversees all of the all of the research park activities. So we're talking about out, we've got an incubator, 30,000 square foot, wetland incubator, we've got the Innovation Center, which is, which is kind of a co working space. So right now we've got 75 acres on the park, but really only have innovation activities and about two at a building. So we're kind of early in the life stage of a research park, but plans to kind of expand there. And, and so there's kind of a marketing component to that, too, like, in addition to kind of marketing technologies, we're also doing a lot of outreach to industry to try and entice the small, medium and large to come and do business at the technology bridge. And so there's kind of a dual pitch there sometimes where it's like, you know, we've got this wonderful IP portfolio, but we'd also love for you to come in and take a look at the park and see if there's, and see if there's a fit there as well. For the companies in our, in our incubator, we have about 30 tenants right now. And most of those are startup companies, a handful of them are eh spinouts. But you know, we do encourage them to, to have connectivity with the university. And so if they're licensing University of Houston, intellectual property, they get a very nice discount on rent at the technology bridge. So that's kind of one of the ways that we, we kind of play with with the resources that we have to try and get benefit from both sides. So we're a small group, and, you know, on the marketing and licensing team, you know, there's only three of us, we've got approval to bring on a fourth person who will really focus more on these industrial partnerships. So they'll kind of there'll be part of the licensing team, but they're also going to have this eye on developing these broader industry partnerships that might bring in large companies to house at the set up operations at the technology bridge. So one way that we're looking to kind of add some additional staff is through our intern program. So we've got approval to hire for interns. And next slide please. And, and so we our program initially was kind of set up so that that the students would come in and would rotate between the groups. So they would learn IP disclosures reporting to the federal government, how to do IP assessment, priority analyses, some of the licensing activities, doing marketing and outreach and negotiation, the innovation activity, supporting our startups doing the leasing contracts and working with our tenants, and then they would kind of have a home base. And so we would kind of expose them to all these different aspects in the office. So they kind of at least know what's going on. But then kind of their day to day would be housed in one of those groups. We listed the positions open for graduate or undergraduate, we had really good recruitment and collaboration opportunities with groups on campus. For example, the Bauer Business College has the wolf Center for Entrepreneurship, which was just named the number one undergraduate entrepreneurship program in the country. And so we advertised through them, obviously, that would be a kind of a great fit for the innovation team. College of Technology and the College of Engineering, both have kind of innovation programs or innovation and entrepreneurship programs like certificates. And so those are also groups that we marketed to. And then we also have a really well known intellectual property law program at the law school. And we advertise to that too. And in fact, there was a lot of interest there. And they are really pushing to try and set up an externship program where students would get credit. And so we're kind of exploring that possibility as well. The nice thing I thought was, we were able to kind of provide support justification for making these paid positions. So for for interns, you know, we're looking at an annual cost of about 70 $80,000. That would be about 20 hours a week. So that's essentially kind of like two additional staff that we're getting, which will be fantastic. And that is really going to help us primarily with a lot of our, of our marketing and outreach and, and the kind of startup support that we can provide. And so definitely encourage kind of, you know, interns, intern programs as a way to kind of fill out your staff a little bit. Next slide, please.

Unknown Speaker  29:23  
So, in terms of kind of our marketing approach, you know, I think we have a pretty traditional approach. The one kind of unique thing that we that we have, some institutions have most don't, is an IP committee. So we've got 13 faculty that are appointed by the faculty senate that comprise our IP committee, the way our IP policy is written. Our office kind of presents the disclosures and we provide a technology assessment to the committee and they make a recommendation to the chancellor who ultimately decides one of two things that either we return the electoral property to the inventors or that the university supports it and we take it forward and are all Has continues to manage it. And so, right now, I think we're kind of around 5050, like in terms of where the committee falls. But we do have this obligation that once kind of, we're kind of past the provisional stage, we put together these assessments for the IP committee. And we do that, you know, the one picture that we've got up there is a SWOT analysis. That's kind of one of the slides that we that we put together for the technology assessment. And we do our marketing kind of early in this process as well. Because ideally, if we've got a company that's kind of expressed some interest in it makes the presentation to the IP committee very simple. You know, we've we've got demonstrated market interest. And so this decision to kind of support the application, and later stages of prosecution becomes a little easier to justify, you know, so we develop our one pagers or nonconfidential summaries, you know, pretty pretty standard, identify leads, do our outreach, that little spreadsheet there at the bottom is kind of a lead tracker document that we can use to track who we've talked to how we've contacted them, what kind of a response that we're getting, I think it's really important in this process of marketing, this kind of traditional kind of push away is, is that you've got good iteration. So as long as you can kind of come back and say like, Okay, do we hit the mark with our initial outreach? Or do we need to refocus? You know, what did we learn from the outreach? Is there companies that that may be interested? Or is this just something where the markets completely moved on in a different direction. And then, and then we usually provide kind of a summary of that, and then we'll feed back into the assessment. But even once it goes through IPC, we're still continually continuing to assess things. The last piece is, of course, our website, a lot of the non confidential summaries will get posted there. And we've tried to do a much better job of getting the technologies as soon as they're disclosed to our office listed on the website by title only, just so that when we have our categories up there, for instance, biotech, somebody wants to see that they can at least go in and see things if it's title only. And if they're like, Hey, that sounds interesting, I want to learn more, you know, we can do an NDA or something like that. But it does give us the ability to kind of create portfolios that we can share with companies, you know, if they come in, and they say, Well, I want to know what med devices or I want to know what, you know, water purification technologies you have, you know, we can gin up his lists really easily to share with him kind of the full scope of all the IP that we have. So I'll share a little bit about one of the projects that we're working on a little bit later. But that's kind of the general overview of University of Houston and our our marketing approach.

Speaker 2  32:49  
Thanks, Brian. All right. So again, I'm Paul, I'm with TechCrunch, Arizona at the University of Arizona. And I'll just give you my quick overview, I'll try and be brief so that we can get into the case studies. Can you move on Holly? We are Arizona's land grant university. We have 44,000 students, 34,000 undergrads, almost 10,000 graduates, and this is actually last year's research number. Our most research number is we're up to $733 million in research expenditures. So the U of A is is a pretty big school and and we are doing well on our rankings. We're number 20 on public institutions and number 35 overall. So we're very proud of what we've achieved at the U of A next slide on. So in terms of our technology commercialization metrics, last year for FY 19. We did 11 startups. We had almost 6 million in revenue from royalties and other income we did 284 invention disclosures. And actually, on that note, given that $733 million in research, we believe there's significant amount of headroom to grow our invention disclosures. So we definitely want to grow in that area. Last year, we had 56 patents issued and applied for 341. And also in FY 19. We did 96 licenses and options. The year before that we did 112. So last year, we experienced a dip. Also on the startup area the previous year we did I believe it was 16 startups and we also had a dip in that area. So we think that this year we're going to get those numbers back up. Of course, the current situation is affecting things. But our numbers seem to still be on track for the year. So we think that we will finish out the year well in terms of our metrics. So that's where we're at in that area. Next slide. about our history. So the University of Arizona actually prior to 2013, was historically underperforming in tech commercialization. And in 2012, we hired a new senior vice president to rebuild technology commercialization at the University of Arizona. With the goal he came in, and he set it out as his gold and said straight up, we are going to be an exemplar technology transfer office by 2020. He set a very clear roadmap, very clear goals and metrics and specific things that we would achieve. He staffed up the office over the course of the year, and by 2013, we were fully operational and fully staffed. And we have essentially achieved achieved those goals. I think that if you look at the University of Arizona, how our metrics have grown year over year, and on our website, we have all our annual reports. Since we got going. We have grown year over year and done extremely well. I think we've achieved our goals and been very successful. So next slide, Holly. So it's a little small on the screen. But to give you a general idea of how our office is structured, we have essentially four branches of teams. We have a licensing and IP team, we have a finance and admin team, marketing, communications, and a venture development team. So the licensing team is really in charge of that. That's our licensing manager group. They are actually embedded licensing manager. So we have licensing managers dedicated, essentially to each of our greatest IP producing colleges. So the College of Medicine has its own licensing manager, the College of Science has its own licensing manager, the College of Engineering, etc. And essentially, those licensing managers are fully dedicated, and they are out there in those colleges interacting with the faculty, pursuing invention disclosures pursuing impactful technologies and bringing those technologies to the surface every day. So they are an essential part both. And they are the ones that are making those connections between inventors, and potential licensees and industry. On the other side of that chart is our venture development team. And we have a good sized venture development team, we have a director, who is in charge of really bringing forth those startups and working with the licensing managers and the inventors, when those inventors express interest, and when the technology has the potential to be a successful startup. And we also, as you'll see on that, on that branch of the venture development, on the org chart, we have met, we have four mentors and residents. And those mentors and residents are specialized. So we have a mentor for software. We have a mentor for physical sciences, we have a mentor for pharmaceuticals, and one for medical devices. And those people are all experienced entrepreneurs and they get paired with startup teams, to help them move along to prepare those startups to be ready for success. When they sign a license. We want them to be as well positioned as possible, and have the right leadership in place in the right business strategy in place to really be ready to hit the ground running when they sign that license and beyond their own. And of course, our marketing communications team, we actually I think have a comparatively we have a very well staffed Marketing Communications Group, we have myself. And then we have an events person, as well as a technology Marketing Associate who is our who is really the frontline person in doing the specific marketing of our technologies. Holly, next one. So on the technology marketing side, very high level, our other presenters gave you kind of their process for what they do at a high level. So here's what we do. So when a technology comes in, we first have, we have a market research manager. And he has a team of student workers, student interns, and they do that big commercialization that initial commercialization assessment. And they work with the licensing managers to figure out what the commercial landscape looks like, what the market potential is, and they do that initial analysis just like the research that Brian was talking about in his presentation. We take that information that we get, and then we begin marketing these technologies and this is the the our technology. Our Marketing Associate takes that assessment that came from the market research Search group. And once we deem a technology ready to be kind of put out there into the world, our technology marketing team goes forth. And they build that web content, they build a nonconfidential summary in collaboration with the licensing managers. And then once that technology is on the web, we also begin that outreach piece. So we use that content to drive email campaigns. We use that content for social media campaigns and social media, not so much to drive licenses. But we want to use that content to drive awareness of the university as a as a real resource for innovative thinking and innovative solutions to real problems. So we're dual purposing. Content. One is, obviously we're trying to get that license. But two is we're trying to educate the public as to what the University of Arizona does, in terms of being a resource for innovation. And just jumping back to the those email campaigns, we do put a lot of emphasis on them, we know that one to one contact, that direct contact is what really gets these conversations going. We're always exploring other avenues. But with those email campaigns, we did 100, almost 100 of them in 2019. And those generated about 100 responses. So we're, it's all it's, it's it's a quantity question. When we're doing direct email campaigns, you got to do a lot of them, you have to get that make that funnel really big to get those few valuable responses. I think that's just the nature of of how it works. Let's see how much you can put how much input? Here's a question from, from set, how much input if at all do you receive from the inventor, when drafting the marketing? Slick? That's a really good question. And we work very closely with the inventors, we involve them in the process, because this is their baby, we want them to make sure that they have seen everything before it goes out the door. Now, at the same time, we don't let them hold up the process. We give them time we say here is the draft, here's what we've done. You have X amount of time, five days to review it. If after that time, we haven't heard from you, we're going forth. But we give them the opportunity to have a voice and we want them to be an active part of our team. For sure.

Speaker 2  42:40  
Holly Can you on? So we're gonna jump into our case studies now. So each of us are going to give you kind of a, a tech technology marketing story and tell you how that went. So Todd's gonna go first.

Unknown Speaker  42:54  
Okay, I'm actually going to do this case study. Second, I want to do a very brief I mentioned in my presentation, that robotic valve that I showed you the tech opportunity sheet on. So what we use there was the Sales and Marketing Associate, said, Well, it's it's a robotic bow, but any valve company might be interested in this. So she was able to find a bunch of valve companies which we happen to have a fair number of one of the bigger ones in Worcester itself, and went to the big one in Worcester who said, No, that's not for us. But you should go to these three others. And I went to one of them looked up in my LinkedIn. And somehow I've got 34,000 WPI alumni in my LinkedIn network, there's only 37,000 Total alumni alive. So we've got most of them in the LinkedIn. I punched in that company's name, and then did a filter on Western Polytech and found a student that had graduated two years earlier working at that company. So I reached out to that student via InMail. He got right back to me and introduced me to the President. And the President saw the the information and then came out and saw a demo. And now he's got a working prototype that he's testing in his hands. So that's one way we did it. The other which is up on the screen is I had an old portfolio of 13 patents that we actually had two different startups, three, three different startups that that started and failed around this intellectual property. We had a tremendous amount of investment in this portfolio. And we use search real fast, which I talked about earlier. Pete Fenner, the founder is an alumnus. And I actually went to him and said, Pete, I don't know what to do with these. And so he identified two companies that are very close by using the search real fast looking at prior art and so on. I use search real fast as actually a marketing tool, because if you put in your keywords, you see who's got similar intellectual property. And we then reached out to see if this would complement their portfolio. In this case, he found one of our CO inventors who was a postdoc in the lab, was working at one of these companies, and was an inventor there. So again, use my LinkedIn to reach out to him, he introduced me to the President, the President is now doing an analysis of these 13 patents. I know they're serious, because we've been contacted by their attorneys. Unfortunately, they're located in Singapore, which is kind of in major lockdown right now. So we have it's been radio silence for a while. But we're hoping they'll surface soon. So that's kind of a different way of doing the marketing, be the search real fast. So that's my case study.

Unknown Speaker  46:03  
Hello, this is my case that they would like to discuss a bit about a next generation sequencing technology that we actually were able to save face from one of the of the academics that we're already working with. This technology is next generation sequencing DNA library preparation method. And as we most of us would know, it is really hard to actually monitor the use of a method when you have actually filed for a patent application. However, we saw that there was real value in this technology. So we thought, okay, let's give it a go. We know that methods are really hard to protect. But let's give it a go. Let's file for the patent application, there were a lot of next generation sequencing companies that could actually make use of this library preparation method, because it was an improvement to the already existing ones. It was really inventive. And it could actually say, in sequencing, the same listing of specific samples in the clinic, and it could make a difference. So we filed for a patent application. And once we had this patent application in place, and we had all the information about the technology, we started thinking, how can we appropriately, appropriately marketplace? So the question was great, we have a method, what is what does this method consist of? What kind of materials or reagents have our academics use to practice the method, it could be the case that the companies that they have bought those materials from may be interested to actually license this method and use it either in their own research and development or make it into a key and market it for why the academic and industry use? So this was the first question that we asked. The second question was, which kind of companies have similar kids in the field, and we could actually provide them with this product, we could provide them with a library preparation method. And they could have an added advantage to the already existing technologies that they have in the market. On the other side, if they're not, if they cannot use this product as a complementary approach? Do we have any competitors out there that if we, if we approach them to license our method, they could get a larger percentage of the market? So sometimes we have these kind of difficult thoughts, because ideally, you wouldn't want to approach your competitor. But it could be the case that they would be a really good licensee, if they want to have a larger percentage of the market share for sequencing, those specific type of samples. And other considerations, except for, you know, the materials and reagents we're using and whether those companies had kits in the field. Some other considerations were whether we could disclose the detailed protocol, and what kind of information could we actually serve with those companies. And this was a difficult one, because having a method you wouldn't want to be completely open from the beginning to a company on a wire on how the method looked like and every specific steps of this method. And the reason for that was, firstly, because we hadn't actually published it, so it wasn't in the public domain, and the patent application hadn't been published either. So it was a risk for us to actually provide the whole of the information of the method. And the company could actually work around our pattern because metal patterns are really difficult to monitor. So having all these thoughts in our mind, we didn't definitely have next generation sequencing companies with other competitors, which could be potential licensees, and we generated a list, a really targeted list of 15 companies, which were key, there's in the next generation sequencing field. And it was interesting because I actually went to two conferences at that time. And one was the autumn conference, I think, and I met some of those companies in person. And it was, I met them, because I have already done this marketing analysis. So I knew why I broke them. Based on this in depth analysis, we only found in the end, one company that best fit for us, you know, best fit as having this as a potential licensee. And the reason to the reason for that was that the materials that the academics use, being here to hit compared with, with the materials that this company are using, they provided a much better benefit. And this company could also use use commercially available materials that we use in our method. So if they could incorporate them in their products, they would be the idea licensee. We contacted this company through LinkedIn, they were really interested. Once with and we signed a confidentiality agreement. Once we published the paper, we actually said the paper with them as well. And it was much easier to actually get the discussions fast forwarded, because they could actually see the method fully open in front of them. And they could they are now in the process of validating the method using their own samples. You know, we have the COVID-19 situation now. So it has taken a bit of time. But we're still working through this. And I feel that it is going really well. And it all started because early on we have done this in depth due diligence on the project. And this is my understanding.

Unknown Speaker  52:07  
Okay, well, hello again, you know, as I was flipping through the participant list, and so, so many names that I recognize, so I'm so sad that I can't see all of you. But Hello, and I miss you and hope you are all doing well. So don't be shy, I'm spending all of my day on Zoom, if you want to reach out, we can catch up. So just give me a shout. So I was going to talk through a case study that we did recently picking up on the theme of presenting kind of the need for interns as well, you know, one thing that we've tried to do a lot of is find other people on campus that can help us with tech transfer and with marketing specifically. And so we're very fortunate that we have a wonderful communications team within the Division of Research. So you know, that's kind of across the entire campus, we have the Division of Research. And and that's where the opposite technology transplant innovation reports into. And they have a communications group that puts together all of their collateral is a fantastic group. And they've agreed to give technology transfer about a day a week of their team's time, which is awesome. And they've helped us redo our entire website, which I encourage everybody to go take a look at it's innovation dot u h.edu. It's a very, very cool, interactive web website. And so one of the things we were thinking of was okay, can we come up with some ways to drive more traffic to the site. And so we started thinking through doing some of these targeted email marketing campaigns, you know, like, like Paul had spoken about earlier. And, you know, it's kind of a bulk game, right. And so, we wanted to start off finding a technology that had real kind of public appeal. And the other kind of impetus for this was that we had a technology that our communications team, you know, they'll they'll pick up the technology from time to time do a little plug on it, we have a newsletter that goes out, kind of like what's happening in research at UNH, and things like that. And and then the communications group at the campus level will sometimes pick those up and broadcast them out through their network, which is great, because we get to be kind of more more viewership. And then sometimes we'll see things with tech blogs. You know, so if you if you work with the communications team, at your campus, they have potentially some, some networks that you can you can access. And we had one technology that had gotten shared through kind of that kind of broad approach. Somebody had picked it up and put it in some aerospace blog that I mean, none of us would have found and it just it just went by I mean viral for an aerospace anti icing technology as far as that is considered viral, but we got like, you know, 30 or 40 inquiries that came in through our office directly to the professor and to the communications team. And we were like, Wow, can we do more like Can we can we make this kind of activity happen. And so we started thinking about how to do a targeted email marketing campaign. And, and so the first thing we did was we crafted a, an email. And we sent this out through, you know, an email marketing program where you can track you know, who's who's looking at it, and things like that, we found about 40 companies, this was a bio renewable plastics technology. So again, it had like really broad applicability, you know, we could send it to big polymer companies. But we could also send it to smaller manufacturers who might be developing biodegradable straws, for instance, that was one company that we had some conversations with as a result of, of this. So we found about 42 people that we could send it out to, and we sent the email out. And then next slide, please. The other thing that we did in, in collaboration with this was we built a landing page. And we this was part of our new website, so like, you can link to it off of our website. So we were gonna have kind of these like ways to do technology profiles. And then we could actually see kind of like, who's opening the email going into the website where they're spending time on the website. And we could track all that stuff, right, so we knew exactly which companies which individuals, we could send emails to that were actually coming to the site. Next slide. And so these are some of the statistics that we have. And so you can see, we got a 42%, open rate, about 15% actually click the link, that's pretty good. And you can see that big spike in the website's statistics there, you know, that was when we sent the push out, obviously. And so you know, it's a big jump. And we had a little bit of interaction, you know, a couple of people reached out, we had one person actually, you know, click on the page to contact me, and had a few people that we could also see called in using the number that we had used, listed on the website and things like that. So we actually had about three or four conversations that kind of came out of this result. I will say, for the time that we spent on on this activity, it was a lot of time, right. And, you know, having all the analytics and things like that is awesome, you get to see it. But you know, you really kind of justify it with the with the results that you get. So I think the general feeling for us was this was not going to be something that we do for every technology, but rather kind of pick and choose, again, those technologies that have really broad applicability, where it kind of makes sense. And the hope, again, is that we can maybe get something that might gets that gets picked up and redistributed to blogs and things like that. So maybe we kind of amplify that the outreach that we're doing through the targeted email outreach. And I think that's that's the last slide on that one. Ryan? So

Speaker 2  57:55  
once someone had a question, what program did you use to track the mails?

Unknown Speaker  58:02  
I don't remember. But I will, I will check with our marketing team, if you want. And I don't know, is there a way that we can share that information afterwards? I don't know if that's possible. But

Unknown Speaker  58:16  
yep, I can help facilitate that. Okay.

Unknown Speaker  58:18  
Yeah. Yeah, I will. I will dig that up. I mean, I guess, yeah, there's probably a couple of things I could grab would be like the one we did the emails with. And then, you know, how we did the website analytics and all that. To be great. Yeah, I'll send that around. Thanks, Brian. Sure.

Speaker 2  58:38  
There's one other question that came up. Before I jump into mind, what exactly is the plant based polymers in the last slide?

Unknown Speaker  58:47  
That was just a bio renewable polymer. So it was like a plant derived polymer. That that was the that was the technology. Right. Cool. Marketing. Yep. All right.

Speaker 2  59:01  
Okay, so quickly, I'll run through my little case study and then we'll have some extra time for for additional questions and answers if folks have them. So, instead of talking about a specific technology case, I want to talk about case of our work with in part in part is a company out of the UK. They're a technology marketing organization. I know many of you have worked with in part, many have not but essentially what they do is technology, commercialization organizations, like universities, organizations with technologies partner with in part, they form the connections they do the marketing and they form the connections between industry and and the inventing institutions to help these relationships happen. So lat it, we've been working with them for three years. At any given time, we're marketing about 170 technologies with them, you can do, folks can do more or less, it depends on what kind of contract you have. At any rate, we have, through our process where marketing 170 technologies at a time, we have had, they have helped us achieve 93 introductions with industry, network members. Our technologies now they are always so the thing about in part is they take all of the technologies through all of the inventing institutions, and then they will do email campaigns by grouping those technologies in specific domains. So they would do a specific campaign around an Alzheimer's drug or there'll be a specific campaign around some special medical device, etc. And they will compile technologies from lots of different institutions into those campaigns. And then the targets of those campaigns, the audiences will reply directly to specific technology listings in those campaigns, and in part then makes the match between the inventing institution and that industry contact. So on that note, we have been included in about 1600 of those campaigns. So again, those are not University of Arizona specific campaigns, but they are more general campaigns and specific technology areas where our technologies have been included. From those 1600 campaigns, our technologies had almost 1200 views. And we did receive 36 different pieces of feedback and leads from those from those connections. And many of those leads are still in process. We are receiving new leads weekly, based on the work that in part is doing. And we actually have had a one license come out of that relationship as well. So I think there's a lot of optimization that can be done. I think that we are at the point where we have learned a lot from how, from the results that we've gotten from in part. And now we're in the process, especially with the help of of my technology Marketing Associate and we are really at and a student intern who is also teaming on that we're really dialing in. We're doing the the analysis on the metrics that have come back from impart regarding visits regarding the time that technologies have been listed regarding when the activity on those technologies has taken place and the number of contacts and connections each listing has generated. We're relisting, we are reviewing our list of 170 technologies. And we are in the process of re mixing which technologies that we will list in which ones we're going to pull down. And so we're expecting that in the next year, we will see a lot better results. From our in part partnership, we expect that our introductions, the views on our technologies, the feedback and leads, we expect those numbers to go up in the in the following year for sure. Sanjana asks, How many times and for how it looks for how long does it impart market and technology? That's a really good question. They really, so they take their direction from us, they will listen to technology for as long as we ask them to. But based on the metrics and the activity that we see. And their recommendations and best practices, we found that we need to list technologies for at least six months to really get a bead on how they're performing and what they can do. And then after about a year, it's probably time for them to come down, they've cooked we've seen kind of what they can do the connections they can make the campaigns that they've been involved in. And at that point, we might pull them down and rotate them out for other technologies. We can certainly I think, you know, maybe up to 18 months, but but after about a year, that's when we would want to take them down and and use one of those 170 spots to market a new technology that we think might have potential. So I hope that answers that question. We got a bunch of questions coming in how many universities are there on the in part client list? Good question for in part, I don't know off the top of my head sorry. Annual All costs. I'm trying to remember last year, I believe, for our 170 technologies, we had a, it might have been about an $8,000 contract. But again, they're there they are. I don't think that number has changed substantially. But that's again, a good question for them. So

Unknown Speaker  1:05:25  
Brian, this is Todd. I think, since I'm evaluating in part, Oh, good. It's tiered by how many technologies you can do as few as 10. And you're obviously at the top end. And there's over 200. universities and research institutes involved. Yeah.

Speaker 2  1:05:45  
And they have grown substantially for sure their client list has grown a lot.

Unknown Speaker  1:05:49  
It depends, mainly depends on the type of technology that you have as well. And the value of the technology, because you may not find that there are a lot of leads coming out of there. And it is the technology's fault. So you cannot be 100% Sure. However, if they provide you with a list of all the people on the comments that they have connected, this could be your case, to the academic that I cannot keep supporting your patent application. So it is a two way street, you may not find the licensee but it will support abandoning a patent application.

Unknown Speaker  1:06:21  
Absolutely. I agree. So that's that's my case study. Do we have a

Unknown Speaker  1:06:32  
lot of questions? Yeah. So on the webinar tab for from blacksmiths, yes. Life Science Technology University in the various states, what is your start date the marketplace? Yeah, so I work in the biopharma team. So I'm happy to take that question. What I have done with my technologies, and this is so true, what they're saying, you know, it is reality in the biopharmaceutical opportunities, what I do is try to understand what the company is looking for. In biopharmaceutical companies, there is the research, there is a team that is looking for its collaboration, and there is also a team that is looking for lesson opportunities. So if I know that the team that is looking for licensing opportunities, is looking at a specific stage of development, so they they are looking for a humanized antibody, and I only have a mouse. I only have the mouse developed antibodies, then I will go to the research team. And I can ask would you be interested in research collaboration, because we feel really strongly about this antibody. And if no one of them is interested, then I would look for a translational fund. And we have a few of them in the UK that can support this kind of development. So the key for me is to know what the companies are interested in. And if the companies are not interested in, in this technology, then this means that it cannot go forward. And unfortunately, this is a decision that we have to take budget size of our offices, especially if we break down numbers on marketing budget and legal budget, in ballpark numbers.

Unknown Speaker  1:08:18  
I can say for WPI been the same budget for the last 10 years, even though we've tripled the activity. It's the good news is the income budget is the same for the last 10 years. So income budget is only 60,000. And the patent budget is 400,000. But we spent like 600,000 Last year, but add over $250,000 of patent reimbursement. So our our net is staying within budget, but it's a struggle.

Unknown Speaker  1:08:50  
We don't have a marketing budget. It's the managers need to do the marketing on their own. And our office manager is the one that is handling our website. So I wouldn't say that there's a specific budget for that our legal budget is 250,000 pounds for for IP protection and prosecution. So anything that has to do with patterns, this is this is the budget that we have here

Unknown Speaker  1:09:28  
I'll add one comment just about the budget piece. So we don't we don't have like a budget set aside for specific marketing activities. But we have been working with one group here locally in Houston that runs a website called the innovation map. And, you know, with all the activity that's been going on in Houston, just trying to, you know, ride this entrepreneurship wave. There's a lot of groups that have popped up incubators, accelerators and things like that. inundation map is really kind of like a blog like news source that tries to kind of capture all that until all the different stories. And we pay about 1200 bucks a month or so to get our, our stories kind of hosted, like reposted on their site, and kind of as featured articles and things like that, we also have, again, the communications team at the Division of research that writes articles about specific topics. And so they'll kind of like, you know, repost those as well. And so that's kind of one thing that we've done. It's really kind of like a broader thing. It's not specific to a technology necessarily, but just kind of like to get the University of Houston name out there. In the innovation discussion happening in Houston.

Unknown Speaker  1:10:44  
There is another question on how long do we keep the technology in the marketing queue? And do we update or change it? If there is no interest? What percentage of our institutions technologists are actively vs passively marketing? And do we only send technologies to individuals? Or do we use the general query email address, if we don't have a specific conduct?

Unknown Speaker  1:11:08  
I generally try to find an alumnus that the company to make the right introduction to that person within the company. And when I'm desperate, we will send it to the general contact. And we've actually gotten some responses when we do that, but it's very hit or miss.

Speaker 2  1:11:26  
Yeah, and just following up on that, there was another question. We're not sure who the right person is. And you find a bunch of contacts, what what do you do? We tend to think our philosophy is we don't want to miss the mark. And we were actually just debating this the other day, because we were talking about the pros and cons of finding 567 people in a company that you think might be the right person, and what it might mean, internally, if you emailed all those people, and three of them contact you, and then you have conflicting communications and managing that can be an issue. But our general feeling is that if there are multiple people, and we're not sure exactly who the right one is, we would certainly want to reach out to all of them. And, and certainly, and always say in those in those requests, you know, if there's somebody else in your organization, who would be better contact, please let us know. And then if we do receive multiple contacts, we'll make sure that we make that connection earlier than later. At least that would be I think, the best practice to say, Okay, we're also interacting with so and so want to make sure that you guys are all informed. And let's move it forward.

Unknown Speaker  1:12:44  
I find that Oh, go ahead.

Unknown Speaker  1:12:47  
I find that the general query be the others is most of the times haven't worked for me. And when I go online, and try to find people from LinkedIn, I try to go for business development managers, and not the higher management. So I won't go to the head of the team, because they're really busy, they have other people to monitor, and it may be hard for them to actually respond to the email, if it is, it isn't something that they're really interested in. So at that go to business development, people that would have the time would take the time to respond. They may I know it, you know, it is a bit of a weird approach. But this is how I feel like I get responses.

Unknown Speaker  1:13:27  
I was gonna piggyback on Paul talking about, you know, when you're emailing multiple people, and Lisa, made a comment here as well, that I think it's so I'll go kind of one level, one level deeper, when you're, when you're reaching out to multiple people at the same company, send individual emails, but let them know that you've also reached out to X, Y, and Z at their company, because you weren't exactly sure who to contact. It just shows that you're you're putting in effort, like you're actually trying to do some research. And it's not just spam, right? Because I know, we get a lot of service requests, and it's like, I'll get them from the communications team and vice chancellor sending them through and our director sent it through. And it's like, okay, they're just like spamming everybody. And it's kind of obvious, right? And so that's a little less likely to maybe get to get you the response. But if, if it's kind of a genuine outreach, sometimes people pick up on that and are a little more likely to respond. And somebody else said, asked about the Zoom info. I was going to just mention something on that real quick. I haven't used zoom info. I mean, a lot of times when I'm searching for people's email addresses, I'll just wherever you can find that information. But one thing that I do, it's it's not so much like just finding a contact with the right contact is like trying to look up news stories about specific companies that you know, are active in the space that you're marketing and technology and try to find people that are mentioned in the news story. They might get a poco over something, you know, typically from somebody, and so then now you have a target that you can go after in order to try to locate their contact information specifically. And so that might be through LinkedIn, it might be through something like a zoom info. But but it's kind of another way just to try to figure out like, okay, who's the right contact? And then worry about how do you actually get their contact info?

Unknown Speaker  1:15:21  
And how do we get our specific technologies to stand out as industry professionals receive several emails from videos. For me, the way that I do it is always make sure that I know whether I'm connecting those specific people. So if I know what they're interested in, and that they're interested in what I have, then there, it is most likely that they will respond to the email, they won't respond, if this is something outside of their strategic interests, this is an indication that they're not interested to invest in or licensing. So this is how you make it stand out. It should be the appropriate version that you go to. And the technology

Speaker 2  1:16:11  
I see somebody from Stephen Schneider here have any license agreements resulted from our relationship with in part, like I said, we had one come through. Obviously, I think we're we definitely are confident that more will come as more more and more contacts are made. But we've had one so far.

Unknown Speaker  1:16:35  
We had another couple of questions asking about market research earlier. One other thing that I I've found is helpful is if you go through your Library, University Library's databases, sometimes they're paying for databases. So they might have market research databases that they paid for, especially at the Business School and things like that. So you can sometimes get access just by being you know, at your university having a university email that you can access some of those, some of those date research databases, a lot of Google searching. Additionally, yeah, there's a lot of places you can pay for those. I don't know if anybody has any experience, buying, like market research reports, but I've found they're pretty expensive. And typically, like very focused. So it's like, unless you have six technologies, that, you know, you can really kind of spread that cost around, I don't know, it might be a little too pricey.

Unknown Speaker  1:17:33  
And so I think that software like Salesforce as well could be expensive. And it depends on the budget that you're willing to invest in marketing on whether you would you would get software like that. And especially what I find really important is that all of the managers need to agree to use the system. And they all need to be on the same page that this would actually be useful for us, you know, for the disclosure forms that we have now for the marketing that we want to do. Because if you have 10 technologies to market, then it's not worth having this, the software to use. If if you have a lot of needs, then you would need something that would cover those needs.

Unknown Speaker  1:18:19  
Someone asked about the CRM. And in theory, we use Indium to manage our back office. But I'm sure Wellspring and others can do this. But theory, when we're contacting people, there's a comment section for each case, and we can list who and when we sent the information to the practices, it's with just three of us in the volume. We don't always get to do that. But that's that's what our intent is. So anybody else who's a different CRM

Unknown Speaker  1:18:52  
will use my ATAR. And then sorry, my IP. We had had a call a few weeks back with a small technology transfer offices regarding different systems like my HR and entailment Wellspring, and they have a brief I have, you know, I have written a brief because I was part of the panel in that call. And I if someone is interesting, I can just send it through. It's just, you know, like a two page draft notes on what we discussed on the call, so I'm happy to send that through if someone is interested.

Speaker 2  1:19:31  
Um, a couple of people asked about what, what email tracking software we use. Someone asked during Brian's presentation, his case study too, because he has some great metrics there on responses for us, and I had typed this in before on a response, but I'll let you know again, we use MailChimp. There are any number of platforms that do very similar things but We've been using MailChimp for a long time, what we like about it is that it gives great reporting, it helps us to see, you know, we know obviously, exactly when, when a campaign goes out, but from there, we can see the number of the open rates, we can see the click throughs, we can see which links got clicked versus others, we can see who the click Word throughs came from, and who the individual recipients are, who might have had the greatest open rates. So if we send out a technology marketing campaign, and 24 hours later, we find that Ellen so and so at a pharmaceutical company opened the email seven times, she might not have clicked on anything, she might not have contacted us, but we have her email address. And we know that she opened at seven times in 24 hours, we can then send her a follow up email and say, Hey, we saw that you looked at our email, just wondering if you had any questions, we're happy to talk to you. So those kinds of tools, it's a little it's a little creepy, with how much information you can get, but it does prevent provide those opportunities? I don't know, Brian, if you have any comments on that, too. But

Unknown Speaker  1:21:18  
no, that's just what I was thinking when he when he said that, like, hey, we noticed you mean, he did this?

Unknown Speaker  1:21:24  
Yeah, we use MailChimp for our campaigns also, and for the small offices, were a great person in the marketing department set us up, because I wouldn't have been able to figure all that out. And once we're set up, it's just keep rolling it through that. We've put all of our IP evaluators on that. And it is creepy to see how who's opened up when and so forth. But

Speaker 2  1:21:52  
I think you have to be careful about how you use that information. So you don't creep people out and put them off? For sure. You

Unknown Speaker  1:21:59  
know, when you set the possibilities. When you set them up, you have to click that you've notified this person that you're putting them on MailChimp. Oops.

Unknown Speaker  1:22:08  
Right, right. Right. Do you need to do that?

Unknown Speaker  1:22:12  
Somebody did ask a question about, like newsletters, I think I saw I saw something about that pop up as well. We I so we don't do technology specific newsletters or anything like that. But we do feature. You know, like I was talking about, like there's research, Division of Research sends out newsletters and things like that, we will get kind of technologies and stuff posted there. But we don't have like one specific, like technology email list that we send out to companies or anything like that. If anybody's got anybody else has anything like that.

Unknown Speaker  1:22:51  
There is another question on advice on how to get more and more in quality disclosures. But I think this is more of an internal marketing question. And the brief answer is to do your internal marketing appropriately, and engage the right parties at the right time. And make sure everybody knows that you exist. So this is the Hi.

Speaker 2  1:23:16  
Yeah, I think I think that this is a moment for a shameless plug. I think those are topics that are really that we cover in the mark in the auto marketing course as well as in the essentials course. So and it could also be you know, knowing if that's an area of interest, we could certainly look at that for a talk for next year as well.

Unknown Speaker  1:23:41  
Just running through the questions here. Time, Holly.

Speaker 1  1:23:49  
We're okay. We got probably about five more minutes we can do with questions. All right.

Unknown Speaker  1:23:56  
Have one from Calvin polar companies like to do validation starts before deciding to license the technology? How much do your themes allow the company to do before offering or signing a license?

Unknown Speaker  1:24:11  
What it's tough right now, our valve went out for about validation. And they're they're shut down now. So they can't do it. But it was really intended to be about a month evaluation period, and then they'd come back and talk about licensing.

Unknown Speaker  1:24:30  
So for me, it always depends on the technology. So if the if it takes them six months to do the validation experiments, I will allow that to be six months, but I will make sure that that time the term of the validation is is determined and will they will always will always have an option to license after that. So as soon as the validation is is concluded, if they're happy with the results, they will have the options The option to license that, ideally, if you're lucky enough, and you're able to get an upfront payment before the validation for the fact that you are providing them with the know how, and the opportunity to validate your technology, it would be great because if it doesn't work, then you would just have a few 1000 pounds on the side. But you always need to make sure that there is an option to license and the term is appropriate to the time that they need to validate.

Speaker 2  1:25:32  
I'll jump in on on a question from Lisa Lorenson. She asks, Do your offices have a dedicated marketing FTE full time employee or do case managers solely lead the marketing efforts? In our office, we actually have a full time marketing associate who is totally dedicated to marketing technologies. So she is managing our in part relationship. She is doing the campaigns, she is responding to requests from licensing managers, regarding reports. So licensing managers will come to our team and say, Hey, we have a company who's interested in technologies in x area, could you please put together a report of all the technologies that we might have that could address this issue? So she is our resource for resource for responding to all those requests, and really making sure our marketing engine is cranking along producing those that outreach, and then measuring the metrics and the success of it all? So yes, the answer is yes. We have NF T. We do know a lot of organizations, sorry, just coming back. And there's also the potential to use interns. I mean, these are kind of great opportunities for interns and students to get involved and learn about technology transfer. Brian, I think you have a lot more experience using interns than anything. So I will actually turn it over to you for that one. We can't hear you, Brian. There's something with your mic.

Unknown Speaker  1:27:09  
Marketing. Individual, so we cannot hear you. You're cutting out. Oh, is it? Okay. I was my headset was is it working now? Yeah. Okay, good. All right. Yeah, my battery is kind of swapping out ear buds here. Yeah, we don't have a full time marketing individual. So you know, that's what I was talking about the internet is a way to kind of build out a little bit more marketing capacity. Because we just have the three licensing officers essentially, who have all the responsibility for marketing as well. So yeah, so we so that's like a theme throughout is like, find other people that can help you with marketing, communications, interns, Alumni Association, whoever, right, just try to tap into as much as you can through the university infrastructure.

Unknown Speaker  1:28:03  
We have in the biopharma team, we only have three members. And we find that the top interns, the top number of interns that we can handle is still because we're three people. So we cannot remanence a lot of people and teach them from scratch, because the time that we spend is time spent from, you know, evaluating in negotiating our licenses, but if you have two interns, and you know, they're really interested in the work, they can, they can do proper marketing. And if you can support them in that, then then it is good to have this resource. I agree with Brian. For global data, we also use global data. For Market Intelligence, it has been useful, there are a number of indications of this area that doesn't cover it growing. It has also provided a really detailed report on COVID, which I still haven't read. It is a long one. But I think global data is good. There are other competing ones. It depends on what kind of needs you have.

Speaker 1  1:29:17  
Okay, guys, we're getting pretty short on time here. Do any of you have any parting thoughts before I close this out?

Speaker 2  1:29:25  
I would just say thank you so much, everybody for being here. We had a great turnout. I think at the top I noticed 134 people on the line, which is wonderful to see. So thank you all for engaging and being here. And thank you to Brian and Todd into the stadia for their time. They've been awesome. So just we look forward to seeing you in Seattle next year.

Unknown Speaker  1:29:49  
And Thanks, Holly, for keeping us organized. And we're the first. We're the first of many coming up. Thank

Unknown Speaker  1:29:57  
you for being the guinea pigs.

Unknown Speaker  1:29:59  
Thank you so much everyone. And I just want to say that on my side, if anyone has queries, you can contact me on LinkedIn. We'll be happy to respond, you know, do any new ones, to any new people in tech transfer that one support or any any advice that you would like.

Unknown Speaker  1:30:17  
Thank you.

Unknown Speaker  1:30:18  
Absolutely.

Speaker 1  1:30:19  
And there were a few questions we weren't able to get to. I'll try to gather these up and get with the panel to follow up with you by email within the next couple of days. So on behalf of autumn, I want to thank Brian Etheria, Todd and Paul for this discussion. And thank all of you for attending. We really hope you got some good information today. There will be a evaluation will pop up when you close out of this webinar. Please complete that that will help us to serve your needs in the future. We want to do one more thank you to our annual webinars sponsor, Marshall, Gerstein and Borun. Thanks for their continued support. And there will be a recording of this webinar available on the website within just a few days. This will conclude our program for today. Thanks for joining us. Have a wonderful afternoon. Thanks, everybody.

Unknown Speaker  1:31:07  
Bye. Bye, everybody.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai