Speaker 1  0:00  
Right. Good afternoon and welcome to today's webinar research impact design presented by Autumn. My name is Sammy Spiegel, autumns professional development manager and I will be your staff host for today. All lines have been muted to ensure high quality audio and today's session is being recorded. If you have a question for the panelists, we encourage you to use the q&a feature on your zoom toolbar. If you have a technical question or a comment, please feel free to use the chat. Should you need closed captioning during today's session, the Zoom live transcript feature is turned on and available on your toolbar. Before we begin, I would like to take a quick moment to acknowledge and thank autumns online professional development sponsor Marshall Gerstein, IP, we appreciate your ongoing support. I now have the pleasure of introducing you to today's presenters. Christine Wilds is the Associate Director of UK innovate at the University of Kentucky. Her focus is to lead innovation and entrepreneurial training programs and initiatives, including coordinating current programs and leading the development of new translational research training programs, through partnership and extramurally funded mechanisms. She's adjunct faculty at Gatton College of Business and Economics and was previously project manner at Vaughn Ullman Center for Entrepreneurship. Prior to joining UK, Christine was Vice President of Operations at munei engineering company, Assistant State Director of the Kentucky Innovation Network Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation, and Director of Admissions at Globe University and spencerian College. She has a BS in early childhood education slash psychology, and an Emmy and Education Management human resources from the University of Wisconsin Stout, an MBA from Minnesota School of Business and a PhD in education and training and performance improvement from Capella University. In McClure is the Associate Vice President for Research innovation and economic impact for UK innovate at the University of Kentucky, where he leads University efforts to translate UK discoveries for the public good, seek equitable returns on UK intellectual property. develop innovative approaches to develop fund and support opportunities for near stage research seek grant funding to enhance UK investment and innovation and expand industry and other collaborative research programs with UK research and, and in Kentucky more broadly. He was executive director of the UK office of technology commercialization where he oversaw a team of staff managing the university's innovation, intellectual property and startup portfolios. Ian is an advisory board member of the Oak Ridge Institute tarab IP web Advisory Committee for University Technology Transfer A P I and P i on to NIH grants and as a co founder of the Kentucky commercialization ventures, a state funded program to provide IP and tech transfer services to all other universities in the state that currently don't have dedicated IP and tech transfer resources, and began his career as a mergers and acquisitions and intellectual property transaction attorney. Following private practice, he helped build a startup company in Chicago that was the world's first financial exchange for IP and technology rights ipsi, which he led through product development capital raise proof of concept growth, to 30, plus full time employees and two offices. welcome Christine. And Ian, we are so excited to learn from you today. And and I will turn it over to you first to get us started.

Speaker 2  3:22  
Thanks, Sammy, I appreciate it. And I think we're going to put up our new slides that we're going to present today. Just want to thank everybody for for taking some time with us today to learn about what we're calling research impact design. This is from every angle, an extension of our technology, commercialization, innovation and entrepreneurship efforts at the University of Kentucky. It's a new focus for us. And what we're going to talk about today is is new programming, new training, that it has taken us over a year to develop the concept for design and launch. And we're seeing amazing results, which we'll talk about with you later. And so I am going to take only a few minutes of your time to set the stage a little bit and talk about why and how we have frameworks this kind of a new focus into our overall innovation and entrepreneurship and commercialization activities. And then I'm going to hand it over to our real expert here. Dr. Christine Wiles, whom we have brought onboard and hired to help us lead this initiative and manage it and effectively lead the training of innovation concepts to our faculty and graduate students on campus. Next slide. So this is at a high level, what we've done at the UK innovate technology commercialization. This third box here was always our focus for technology transfer efforts. But like every technology transfer office, we realize that a lot of our work was still reactive to the things that came in our front door. We did innovation harvesting to bring in invention disclosures just like everyone else does. And we were very productive in those efforts. But we sat down in the middle of 2021 and talked about how can we more holistically support, innovation and entrepreneurship on our campus. And we settled on a need to really build capacity in what we call pre transfer or pre tech transfer activities. Really, providing new kinds of support and services before the technology transfer process is initiated. And one of the main reasons is because we really wanted to diversify and expand and make more inclusive, the access awareness and touch and engagement with those technology transfer and commercialization activities. Just like everyone that does technology transfer. One of the issues that we of course came to is that only a small percentage of our faculty on our campus actually ever engage in technology transfer. Certainly, it's not the inclination of most faculty. But we thought surely we can we can expand upon the visibility to an awareness of the importance of impacts for research in more ways than just publication. And how can we best do that? Well, we settled on this training mechanism we'll be really wanted to incentivize our faculty and graduate students and staff to engage in understanding what innovation the innovation process is about, and really to expand their awareness of other ways to effectuate research impact. That's why we've called this research impact design really gets designed think for effectuating research impacts at the research stage, certainly an expansion of the the normal Technology Transfer model, but we really wanted to get ahead and, and create greater visibility and awareness. Now not all faculty are going to participate in something like that. So we developed what we're calling a micro certification, Christine is going to talk a little more about this, we needed to incentivize faculty to do this. And so we created a badging concept where graduates from this program, get to create an indicia of, hey, I did that thing, and show their peers that they have accomplished at least a greater attainment of innovation and entrepreneurship knowledge on our campus. So this is how it sits within our new buckets of UK innovate, it's an expanded umbrella for innovation and entrepreneurship, at UK in innovation training as one of our focal areas that we believe over the long term is going to become a really a sort of a pillar of our culture shift around innovation on our campus. Next slide. So what we created is a training program I mentioned. It's and as Christine will describe, it's accessible, and is really focused on career development. That's the way we message this to our faculty. Again, we understand not all faculty graduate students staff are going to be inclined to to participate here. But if we make it easy for them to access, and we give them incentive to do it, we hope that that before they get into completing or even designing research projects, before they even come to a point of discovery, they'll know what it means to do proof of concepts. They'll know what what other pathways are available to them to increase the potential impact of their work. And so we introduce concepts like partnership and new funding, where sources or sources and what product development means in the context of basic research. So this is all types of entrepreneurs and think about what entrepreneurship is, it's really just risk tolerance. And we want to teach our faculty what what risk tolerance is, and the meaning of risk tolerance in the research context. So career developments, greater access and incentives is all sort of key to the messaging in this and so in the end, it took us a year didn't take us it took Dr. Wilds a year to design this program to create the online environment and now she's going to show it to you next slide. So the objectives of this webinar, we want to explain first, the evolution of the university researcher, Dr. Wilds is going to talk about and by the way, she's an expert in performance evaluation has a PhD in performance evaluation herself, and so she's an expert on training. But we're going to talk about the why why do we think this is needed? And it does come down to the evolution of university research or what we see now around use inspired research and new focus on research impact from federal funding agencies, then Dr. Wiles is going to take you through An extra introduction to pre transfer training, why we focus on the pre transfer mechanisms and why that is where we believe we can effectuate the greatest impact of this type of training. And then finally, you know, we want to provide strategies for you and your team and other universities to consider. If you are thinking about developing an innovation training, masterclass program, online environment, whatever it might be to effectuate culture shift across your campus, we hope that we can share our experience pros and cons and what we've learned over the past year and a half. And now since we've launched this thing, since Christina has been teaching our, our faculty and students through this program, what we've learned so that you can take those away and hopefully do something similar, if you're interested. Alright, now I'm gonna pass it to the real expert, Dr. Wilds, please take us away.

Speaker 3  10:50  
Thank you. And thank you again. So basically, eating covered everything we're going to talk about, but I'm just going to add a little spice on top of that. Basically, what we're seeing is that faculty really don't encounter tech transfer until after the process really starts. And they might not even approach it at all or indirectly, even. And then number two, our entrepreneurial cultures and values might not be consistent all the way across our campus. We're not seeing it all. So if you've had those experiences, what I'd like to do is a quick chat, storm. So if you've had those experiences, right, yes, in chat, and on the count of three, hit enter, 123, enter. Yes, right. We all see it as we're going through our evolution in the Technology Transfer Office. So that has barriers for us to overcome. And there's a couple barriers are talked about and things that we can do as we're working through those barriers. So a large amount of our research doesn't even hit commercialization, because they don't even enter our process and why some of it comes down to what the people individually think of our and our researchers, what they're doing and what's valuable to them at this time. And some of them have values that are completely different than the culture that we need for tech transfer. So they have unwillingness to allocate the time to it right? Or they have concerns about publication, publish or perish. Those are the big things they need to get done first, especially if they're in a tenure process. So they have perceived perceptions of the tech transfer office to and those are actually difficult to overcome as we're moving into changing the value system of entrepreneurship and tech transfer. So how can we reduce some of those barriers? And what can we put into place to move forward in that? Well, here's four ideas. The first one is to think about, how do they actually enter? How do researchers enter our tech transfer process? And where do they enter? And what kind of barriers do they have to? Do they know how to enter? What kind of forms? Do they need to fill out? Do they have the information? How long will it take them to fill out those forms? How can we reduce the time and make it easier for them to enter the tech transfer process triggers some engagements within a broader ecosystem with these researchers early on in different ways, then, even outside of the research environment, we want to shift some of that attention from internal processes to our internal what's going on within our environments. And then we want to increase the level of activity in pre innovation disclosure phases. And how do we do that? Well, we need to be able to reach the researchers early on before they even get to disclosure in that process. So we kind of see a shifting continuum, right. Many times probably many of you, as tech transfer officers may have seen this, that by the time they reach our office, the research doesn't have desired impact any longer. And it arrives, the technology is not viable any longer. Along with that probably it's scientifically obsolete and doesn't have a lot of value to us at all moving forward. And those three items really impact the amount of revenue that we can bring in as a tech transfer office and value for our perceptions within the society to researchers, because then they feel like they've got something and it's their baby. But because of taking too much time to get it to market or even in licensure, we can't help them because of these three avenues. Sort of the framework we want to think about is, first off bringing them and bringing tech transfer into an essential integrated part of research, right, we want to be able to prop be involved early on, even when they're developing the problem statement and putting everything together for them. We want to have a lot of early interactions with researchers so they can see us as a friend, not as somebody who just wants to help make some money for the university. And on top of that, the number three is that you might be thinking well Christine, this works great at the University of Kentucky you've got 30,000 students there and a plethora of researchers. This doesn't really fit for our university. Well, many of these pieces can fit for university because one size does not it all, it's not easy to say you can go through this process 123, and you're going to get a great result, you might have to do pieces of these processes in order to get a great result for what's relative for your own university. Part of the framework that we're working with is actually knowing what real change is, and how to implement real change. So impact and research impact is actually the real change that we can see in the real world. We want to be able to take that impact and broaden it beyond the university walls. And what does that actually mean really? Well, it's provable benefit, impact implementation, we want to actually move that research, and we want to be able to value it in different avenues, we want to be able to see it so we can demonstrate, measure and capture the research, we want to be able to take the research beyond academia. So it actually has value in society, the economy and our environment. And finally, on top of that, research, an impact happens because of what happens at our universities and the research that we do and contribute to society in general. And that actually is a pretty big wall. In fact, I've got a great slide on that the wall between the university and society is a pretty big barrier to in order to have research impact, we essentially go back to the beginning, right, exposing researchers early, so their values will change indirectly. And we can have experiences for those researchers early on to help them break the barriers to get over the wall, under the ball around the roll through the ball, whatever we need to do in order to make research impact, take it from the university through the wall and make sure it enters society and creates that larger impact. So really, what is impact? Well, according to the NIH, and I looked at a lot of different different definitions of research impact, but the NEH had a great one. And this encompasses almost every word you could possibly think of the direct and indirect influence of excellent research on individuals, communities, or society, including improvements to health and equity, and social, economic, cultural, or environmental benefits. Well, that's a lot of words put together. And what does it actually mean? The real message is that research impact does not happen by having the researcher do the research alone. It really requires communication, relationship actions, we want to be able to connect those academics to society and individuals that they actually impact so that we can see the impact occurring, we can see it beyond the university and what we're looking for. All right, why do we care? Well, we care about research impact, because our funders care about it, right? The universities care about what happens for under our research, as well as researchers care. Those three customer segments value almost the same things, but in different orders. Our funders want us to show the benefit and securing the funding, right? Why are they giving us the funding at all, we want to they want to be able to show responsibility to taxpayers for actually giving us the funding, as well as they want to be able to solve problems that are relevant and current to society. The universities are really interested in what we're doing for impact and research because it does attract more funding for the university. It improves the university's reputation. It attracts world class researchers. And that's a big thing right now. In fact, we're hearing it a lot over and over over how do we bring the valued researchers into our university. So that increases more revenue and brings better reputation to our university. And then finally, as a researcher alone, sure they need funding to do their research, they want to address social responsibilities and be able to have the research create impact for for the individuals that they want to create the impact for. It allows them to address new research questions, and develop new skills by actually attempting new types of research. So we care because our funders care, and they're changing how they're going to be administering funding in the future. Our university cares, because it's a lot of value to the reputation, the researcher cares, because of all everybody else in the pipeline. All of them put together, they all care. So there's lots of types of impact when we're looking at it. And there's a couple things to think about, right? There's instrumental concepts, conceptual, as well as capacity and then connectivity. And sometimes you think about them as being the same thing. But they're really not. They actually look at many different activities and actions that come from each of them. So instrumental is really researched the changes impact of policy or behavior, right? There's a clear link to what's coming out of that work. Conceptual is more about influences the bodies of your public, you know, it's professional knowledge, understanding or attitudes. When you talk about capacity building, it is about skill development, and technical expertise. And then finally, connectivity. Really, it sounds very simple, you know, setting up new networks, facilitating collaborations, and that's a lot about what we're trying to do at the University of Kentucky. How do we collaborate and set up new connect shins across the campus and help change the culture.

Speaker 3  20:06  
And that's where we come to pre transfer. And really, it's just like, what it sounds like. It's before, it's before the tech transfer process. And an actually flows into a really nice framework that was developed by the Department of Defense. The study that I found showed it like this pre transfer, transfer, and post transfer, all work together in a really nice formula. The larger framework that goes under it has a lot of other activities for the federal government. But when you're looking at it very closely, pre transfer has a place in our tech transfer process. And if we drill into it a little bit deeper, we can see that one of the main items on that is entrepreneurial r&d, training, and tools and services, developing outreach strategies, those are all the items we were talking about, which were important, they're important to the university, they're important to our funders are important to the researcher in general. So where do we pull out of many of these little pieces and begin, you don't, you don't have to pick just one, you can pick many of these different areas and pull them into the pre transfer process, as well as include them in transfer and post transfer. Because we found this study and where we went with it, we decided to start with entrepreneurial r&d training. So what does that look like? And where are we going with it right now at the University of Kentucky? Well, we can create created what we're calling a micro certification program. And it's pretty deep. And here's the foundation for it. We wanted to be able to create impact literacy. And that's really important. We're not just teaching impact research or teaching impact literacy and what it actually means to change and how it changes in for who, and then how research can be mobilized, who was involved in the research, putting it together and why. And if you're thinking about a business model, that sounds just like a business model, right? What are you doing, who you're doing it for how you're going to do it, and why all those pieces put together, actually lead us in a direction that that helped us form the program in general. So it's multimodal, what does that mean? There's many pieces to delivery, it's not just listening to a lecture, there's hands on activities, there's things they're going to accomplish, they're gonna have outside exposures. It's inclusive, and its delivery. And it's short course, which is really important. It creates learning spaces through experience. And that's important because it's experiential learning, it's what's needed in order to reinforce that learning, and then also values, reflection in your experience. So you do something, you think about it, what happened there, you review it, you're gonna cement the learning into the process. You might have seen the graphic that it kind of is like a tiered system. And that we built it that way, because we found that valued in a certification type system begins with a level one and a level two and possibly a level three. So if we start at the basics, we can move our way up. And actually, as you mature in the pathway, you can earn larger badges. And this is what it actually looks like. Ours has two sides, we have the full certification, UK innovate, and micro certification, but it has two sides, one side is impact. And the other side is implementation. And each of those two sides have five courses underneath them. So when you finish the five courses for impact, you gain that those five badges as well as the impact badge. When you're when you finish the five courses under implementation, you earn those five badges plus implementation. When you finally have those two levels, attend courses, innovate the Innovate impact and implementation you earn the micro certification. Let's talk about those classes a little bit. Those classes, in fact, on the first side is impact workshops. We want to start at the beginning, what is impact literacy? And why is it important to you? And we started with the growth mindset, what is an entrepreneurial mindset? And what does it mean for the research and have an entrepreneur mindset and how to change your mindset, if you don't have a growth mindset, the activities involve them help them move through separate processes to understand what their mindset actually is, and how to use design thinking in their in their research process. Then we go on to building Impact Research, which is what is it you know, knowledge exchange, transfer to society types of impact, and how impact actually happens from academia into society. The third course is impact design where they create their own design plan, that they set impact goals in a model, they create an impact plan, they collaborate for impact, and it puts it together in a really nice package when they're done with that. And then, when we go into moving into engaging stakeholders, which you think of as customers and as the tech transfer office, we think engaging stakeholders as customers well, using the word customers with researchers was not a good move. So we use stakeholders because that's what they're used to in the research environment. They actually need to learn how to talk to people outside the lab and that this course actually helps them learn how to engage stakeholders, many different activities, many different tools and resources for them to use in their research. And then we go through the entrepreneurial research ecosystem because it's a little bit different than just a startup ecosystem, what what tools and resources are valuable to them around the university, but also around our community, statewide, even national? Why do they have available to them that they might not be available, aware of early on? The other side of the coin is implementation. So impact is early on a lot of learning how to do things, implementation is hands on and moving forward and changing things in society taking your research through a commercialization process, which means the first classes I did an enterprise so how do you actually establish a startup or a new venture, and it's very basic in nature, this is not hands on full business courses, these are very step by step simplistic, fitted for the researcher in a researcher environment, the next class is protecting your idea before and after validation. In other words, we're engaging with you early and you should allow us to be part of your process early on to help you protect your idea, in the research, give them that idea early on, that being involved in the tech transfer process isn't scary, hard, or not a value. And then we move into commercialization and Social Sciences, which is a fabulous course taught by our own Dr. Serenity, while she's the expert in social sciences, so why not bring the expert and the third fourth course and that is who's writing the checks? Well, federal funding is changing, and it's changing in a variety of different directions for researchers. So who else can we go to to obtain some funding, what is available in our community in our state, as well as what are the organizations that are looking for research to be done and partners in research as well as industry partnerships for research, so they get a full course load around that as well. And then finally, data in today's comp data, and today and tomorrow's company. And when you think about data, you think about why I mean, they all use SPSS, or whatever they use to track their data and their systems for research, right. But it's important to understand how data is used not only in research, but in companies and in systems for tracking some of the societal research they might want to do. So they learned how to use a CRM, not only from the beginning of the, as a user, but learning how to create and manipulate a CRM behind the scenes, it's baby steps. It's not very deep. There's no coding involved. And right now, they've all loved it moving forward. So how do we do it? Well, University of Kentucky has Canvas as our LMS, we have used Canvas as our LMS. We've built all 10 courses within a Canvas environment, we've created their own numbering system, as well as lettering system within our catalog of courses at the University, they all have a welcome page, they will have a module format. And they all have short assignments for each of those modules that they need to complete in order to be accomplished as attending the course. Each of those courses have two sections, a synchronous section and an asynchronous section. And why do we do that? We do a synchronous session first, right? It's 3045 minutes on a zoom with me. We weren't doing him at noon. But this semester, we're trial trialing a little bit early, we're going to do 1111 to noon to see if that works a little bit better because noon seem to be a happy time for faculty to engage in a learning process. But during this introduction, they get a very good introduction to the concept that we're covering in the modules, as well as covering how to do the modules, resources and tools and understanding what's available for them within each of those sections are covering for the next couple of weeks. The asynchronous then is what they do on their own time, they've got about 30 days to finish it. But they do have individual mentoring. During that time we touch touch base with them a couple times a week or whenever they need to, to make sure that they're following as they're going through the pipeline of each course. And following and understanding the assignments many times they end up being on multiple zoom calls. And it's because they value the information they're getting. And it's been very rewarding. Finally, each of the courses through the modules have a number of resources. And it would be confusing to go back and figure out where all those resources are and within the modules. So all the resources are then put in their own little research module resource module at the end of the canvas unit. So they can easily go back and find those tools if they need them in the future. So we have a badge system. And if you didn't notice early on each badge has its own little identity that goes along with it. And we used we searched researched many different badge systems. So we've selected badger number one because one, they're already implemented within Canvas. And two, they had a high reputation for their systems in badges and how badges are recognized. It connects to Canvas, which is really nice as it talks to each other and it connects to Salesforce, which is our registration system. So our faculty and graduate students register from an online portal that takes a little bit of information, they select the class and time they want to take and it drops right into our Salesforce CRM. That CRM also connects to Canvas and badger so all three of them talk together. So when when a course is finished, the badge is automatically awarded in Canvas, it's automatically awarded to the student record. And we don't have to keep track of it because digitally we can follow all those metrics was with within Salesforce on a really nice dashboard.

Speaker 3  29:59  
So badger was collected badges for a multitude of reasons, not only from their own marketing value, but because they actually had a lot of the requirements we're looking for. It not only has a description of the badge attached to the digital badge, but there's criteria, and you have to have evidence that goes along with it that the badge was earned before you can select it. And those are the two main reasons we went along with badger besides being able to integrate it into Canvas, we know we made a good choice on badger because Canvas actually just purchased badger, and they're going to be rolling it out within their own systems. So who is this for? Well, it's for the experience researcher, faculty, somebody looking for something different or to add on to their knowledge they already have. And because it's stackable, you can do 1234 courses, five courses and just do one side, or you can do all 10 courses and earn the full micro certification. We've seen a lot of faculty say there's a lot of value in that and, and not having to do the whole thing, and only doing pieces that they think you're valuable to them. It's also for the future learner who doesn't want to fully commit to a full program, right, they're getting the basics in a nice format that they can understand. And actually the learning does transfer to them. And it's also for the current student, as well as graduate and postdocs. In fact, the graduate students are very much looking forward to using this program for their innovation focus in the graduate field. So finally, along with that, when you have the two sides, you have impact, and you have innovation, and that they both work together because you learn different skills on one side. And on the other side, it lets them explore develop what they could have as potential commercial value. And there's a lot of benefits to that not only to the university and industry and government, but the benefits overall, are to the innovator to the university, and eventually taking that impact into society. So in a, in a sense, you know, we need to reduce the barriers, engage early on with our researchers so that we can produce more impact in our research from the University. We want to be able to take that research from society, and it doesn't actually emerge on its own. We need to be persistent. And we need to do it. So does it because it doesn't happen by accident. So we need to build it, and we need to maintain it. Thank you. Sammy.

Speaker 1  32:14  
Hello there. Sorry, I was finding my button. Thank you so much, Christine, for all this important information. I think that was super informative. I do have a couple of questions and attendees, please feel free to continue submitting questions, we do have plenty of time to get those answered. If you're watching in the autumn Learning Center, there should be an Expand button at the top of your window. If you're not seeing the q&a, and the chat buttons, those will pop up once you expand the window. So if you haven't seen those yet, you can also email questions directly to me. I appreciate everyone's patience with signing on in a new system today. So thank you for being a little bit of our guinea pigs. Like I can get a started. Christine, what findings in the first six months of launching this program are becoming apparent to you? And how are the faculty receiving this program so far?

Speaker 3  33:10  
Surprisingly, we had 90 individual registrations for all the courses, which was a phenomenal amount. In fact, we were in a leadership meeting when we opened registration, and I was counting the numbers that they went up. And by the end of the meeting, we had like 35 registrations within an hour. And the leadership team was like, wow, this is great. So out of those 90 registrations 77 completed the courses. That's a tremendous opportunity and success rate moving forward.

Speaker 1  33:38  
Absolutely. And Ian, has your office heard from faculty that they've been working with? Any, you know, how they're being receptive to it on your end?

Speaker 2  33:46  
Yeah, I mean, so to Christine's point, it's surprised us, frankly, the uptake, we've already had to get this. So interestingly, as we were designing and launching this program, we had to go through administrative leadership to sort of talk about the need for something like this, like most universities, you know, through our, for example, through our office of the vice president. They offer kind of research, leadership training and things like that. And we had to show how this is different. This is focused, and it's also differentiated from just commercialization education, right? We're not just teaching the commercialization process, it's really focused on designing for research impact, it's thinking creatively differently entrepreneurially about the ways in which research can be designed and set up for impact, which should result in things like disclosures and translation opportunities. But the reception has been great. So far, I've met with a lot of associate Dean's for research at colleges across our campus that are excited about this. And I think in the first week or so that we launched this, we had dozens of applications I think what Christina I think we had 80 or 70, or something registrations was

Speaker 3  34:57  
really high in the first week was like 16. We started the week After and they kept rolling in after that. So having 90, I mean, even number kind of is kind of interesting, right, 90 individual registrations, but and then when we just finished the courses in December to have 77 complete as a really, I mean, you can't expect better numbers than that.

Speaker 2  35:16  
But the messaging around it is important. And that's what we had to be careful about. And again, we adopted terminology like research, impact and design thing for, for innovation. That's right. And we're thinking about, it's, you know, we all we all know, customer discovery, we all teach customer discovery in Excel, but our programming and commercialization pathway developments Ichor. And effectively, this is customer discovery at the research stage. But we also can't message it that way, because faculty don't know what that means, until you really talk to them in a language that they can understand. And that will incentivize them to participate.

Speaker 1  36:00  
Excellent. And I think that this kind of goes hand in hand with that question. And I know that this will take time to see. So it might be too early to answer this one. But have you seen? Are you starting to see increased engagement with the tech transfer office due to this training? Has it? Have you noticed an impact there?

Unknown Speaker  36:19  
Christine, you wanna take that first?

Speaker 3  36:21  
Yes, uh, no. Actually, I believe it will it I do feel like it's too early within the process, whoever in our programming, we do have already had a lot of education going out from our tech transfer office, they do a phenomenal job with many of the seminars they already had in place. And so I feel that some of the momentum came early on from what they've already been doing in our office. So this training is complimentary. And it's coming before that, it should actually show potential moving down the line, and I don't think we're gonna see full impact for maybe a year we'll see those researchers put moving into the system. It's a

Speaker 2  36:55  
long term investment in culture shift, right. And those things don't happen quickly. We just launched this program in the fall. So we wouldn't expect to see increased engagement in the form of disclosures and things. One thing that we are counting, though, and that I hope, you will see is a diversification or an expansion of new faculty engaging with us, right in this stuff. Hopefully, we're meeting with newer faculty or faculty that have not gone through the commercialization process before but are hoping to learn about it at the research stage, while they're designing research projects, and so you just think about the natural timeline that that should create, we would hope to see that effectuate additional disclosures in like one to three years. But But again, it's this is about culture shift and not sort of early short term metrics other than increased and or diversified engagement of innovators. Great. And

Speaker 1  37:52  
all these questions are building on each other very nicely. So thank you attendees for submitting these questions. When we did receive was what disciplines are represented. Some faculty and grad students who have registered so far, so are you seeing the traditional faculty? Or is it a lot of new folks that are kind of coming into the pipeline or MCs?

Unknown Speaker  38:12  
Cafe? What is cafe? What's the if

Speaker 2  38:13  
I can remember what that one stands for? Agriculture, Food and environment? College

Speaker 3  38:17  
of Education, college of medicine and research? Ah, yeah, College of Medicine had the highest attendance, right?

Speaker 2  38:26  
Yeah, I think one thing we did discover that, amongst early registrants, we had a high number of College of Medicine applicants, or registrants served from a number of other colleges, it's been diversify. One thing that I think Christine has been really happy to see that I have been to as graduate students have been signing up to take this, which is exciting to see.

Speaker 1  38:49  
Excellent. And then how does actually, let's jump over to this one first. Do you have suggestions on how to coordinate your patent filing strategy with potential future business plans of the product that you are protecting? And I was gonna say, I think that one shifts over to you. And if that is too far outside of the scope, we can also take that one off? Look, it's a

Speaker 2  39:16  
really good question. I don't know if it ties in with the concepts that we're talking about here. Other than because what we're what we're not really getting into here is business plan development. That's that is the tech transfer process. What we're teaching faculty about is the purpose of something like a business plan, even things like sustaining a research center, right. But, but sort of tying patent filing strategy with business plan development. That is, that's the work of really our Office of Technology Commercialization and our launch blue accelerator, for example.

Speaker 1  39:50  
Great so we can take that the rest of that one offline. I'm happy to make that connection. We have a few more that have come through. What is the difference between gain. I think we've touched on this a little bit between this training and so much of the commercialization education that Tito's are currently doing with faculty.

Speaker 2  40:08  
Yeah, that's a really, really good question. And Christine, you can add on to this. We all do commercialization education. And we had done plenty, just like every tech transfer office, we had, you know, done webinars and gone to departments. But again, a lot of that training, which is necessary in that education, is focused on the commercialization process itself. And it starts with a disclosure, usually we start talking about a disclosure, and then we talk walk them through the process of evaluation and de risking and licensing. And the concepts here for research impact design are prior to that it's really taking a step back and looking at, you know, understanding, partnership, understanding, customer discovery, for use inspired research.

Speaker 3  40:57  
Yeah, actually understanding how to design your research for impact design for the users designed for society, and how can you make the greatest impact for that? So we are stepping back even before the beginning of the system. So they understand that many of our funders are moving into this type of cycle, that they're going to need solid numbers like Who are your stakeholders? How are you going to reach them? What activities are going to form so that you can create impact and show that impact with our funding?

Speaker 1  41:24  
Yeah. Anything to add there before I want to cut you off?

Speaker 2  41:27  
Well, no, I guess the last thing I was thinking is, if you can think about what I would love, love, love to be able to say in like five years is that this program not only increased the number of disclosures, and diversify the number of innovators that we can work with. But it increased the quality of those disclosures, right. So we're not just being reactive to the academic freedoms of basic research. But we're actually helping people to identify users customers impact potential at the research stage. So when they come into the to the tech transfer office, there's already an element of proof of concept that has been tested.

Speaker 1  42:06  
And we have two questions that I think tie in really nicely together. So I'm going to pair these together. The first is if the if a university wants to build something similar, how do they maybe go about that? Who is available to maybe help? Christine, I'm winking at you on that one. And then sort of as a follow up, is there any plans through your office to expand this outside of UK? Maybe to the larger network? Or is it really an internal program?

Speaker 3  42:35  
So interesting enough, I'm more than willing to help anybody who'd like some assistance, because as Ian said, I spent three months doing research and other universities and the type of training opportunities I have, even internationally. So I have a lot to put into the foundation for which direction we went with it. And then, interestingly enough, I you know, how you're supposed to disclose things for tech transfer? Well, apparently, I'm going to be disclosing the micro certification and moving it into the pipeline. But yes, there's opportunity for collaborations and then move things forward. Great.

Speaker 2  43:10  
Yeah. That's just to the second part of that question. We would love that. I mentioned it took us a year to build this pristine designed it through lots of benchmarking and studying and then building the curriculum, lots of materials development, and then constructing the whole online environment. And if anyone is interested in sort of quickly adopting a similar approach, we we'd love to help and support, talk, provide guidance, and then hopefully, eventually, even provide the course and program be licensed or otherwise. Excellent.

Speaker 1  43:48  
I'm gonna give it a minute to see if any other questions pop through. So feel free to keep submitting those in the chat and in the, in the q&a field. As we wait to see if there's any further questions. And I think you touched on this a little bit. But for both of you. What is your take on where you see this program evolving? And what really are those long term goals? As we said, this isn't a short term project. We're not expecting see huge results on January 12. Today, a few months after launching. So what is that long term vision look like for this? Christine, you

Unknown Speaker  44:26  
might take that first. I have

Speaker 3  44:27  
a couple ideas. The first. The first is that we we didn't know we needed to go to the faculty senate for an approval process because the university didn't have a batch approval process yet at that time. So we are now their Beta Test moving this moving through the system. To get this this batch certification approved through the Faculty Senate. On top of that we do plan on expanding the courses have a plethora of list of opportunities and courses we can add to it and actually layer into the micro certification to give more opportunities and more diversified into the courses. We can actually take this and many many different reactions.

Speaker 2  45:02  
I don't want to give too much away, Ian. Well, that's, you know, our goal would be to see this really effectuate the type of impacts we talked about on disclosures, quality of disclosures, increased innovation culture on a campus. But how do we how do we know that's happening? You know, we studied a couple of really interesting benchmarks. There's an innovation masterclass, for example, at UNC Chapel Hill, they've done a really good job over like 12 to 15 years with 300 Plus faculty that have that have graduated from this course. But importantly, it's been incentivized through providing this sort of stamp of approval or graduation to those faculty who share it with other faculty and say, I've graduated that masterclass. And now, it breeds this, this sort of incentives for others to get on board, and do it. So that's the importance of the micro certification aspect of this. We didn't know how much we were gonna have to work with the faculty senate on this, because while every university knows, Microsoft knows and offers macro certifications very well. We don't do that for our own people. And so offering a macro certification for our own faculty was new. And so we've had to go through the faculty senate process to understand what a badge is, and how we're going to offer it and, and how it's going to be beneficial for career development for faculty researchers. So hopefully, we see real, it's individual incentivization, from a grassroots level continue to grow. And then over years, we would love to see, you know, hundreds of our faculty with these badges.

Speaker 1  46:37  
Excellent. And we did have one additional question come through. So I want to make sure that we get all of those answered. I know we spoke about the different colleges that were represented from those who have signed up, but have you had any PI's registered for the program?

Speaker 2  46:54  
Have we had any PI's register for this transfer program? Yeah. Well, I hope all law faculty researchers are PI's of some sort.

Speaker 3  47:04  
Yeah, ah, yeah, we Yes, we have a female researcher, was a PR right now. One, for sure. I know, that I can think of in conversations in class time when we did synchronous, so some of the things she was talking about, so I can think of one for sure.

Speaker 1  47:19  
Okay. And then another question came in that says group leaders, I don't know if we need more clarification on that. I'm guessing it's a follow up to that PI. Question me group leaders who have signed up.

Speaker 2  47:30  
Oh, Christine, any administrative leaders, center directors, department chairs? I don't know that answer. Well,

Speaker 3  47:38  
but our VP er of research, Dr. Castro, is wants to take the courses. So she's getting the schedule this semester, so she can engage as well. Yeah.

Speaker 2  47:46  
Or VPR has promised to actually take it and show off the badge herself. That's, we hope that's going to be an incentivization as well.

Speaker 1  47:52  
Yes. Excellent. Perfect. Well, I think that covers all of the questions that have come through. I know Christina and Ian are always open to folks reaching out if additional questions do come up, and you can always connect with me and I'd be happy to get everyone connected. So on behalf of autumn First, I'd like to thank you both Christina and Ian for taking the time to share this program with us. I think it's going to be inspirational to a lot of attendees and get the wheels turning for how they can engage with their groups that their universities and attendees thank you all for joining today.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai