Speaker 1  0:00  
Everyone, thank you again for joining us. All lines have been muted. I'm going to let the slides roll for to ensure high quality audio and today's session is being recorded. If you have a question for our panelists, we encourage you to use the q&a feature on your zoom toolbar. And if you have a technical question or comment, please feel free to use the chat. Should you need closed captioning during today's session, the Zoom closed captioning feature is turned on and available on your toolbar. I would like to take a moment and acknowledge autumns online professional development sponsors, we appreciate your ongoing support. And now I have the pleasure of introducing you to today's distinguished speakers. Joining us today is Kara Moore and Dan vanderley, from Rutgers University, and Michael Pycelle. from University of Pennsylvania, Cara, Dan and Michael, welcome. We're so excited to learn from you. And I will now pass it over to each of you to introduce yourself before we begin today's presentation. Thank you.

Speaker 2  1:01  
Thank you, sorry. So I guess I'll start my name is Dan vanderley. I'm with Innovation Ventures AT walker is that's our technology transfer office. My background is perhaps a little unusual for tech transfer and that I didn't come through academia, I don't have a PhD, bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and an MBA. Many many years ago, I spent over 25 years in industry doing bringing innovations to market, both in small companies and large. I came to workers a couple of years ago. In the tech transfer office, I'm responsible for licensing of engineering, software and copyrighted works, as well as helping run and teach our site iCore program.

Unknown Speaker  1:52  
Sure, yes, I'm Kara more from Rutgers at the corporate engagement center, Director of Corporate intelligence and business development. I've been at Rutgers since 2019. My background is in information science. And I spent 10 years prior to that at Northwestern University in a similar corporate engagement role. So not technically part of the the tech transfer office, but hopefully showcasing today how we're working together.

Unknown Speaker  2:17  
Great. And I'm Michael pointelle. I'm the Executive Director of PCI ventures. I've been here at Penn for the last 12 years after spending 10 years in venture capital, came here to Penn to help create an entrepreneurial ecosystem among the faculty. And over that time, we've now created over 240 companies, and have an active portfolio of 70 companies, of which I have a five person team that manages the portfolio.

Unknown Speaker  2:47  
I think next slide. Yes, yes. So

Speaker 2  2:49  
just to give your context for the day, what we're going to be talking about for the next half hour or so, how we're going to begin with just a few minutes of context about pen and walkers. And then we're gonna hand it over to Kara to give an insight into the mind of an advancement officer. She's gonna talk about the corporate engagement center and workers and how it's structured, and really how the university advancement function thinks. And we found that to be really useful, because it was through that, that we could really develop the win wins, that we're going to talk about next, some examples of how both at workers and at Penn are partnering with those University Advancement offices, to really further both of our goals. And then we'll end with some tools and tips about how you might be able to take some of these things and work with him going forward. And hopefully, I'll have time at the end for some q&a. Next slide, please.

Unknown Speaker  3:44  
So I'll jump in with a little background on Penn, Columbia, everybody. Oops, there we go. Probably everybody's aware of us. But just to give you some perspective, we're an urban campus in the city of Philadelphia. We have 12 schools across many of the standard auctions. We're about 24,000 students back to the one higher than that now live in 100, postdocs and 4500 faculty members. So I have a lot of pipelines to work with in terms of companies we can form. So about five years ago, we made the decision to pull together all of our interactions with the outside world. So we now have an organization called PCI pen center for innovation. And we handle all of the interactions. It's whether that's a corporate contract license agreement, any touch point between pennant and an outside corporate entity is going to go through our group. That's industry partners, investors, entrepreneurs all working together, to try to improve our method and our ability to commercialize the research and technology. It's coming out of 10. We work across many different industries, I think Penn is probably most known for its life sciences work that it does. But we also had a very vibrant robotics group and some other technologies as well. So that's kind of our overall our philosophy with PCI just did some recent highlights for us as a group. Last year, we had just over a billion dollars in total research funding with about 75% of that coming from the government 25% growth industry. We've had 360 tech disclosures, which kind of is a good way to measure the size of our tech transfer office. In our operations. We applied for 705 patent applications. And next slide. There we go. We had 84 patents issued last fiscal year, we formed 14 spin out companies. And it was a very good year for venture capital, our spin out companies secured almost 600 million in venture capital just last year alone. Pretty incredible year for us. Next slide. So just to talk for a minute about what I do at the university. And in the contact for as we go into how we work with alumni. We have two main company formation programs that we use just for faculty. So we have our business school, Wharton, they pretty much work with the students. But we've kind of split the world in that way that our business school kind of works more with the student businesses, and we have tech transfer office works with the pack with businesses. We, we have these two parents, we're actually in the midst of formalizing our pre Company Program, which we call venture warm up. So we'll have venture warm or free company and then once a faculty member decides they want to start a company if they want to work with us, and they want our assistance, there's really two ways to do that. One is up advisors where we're pretty much hands off, we're just there to answer questions to get them started, make sure they stay on the right track. But pretty much we stand back from them. What we're, we have that program for a couple of different reasons, one for companies that may be simply going after an SBIR rather than going after full fledged company. And we also have that for companies where maybe a member already has venture contacts or entrepreneurial contacts that they can work with. And so maybe they don't need as much of our help. So it's kind of a soft touch model, where we spend a lot of our time and energy that was on the upstart program, where these are faculty that have never done this before, are interested in bringing us on sort of as cofounders of the business, and really being there to help them every step of the way. So we actually formed the companies for them. We do all the background legal work for them do all the registrations to get ready for applying for SBIR, we then take on the task for finding a management team to run the company. And then work with that management team to develop the overall business strategy, the IP strategy, the branding strategy, and then the funding strategy, how we're going to get money into the company. We work with them to do that to get funding in. Once that happens. We have service providers that we've lined up as partners that actually pay to be part of our network. And those who respond to them can do all the back office, the payroll, bookkeeping, insurance, benefits, legal counting, all of that is done by them. And then the last big step for us was finding space for the companies. Let's actually just about five years ago, we opened the Innovation Center. That's been a very successful business incubator for our companies. We filled that building, we renovated a second building filled that building and our third building opened in January, it's about half full, and we're going to be breaking ground probably in the next 12 months on our fourth building. So that's been a very successful aspect of program. Lastly, my team stays on the board of the company as long as they want us to be there. We're active participants working with them almost daily, to help them build their business will stay as long as they want us to. If they have VC investors that can take the reigns from us we're more than happy to do so. Sadly for my team over 10 years we've only been kicked off the two boards so we don't eat sleep or know the names our children could just sit on boards. But but it's been a great program for Penn has been very successful for the university and I think everybody's very excited about where we're headed. So that's what we do next

Unknown Speaker  9:44  
thanks so Sammy, you wanted to

Speaker 1  9:49  
Yeah, we're gonna quickly reshare so that the timings are turned off thanks everyone for your patience that We don't have to keep bouncing around on the screen.

Unknown Speaker  10:08  
Okay, this should be for us. Oh my god.

Unknown Speaker  10:11  
That's so impressive. By the way, I just want to say, I

Speaker 2  10:18  
think that's very impressive. Thank you, Michael. So I'll tell you a few words about Walker's is one of the oldest colleges, universities in the country founded in 1766. We have three New Jersey locations, for units. That includes the including medical school, I won't spend too much time on it. Go to the next slide, please. The really, it's kind of you know, it's a it's a big institution, over 70,000 students, I won't spend time reading the numbers, you can do that yourself. The key point on this slide, I think is the over half a million living alumni. That's a huge resource. That, that, that we were sitting and trying to figure out, how do we how do we get that right? We have all these needs. And you don't have a incubator the way you Penn was talking about? And you all know, at the tech transfer world, how important that industry input industry involvement is. And we kind of said, there's a huge resource out there, and how do we go and tap it. And that's really what we're going to be talking about today. Next slide, please. Just to give an idea of of how big we are, our r&d expenditure is about 750 million, so not quite as big as UPenn. But we're trying over half of that was in life sciences. And I want to point out that, that 750 million is more than all other New Jersey universities combined. So we really are the behemoth within our state. consistently over 14 $15 million in licensing revenues, lots of researchers, lots of collaboration going on. Next slide, please, to talk about the tech transfer. Again, very quickly, some numbers were sent with the with the sizes. fiscal year 2020, we had over $60 million in licensing revenues 100 over 180 invention disclosures, a over almost 900 active license agreements that we're managing in which almost 70 had been signed that year. 360, patents filed, etc, etc. So it's a pretty active tech transfer group. Next slide, please. So I have this slide here about the structure, not too much to talk about the structure, because I'm sure it's very similar to most other tech transfer offices, it's divided between IP licensing, new ventures and financing compliance, really to point out kind of where the conversation we're going to be having today focuses on from our perspective, right, where as a tech transfer office, we want to have that industry interaction. So it's really focused on licensing and new ventures. You all know why when when evaluation, technologies come in, you want to get some sort of industry input into the, into the evaluation, and when you try to license it. And we talked about startups, and I'll talk a little bit about some of these programs here. Because they'll give context to some of the conversation later. Tech advances in health advanced is our gap funding vehicles, where we have technologies that have been developed by faculty that aren't quite ready yet to be licensed, right, we have that gap between the with the comes out of the academic labs and papers can be written on what industry when it's ready for industry. And there, it's very critical to have that industry input and industry mentoring. We also want an active iCore site, which is really designed if you're familiar with the ICORE program. It's an NSF funded program focused on helping researchers get out of the building and understand the potential customers for their research for their for their inventions, and how and how those can be used out in the in the outside world to get a wider impact. And again, there are a number of roles there where you want to have industry, industry interaction between getting the interviews that you need for getting mentors and advisors for the teams. So and this is nothing new to all of you people who are in tech transfer, but I wanted to give context as we move on and hand it over to Kara to talk about how the advancement of the alumni officers are thinking and how this fits in a I'm to meet their needs as well. Next slide.

Unknown Speaker  15:04  
Yes. So the corporate engagement center is the unit at Rutgers that I'm part of. We are a holistic center. And I've listed some of the things that we really focus on. So we're focusing on engaging companies on sponsored research philanthropy, connecting them with workforce development programs, executive education, so anything to engage industry to what's happening on campus. And that's a whole large group of things. But I work specifically with Dan and his team on the licensing of technology. And most of the corporate engagement center touch points are alumni. And I should mention if we go to hit next, that we are unique that we report both into the University Foundation and the Office for research, which allows us to have a foot in both camps. And so most of you may not have a corporate engagement center at when I was at Northwestern, we reported into the philanthropic arm, we had a dotted line to the office for research. So you might try to seek out the people who are on your campus who are part of these corporate engagement shops, they might be embedded within your your development office. So there tends to be a CFR group within your development office, the corporate and foundation relations, that's going to be mainly concerned with engaging alumni. And so next slide. So this is how we think about partnerships with companies, we've created four different buckets, the network, emerging growth and partner partner being our most engaged companies, these are ones that have multiple touch points, we are the main source, main point of contact, we probably have a main senior leader who is at the firm who really wants to keep things moving across different schools with our 29 schools, we have lots of activity happening across campus, the growth companies tend to be people we want to, you know, large, make those gifts a little bit larger, make those research agreements a little bit larger or engaged with another school, or emerging, those that we're looking to move into growth and network might be a little bit more of one off opportunities. So if we're looking to move people up this continuum is, you know, an engagement opportunity of working with the tech transfer office or Innovation Ventures helps us move along this continuum. So next slide. So now I'm going to spend some time and this is more, this is not Rucker specific, this is more universities specific about advancement offices, because I think is as I been in this role, for quite some time, knowing the language that's spoken on the development side, and then knowing the language that's spoken on the tech transfer side. So advancement or development offices at your institution, you know, their main goal is raising funds for for the institution. And they tend to have either priorities within Dean or Chancellor level of where they should be soliciting donations. And they're both looking at prospects. And they're looking at donors or alumni to to volunteer for events. So the structure tends to be a Central School and region structure central being there are frontline officers and frontline officers F fellows tend to be those who are out there soliciting donations from alumni or even non alumni. And central means there across the whole institution, that they are really agnostic to school or program that they just want to engage alumni and hopefully get a gift to the institution, school will be school specific. So there are frontline officers that are embedded within each school, for example, we might have, we have a school of engineering team, who is solely looking at Engineering Alumni, to give back to the School of Engineering. And then regional alumni, we Ruckers have a California team and a Florida team that are really managing our people who live geographically in those regions. But they those people are just looking for ways to engage the regional folks. And so I'm mentioning this to understand which offices you might want to engage with, you know, the central and regional offices are agnostic. But if you have a technology within a specific school, that could be good to engage that development officer to let them know that you have this technology and you're looking for industry expertise. And so each of those frontline officers will have manage prospects, they all have their own prospect pool of, you know, 50 to 70 prospects that they manage. And by manage, they own those relationships, and they have those ongoing conversations, and they tend to be champions for the institution. They have specific causes, their focus is on and they've been, they've been evaluated to understand that they have a capacity to give. And it's Dan and I that are really looking at those champions for the institution because those are the people who are willing to make those introductions. They might not be the right person at the company, but they are willing to make instruction to the specific unit or the RN Do director to help us get the proper expertise we need. And I should mention that the the frontline officers are really thinking about a person as an individual, and not about how they're working or their industry expertise. So they think about Joe Smith as a gentleman with three kids and loves to sail versus the head of r&d at a major robotics company. And so it's making sure to communicate that what your interest areas are. And so next slide. So this is more of the fundraising cycle. So there's usually a prospect research office, there's always a prospect research office that's always researching individuals and identifying if they could be good, good donors for the institution. They go through a qualification phase where they're looking at wealth indicators and understanding if they have a capacity to give, do they have a history of giving, then if they've if they've met the criteria to be qualified, then there's a cultivation stage where the frontline officer will go out and speak to them learn about their passions, learn about their interest areas and see if there might be alignment with what's happening at the institution. solicitation is an ask for $1. So it's asking for a donation. And then once they give a gift than they are stewarded to. So they are made sure that they are given updates about their gift, make sure that they could get updates to potentially give another gift. And so if you hit the next slide twice, so these two areas, the stewardship and cultivation periods are excellent periods where the frontline officers are looking for ways to engage their donors. They want to engage without an ask of $1. And so how can they engage in a non monetary way. And these tech transfer office opportunities are our prime opportunities for them to not compete with the dollar that they're looking for, and provide value back to the institution. So it's a great cultivation and stewardship. So next next button. So those two areas which are constantly in cycle with all frontline officers, are great ways to engage. So next slide. So that was the more of the fundraising side than the Alumni Relations side, you know, I could call them fundraisers, instead of fundraisers, they are working to just make sure alumni are overall engaged, making sure that they're they're aware of what's happening at the institution, hopefully, they'll give back a gift. But they want to just keep the momentum going of making sure alumni are aware of what's happening. And so they host events. And if if tech transfer can get in front of these alumni with events, which we've started to do at Rutgers. They're always looking for new new events to offer their alums. So I encourage you if you're not already speaking to your alumni relations office, in addition to the frontline officers. So next slide. So I want to talk a little bit about the metrics that are being used to evaluate alumni or look at their engagement scores. So the traditional method is what's called the RFM. Score, recency, frequency and monetary. Of course, how long has it been since the donor gave? What's the average size? So those tend to be dollar focused, we records and your institution might have something similar, we have alumni engagement metrics, so that give bullet is that RFM variation? We also look at, do they attend events? And then the last bullet, do they connect? Meaning do they click through on newsletters, so more of the engagement online? But that help portion we're also tracking? Are they are they doing resume review for Career Services? Are they doing admissions review for for incoming students? Are they providing mentor opportunities to our faculty? are they evaluating new technologies? Are they being ers? So that engagement point is super helpful for the Alumni Engagement metric to know even though they haven't given $1 yet to the university, knowing that they have that interesting capacity to to volunteer their time could make them a future donor. So all that is very helpful for the Alumni Engagement Office. And I think positioning that as you're talking to your internal teams could be very valuable. And so next slide. So that's where we've taken this information. And now we partner together, Dan and I and so Dan, do you want to speak to some of the some of the areas we're looking at? Yeah,

Speaker 2  24:24  
thank you. So you know, as within tech transfer, and again, this is not news to interview who are there these are the areas that that we look for external partners outside input in licensing I mean, we can find targets for people we're going to license our technologies and our sponsor research, doing getting industry feedback on for technology evaluation, I said Ichor interviews, you know, that contact with industry to learn whether the ideas that that we have are good ones or bad ones or how they needed how they need to be modified. Outside reviewers I mentioned tech advance and health advanced before there are gap funding. And we we very much mean that those there one, those decisions are made by outside reviewers, we don't want to make those decisions in house, we have to find reviewers for the right technologies in the right spaces in the right industries, to give us good accurate reviews of the technology evaluation, that the technology that we're looking to fund, and mentors, very important that our iCore program is highly reliant on on outside mentors. How do you get people who are willing to do that and spend time with your with your faculty, with your students to go through that process. As part of our health advanced, which is an NIH funded grant, we actually provide teams with mentors to help develop their application to to the program. And again, you have to find people with the right expertise. And EIR is right, we want people to come into our institution to come into rockers, look at our technologies and hopefully work with our faculty and spin them off into startups. And finding those people who are interested in engaging, as you all know, can often be very, very difficult, but you have to find the right the right person. So these are all areas that we've now worked with corporate engagement and with Cara, to identify people to identify alumni who can fit these roles. Next slide, please. So here we've we've listed a number of different ways, examples of how we have worked with corporate engagement. And you as you kind of go from the left to the right, it gets deeper and deeper engagement than I would say it kind of developed from left to right over time. So we started with having Kara sit in on some of our weekly team meetings. Where, where we talk about what What technologies do we have? Are we working on? What are the issues we're facing? What industries are we looking to get feedback from, and it gave her insight. And she was able to then go and say go to the next, the next one of targeting alumni and say, hey, I can go into my alumni database. And I can find people who who fit the roles that you're looking forward, or at least the companies that you're looking for, I don't care if you want to comment on that at all.

Unknown Speaker  27:29  
And I should mention, it works the reverse to that when I'd come to the weekly meetings, I'll say who I'm meeting with over the next week or two. So I'm meeting with them on maybe a student product capstone project, and then I would hear from the team of Oh, I'd really love to speak to XYZ company, we have this great technology. So it was a way for us to keep the communication lines open of what are the needs and areas that our Innovation Ventures is coming up with. And then who are we already speaking with. And the target alumni, we're using those alumni engagement metrics of if if Dan said he really wanted to loan it at XYZ company, I could go in there and say, Okay, who's the most engaged based on that Alumni Engagement metric. And even if I don't have a connection there, I would start with that person. And even if they're not in the right role, I wouldn't reach out to them, because they usually respond back and say, Oh, I'm gonna record love, I don't know, if you know that I would love to help you. I'm not the right person that let me make an introduction to you. And so that, that is all we're looking for as an introduction, and most of them tend to be passed off to introductions, and we've had many success stories.

Speaker 2  28:32  
Right. And the result of that has been industry calls that we participate in together just to give an example of what Kara was talking about. We had a faculty member that had a novel flower preservation technology. So it's not something that's kind of really in our in our mainline contact list, right? And we don't, in tech transfer tend to know a whole lot of people in flowers. But through Karen, we reached out to an alum, who's a C suite executive. I'm at a major flower company. Now, they weren't the right person, but they introduced us to the COO. We had an NDA signed, we're looking to put together a pilot project for them to test the technology. And that all happened in the space of a few weeks that absent kind of have you been able to target this alumni who was engaged with with the university. We would never have had an if we ever would have gotten that. And to kind of flip that back. This now helps the alumni office now engage, right, that becomes part of that help score, and all the things that was one of the things from from our perspective, the ask from our perspective, because it has to be a two way street. Where that hey, when you have engagements with alumni, let us know. Right? So every time we've had an Ichor interview and alumni that was identified through the CDC, we feed that back so that they can update their database, and they know that this person has not been engaged with a Walker's team. So it's very much a two way, a two way street.

Unknown Speaker  30:08  
And that it's that communication and trust on both ends, I think maybe units tend to be very territorial of contacts. And so I think we've, we've opened up the floodgates. So there is more trust between to the two groups. And so manage prospects, I mentioned that earlier that those prospects are looking for ways to engage. And so the frontline officers are seeking ways they can keep them engaged. And so I highly recommend connecting to get get the list of all managed prospects, if possible. And sometimes even the the prospect managers won't know by title, what that means or how that might be relevant. So sending that along to the tech transfer office so they can evaluate, I'll give you an example is our our startup team is interested in finding a bunch of ers and mentors for their startups. So I engaged the California team, which we have two prospect managers out in California, who reviewed their list of managed prospects, and I sent them on over to our startup team. And they've identified about six people that are really good C suite or owners of companies that are having conversations with our startup team to be part of and this is a paid gig, you know, that they're being actually paid, instead of asking for money, which is, and the prospect managers asked, Can they not be paid, they would prefer not to be paid, which is even better for the university, they just want to give back to their time. So leveraging those managed prospects, and coming to the prospect office with saying, you know, we want to give you an opportunity to engage. And the RU a webinars, so Rutgers University Alumni Association, I mentioned the fundraisers, they do events, and we reached out to them to see if they could do a webinar solely on Innovation Ventures. And this will go out as a public webinar, it goes on their YouTube channel. But it's a way that Innovation Ventures can highlight what they're doing due to a call to action to say, we need mentors, we need reviewers, and even a call to action to give. So that could be also a fundraising effort for the innovation office to fund things like tech advance or health advance. And then lastly, the alumni database, the coveted alumni database. So it tends to be a resource that's very behind closed doors. But given this relationship that we have developed over the past year and a half or so that we've been working closely together, I've now been able to talk to the foundation to give Innovation Ventures some of the access to the alumni database. So instead of me being the bottleneck to search across the alumni database and find those engagement scores, I'll now have extra team members from Innovation Ventures. And so I think it's that trust that we've built up that they're seeing the the benefits, the foundation is seeing the benefits of partnering with tech transfer. And of course, tech transfer is seeing that benefit too. And it's really helping us both out, just raise rates Ruckers overall.

Unknown Speaker  33:07  
Thank you. Great. So I can jump in now from a pen side of things. I have somebody on here from our development office who could talk a lot more about how they directly engage with alumni, similar to record status. But as it relates to us in particular, I developed a good relationship with our development group where they understand that if we can find innovative ways to engage in alumni, it can lead to a closer relationship with the university that may eventually lead to them actually donating and being more directly involved. And so they're very, they're very important partner to me and my group in working with the alumni in a couple of different ways that we work with them. So you know, because we have our innovation campus here, Innovation Center penetration works. We can offer campus tours to alumni, so if they're alumni coming in town, especially around homecoming, very often will get requests from the development office to give tours down here so people can see what's going on and gives them a perspective of exciting things that are happening on campus and give them incentive and reasons that they might want to come back. Also Alumni Club speaking tours, so their alumni clubs around the country and being able to engage with them. So I can go to the development office, ask them for a contact in a city. They'll give me that contact and then I'll reach out to them and talk to them about what I do. And would it be interesting for their group to have me come out and speak about what we're doing on campus and the companies we're creating? It's very beneficial for me because I need entrepreneurs, I need investors. I need board members, all different ways that our companies can benefit our development office and one that office benefit because we're engaging the alumni between the cities, and those who've been very successful, we've given talks now all over the country, and up and down the west coast in America. So it's been very fantastic. And then for us, probably a lot because of our Business School and Wharton, we have several alumni, angel investing groups. And so making sure that we're in touch with them, and giving them a perspective on the opportunities that are here on campus, and engage them further and try to help them be more involved in what we're doing here has also been been great. And we have angel groups that are based on classes, class of 98, alumni, best in group. And then we also have based on location, New York, Boston, Houston, Austin, one different groups like that. As I mentioned, this can lead to direct involvement with alumni, given the entrepreneurs and our company's advisors, we have a program where we have mentors and residents. And that program is focused here at the animation center where we have seven, I'll call them retired executives, very much, they're, they're extremely busy every day. So they're not very much retired, but they love their primary position and work with us to mentor the companies in, quite frankly, the demand to r&d. And they're fantastic, great group of people. And then board members over companies universe, so many companies, we're constantly having a board member openings that we'd like to get people into, that's fantastic. And then, as I mentioned, investors, getting them to go and vote, to get them to invest directly as angels in the companies or through VC firms that are part of an investment group. But getting them involved financially for the companies as well, engages them in campus, brings them to campus, and I think, receives the benefit of doing that. And, and it's been very helpful and involved with us making this happen.

Unknown Speaker  37:00  
Great, so we want to talk a little bit more about tools and tips. So I think you might say, How do I find my alumni? How can I engage my champions. So of course, the foundation alumni database, or your philanthropic your development alumni database would be a great resource. But unless you have a good connection there or senior leadership willing to go and you know, see if you can get access to that database, there are some alternative tools. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is kind of a premium subscription to LinkedIn, I'm not sure if the cost, I feel like it's close to $1,000 a year. But it allows you to do some really sophisticated searching across LinkedIn and you could search across your school, or how many years somebody has been at a company or if they're a C suite executive, and set up alerts. So I highly recommend LinkedIn Sales Navigator, there's also a tool called Academic analytics, alumni insight. So many of you might already have your institutions might already have access to this tool in so inquire with maybe your institutional research office, they tend to be the people that how's this this resource? Academic Analytics has many different verticals that they offer. One of them is alumni insight, where they will actually grab a list of all of your alums, or, in our case, we only have the PhDs that we're looking at, and where they're working with their titles, our locations, are they in academia versus industry. And they update that once a year with all of your lungs, or depending on what your agreement is. And I'll show you that here in just a minute. And so what can you do next is I would suggest having a meeting with your advancement office or your development office and, you know, create some sort of communication with those frontline officers? Could they come to a monthly meeting just to hear about what events are? Who are your top companies you're looking to target? And do they have senior leaders at those companies that they're already engaging? Offer to do an information session? Do you know what does your when it's tech transfer do just as you might not understand development, understand that probably the development officers don't understand tech transfer. So you know, having an opportunity to showcase how alumni can help them and how you can help their initiative by engaging those alums, and then offer an external webinar to showcase to alumni what you're doing and get them excited about engaging with your institution. And lastly, just seek out those alumni champions. I mean, I think Dan and I can can vouch for they are more than happy to have a conversation and excited to just talk about being back at school and then and then you know, wanting to talk about their company and doing whatever they can to help out. So they're not just blanket emails or email marketing blasts that go out there. They're targeted emails, and you don't need to send necessarily 100 You could send out five and have five good conversations. So we've had some really good success with that partnership. So the next slide is a is a visual of alumni insight, just to show you kind of the information that's here. So this is just Are PhD alums that they're looking at, where they're working, what their job titles are the percentage and you can drill this down under the details area, it will show you all the names of the people. But this is a great way without having access to the alumni database if you already have a subscription to this, and I think there are about 80 institutions in the country that have a subscription to this. And I've inquired with academic analytics prior to the session, that, you know, it's an underutilized resource. So I just shared it with the Innovation Ventures team recently and gave them all access to it. So they have the ability to go in and find the people that are listed here. And so I think with that, we wanted to leave some time for questions. And so hopefully, there might be a few questions or comments about our session. So just want to leave some time. And we're happy to answer any of those.

Speaker 2  40:48  
Actually, I want to I want to add something Kara, to what you just said kind of reinforced something that you said, which is about the, you know, advancement offices, not really knowing what tech transfer does, as much as we tried here to kind of give some insight into the mind of the advancement officers. Because the audience here is tech transfer. I think that just as important was in this process was giving the corporate engagement center insight into what tech transfer does and how we want to engage with people. It was really kind of that meeting of the minds that two way street that led us to where we are. And you know, as you know, most startup most overnight successes are it takes time. Yeah, it always takes takes a lot of overnight success after 10 years, it took us a little time to kind of get that conversation going. But once we got it going, it was kind of like a bunch of aha moments. And I think on both sides, like, wow, we can really help each other. Now I know why, you know why we want to engage. And I think that was that's a point I wanted to emphasize I mean, reach out to your engagement offices, your your your alumni relations, tell them what you do, and show them how you can help them.

Unknown Speaker  42:05  
I think our first calls Dan didn't realize how important it was to wear Ruckers care, to the phone calls, and then how the calls would start learning, you know, to start talking about rockers and giving updates about records versus a straight business transaction. So So I think it's a little bit of a different, a different flavor. So we welcome if there are any questions, hopefully this was was was helpful. And you maybe have a few tips that you can go back to your institutions.

Speaker 1  42:37  
just sent out a chat reminder to everyone, Cara, Dan, and Michael, thank you so much for so many practical useful tips that you've shared throughout the way attendees take a moment to submit any questions if you have them. I know we covered a lot. But I always like to ask, you know, what's the one big takeaway or something that you can implement easily at your office right away that you think will have big impact on leveraging these alumni relationships, and I can pose that to all three of you or if someone wants to take it?

Speaker 2  43:12  
Okay, I'll take I think I just did, but I'll take. I'll repeat what I just said. You will, hopefully now you have a understanding of what's important to your advancement office, your fundraising, your alumni association, you have to craft your message your ask in a language that they understand and be highlighting where it's useful for them to where it's a two way street, expecting people to help you just because you're in the same institution. And they should write I mean, they should. But that, you know, everybody's very busy, and everybody has their own goals to meet. Finding the Win Win is really how, how this works. And the fact that we in tech transfer can help engage alumni and prospects in ways that the corporate engagement center could not do before. In a ways that's valuable to them, is really what I think what what kind of made this happen

Unknown Speaker  44:22  
and not asking for money. I mean, so a lot of the lot of the folks who are if you go to an advancement office and you say you're looking to engage alumni and making sure you're saying we're not going to be asking them for money because you're not competing with other priorities, their Dean's might have that that levels the playing field a bit.

Unknown Speaker  44:43  
And I'll say, you know, some alumni offices and development offices may be very protective of their relationships with the alumni. And you have to accept that and meet them at their level and try to enhance Those relationships, not to give them any feeling that you might be taking them away or interfering. And really show them the value you're involved in.

Unknown Speaker  45:14  
I agree. I agree. Sometimes there are major prospects that are still off limits. Yes, not all prospects are created equal.

Unknown Speaker  45:24  
Well, I'd love to call Elon Musk who is

Unknown Speaker  45:28  
No, that's right. That's great, though. As Elon gone on a tour of your of your space, not yet. Okay. Not Yeah.

Unknown Speaker  45:41  
We actually had a project as we're waiting on a question. We had a faculty member who had a battery invention. Yeah. So could you get the Motzkin I worked through channels, and I got his cell phone number and I said, Okay, you know, I'm ready to call him and the de facto number chickened out, say, oh, no, I'm not ready.

Unknown Speaker  46:02  
Now you have his number.

Unknown Speaker  46:05  
And I hung on to it.

Speaker 1  46:11  
Excellent. Well, it seems like you guys covered so many practical important information pieces, but I think we preempted any questions that we're going to come through. So I'm more than happy to give folks 10 minutes of their day back. I know time is always valuable. So on behalf of autumn, I would like to thank all three of you, Kara, Dan, and Michael for this informative discussion. And thank you, attendees for joining us today.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai