Speaker 1  0:42  
Hello and welcome to today's autumn webinar, holistic approach for a successful commercialization of research outputs. My name is Don vielle young. I am a member of Autumn's educate team and today's staff host. All lines have been muted to ensure a high quality audio and today's session is being recorded. If you have any questions for the presenters, we encourage you to use the Q and A feature on your zoom toolbar. 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, would like to acknowledge and thank Autumn's online professional development sponsor, Marshall Gerstein, we appreciate your ongoing support. I would like, I would now like to welcome today's presenters. Dr David Gulley is executive director and founder of the Technology Transfer Office of the Puerto Rico science technology and research trust, a private nonprofit organization established in 2004 Professor Fauci le Badar has dual experience as an academic and as ke slash TT professional. She is the Director of Savanti University, Sunam Nanotechnology Center, and the Vice President of University Industry Collaboration centers platform of Turkey. Thank you, Dr gully and Professor Badar for joining us. We are excited to learn from you this afternoon.

Speaker 2  2:40  
So thank you very much. And good morning, good afternoon or good evening, depending on where you where you are. So today, Fauci let and I will be talking about a holistic approach for the commercialization of research outputs and bringing perspectives both from North America as well as Europe and the MENA areas. Before I begin, I did want to mention that Fauci lett and I both are on the autumn International Strategy Committee. This committee has been in existence for about five years. It is comprised of nine regions across the world, and the mission coincides with Autumn's mission to include professionals worldwide in our knowledge transfer and tech transfer efforts. The Regional chairs and co chairs have direct ties to strong national knowledge transfer and technology transfer associations in the region Fauci let, in fact, is the chair of the West Asia MENA region, and you can see all of the other regions in that particular map. And I'm the co chair of the Latin America and the Caribbean region, and also serve as chair of the autumn International Strategy Committee. So I'd like to begin really to talk about accelerating research, because that's become very important for those of us in the KT and TT profession, and when we understand research and what it takes in order to reach the commercialization level. There are a number of different audiences, a number of different stakeholders, and quite a bit of money that's required. And I've taken this slide from a group called inovo source, which does studies about these GAP funds, and looking at GAP funds and accelerator programs, and the kinds of programs that are there, the amount of money that's generally needed, the technology startup stage of development, and then the different activities that are supported in order to scale that research toward commercialization. So. As we know, licensing trends in the US, and based on the autumn surveys, our research expenditures have topped 91 billion in 2022 they continue to increase. And also, startup companies are a method many of us use in order to commercialize research discoveries. And in 2022 again, in 2021 it had increased by 8% again. So it comes increasingly important for us to understand how to accelerate research discoveries and manage that effort so that we successfully commercialize the technologies. One thing that is required, also, as I mentioned, was different types of funds for supporting that effort. And this is a, again, a very good figure about those GAP funds and the type of GAP funds that exist. This comes from a survey that's done by a Novo source, and in the last survey that was accomplished in the in North America, there were 97 research institutions that's that participated in that they, in total, managed 176 different types of funds, with over 665 million in those funds, all the way From translational research grants to proof of concept and de risking programs to the startup acceleration, and then leading to the investment by venture funds. We need new skills to be able to manage this. And those new skills, I've listed several of them here, and we'll be talking about these as we proceed through this presentation, but we need to be able to identify promising research and researchers strengths and weaknesses, and there are methods that we use at my office to do that. We also have to secure and manage financial support with strategies to sustain that kind of funding for de risking our research discoveries. We also need to have, develop and implement decision making tools that are consistent to engage external expertise and potential stakeholders. Knowing who those stakeholders are, whether they're near or far, becomes very important. One of the main thing that we also do is to educate our researchers about lab to market commercialization. And I know many of us have programs like that, but they're they're key to what we do. And we also have to both locate and deploy experts and mentors that support these research projects. There are not enough staff in our office to handle all of this, so we have to have these external experts and mentors to help us achieve our goals, and also in the management standpoint, to be able to implement progress and milestone driven funding plans to mitigate risks of an unsuccessful effort, and to be able to work with the faculty and the inventors in doing so. So I'm going to talk about one of the programs that supports this research acceleration and commercialization toward commercialization, and that's the regional tech transfer accelerators in the US in 2018 the National Institutes of Health targeted the idea states. Idea states in the US are those that receive less than the usual share of NIH funding, and they wanted to really help move scientific discoveries and technologies out of the labs, the university labs, and really increase funding toward those underserved regions, tie them into other federal initiatives that we're developing and move forward with these regional technology transfer accelerators. And you can see those accelerators and the idea states in that map Puerto Rico, which is that little yellow dot down on the below Florida, which is actually the right size, is part of the southeast accelerator network. So when we began to develop these in this and our ours is led by the University of Kentucky, the hubs really are these regional consortia. In fact, we have more than 25 universities that participate in our particular hub, but they're there to promote the entrepreneurial culture within our universities, also to be able to network among the universities, the staffs and the researchers, and also to form teams that occur during this particular process, also identifying stakeholders within the region and out of the region too, but venture capital groups, business development organizations, other businesses that are interested in what we do and really to be to create a consortia that shares knowledge across all of our institutions, as well as best practices and guidelines. So education, again, because. Is very, very important for our researchers. The Southeast accelerator network, which is the one I mentioned, and the one that we are part of in Puerto Rico, also has an I read commercialization program. It's really there and targeted toward biomedical researchers, clinicians as well as students, to bring them skills and knowledge about entrepreneurial activities and research commercialization, and really to shorten the time it takes to get them to market. It's also targeting healthcare startups and trying to create scalable healthcare startups. Well, there's another word that's not common in our profession. How do we make a scalable healthcare startup? Again, new tools and new requirements for us in the tech transfer offices and new skills we have to know about. And here we're talking about a scalable healthcare startup that means that the founders can develop and launch commercially viable and competitively defensible technologies, right? So those are very key words, and we again train our researchers on how to do that. We also need to attract funding that brings the innovation to market, and then to be able to grow the talent pool that supports the startup, and ultimately to attract, grow and retain customers. So this is not something we've we've customarily did, but as our startups become more and more frequent, these are the kinds of things we must learn to do and find the partners that help us do that.

Speaker 2  11:38  
In in our network, in Puerto Rico, we developed a program called entrust, and it's a life science accelerator, so this is a real example of how we took that and deployed that effort inside our technology transfer office. Now our office is not inside a university, it's in a private nonprofit Institute trust, we serve 17 campuses, which includes four medical schools. So we have both public and private universities that we serve as the tto for all of those universities and their researchers. What we did in this case was we looked for a partner, and we needed to find a partner who was aligned with what we were doing, who could help support what we would like to do, and we found one in Columbia University. Now you say Columbia University is in New York. We're in Puerto Rico. We're a little island. What's the what's the linkage? Really? Well, the linkage, as many of you know, is there's a very large diaspora of Puerto Rican individuals that live in New York and, in fact, live very near Colombia. And so there was real interest in making more and more ties between Colombia, their local environment, as well as the environment in Puerto Rico. We looked for research relationships we had, and we found some of those, and we began to build on those, and then formally became part of Columbia's Life Science accelerator programs, really to accelerate research projects that we identify in our 17 campuses. We also set up a system to be able to look at pre proposals. And we also set aside about $75,000 for each project we fund that may run from 12 to 24 months. The boot camp itself lasts 11 weeks, two and a half hours each week. There are lectures, there are presentations, there are exercises and homework and team presentations, and the faculty get to learn to do a pitch, and also how to put together a final proposal. So we've been doing this really, since 2021 and you can see the results of that. Each year we've added more universities to the group that we've been dealing with, also the teams. In particular, this year, we ended up with 17 teams of 20 consisting of 27 researchers in our entrust boot camp. We don't know how many awards we're going to get yet. They're, in fact, developing the proposals now, but you can see over the years, this is this has begun to grow. It's very popular with our faculty, and they really like the linkages we get with Columbia University and the network of resources that are available through Columbia, we've had eight startups also that came out of this effort. So we're very, very happy about that. Inside the US, there's also some other initiatives that are driving these new skills that we need to develop. Most of you know about the chips. The science act a very large investment, really, to focus on not only chips, but also science, as in the title. And there were some efforts inside that that attracted many of us in the tech transfer world. One through the National Science Foundation. Were these. Regional innovation engines, again geographic, and then also under the Department of Commerce and the Economic Development Administration, the tech hubs program also to create consortia within ecosystems within the regions. So if we look in the US then and through the NSF engine Awards, the first stage was a development award, planning for about a million a year, a million for two years. There were 44 awards made. And really it was to bring the communities together, to really grow the economies based on a particular topic or field of science and technology, and this looks again, it was spread pretty much across the US. We were fortunate to get two of those awards in Puerto Rico, and we've been working for about a year now to help refine all of these things. The second stage of this too, and how we're developing this is we focused on one of our strengths, which is biopharmaceutical manufacturing in Puerto Rico. And we really focused on these topics. We wanted to look at use inspired research and development. So again, we had to go out to faculty. We had to look at faculty programs, research programs, centers that have been funded over the last say, five years or so, and start to identify those individuals, those researchers and scientists that we could bring into this particular topic. We also needed to look at how we were going to translate those innovations, and how to translate them into practice, what kinds of funding we need, what did our environment look like, and really to mobilize the entrepreneurship efforts we were having on the island. And workforce development, again, becomes another really, really important part of this, because that will sustain our regional innovation. And workforce development in the biopharma sector in Puerto Rico is very, very important. And then lastly, from the big picture is really that ecosystem of partners and stakeholders really to advance innovation in this field regionally, and when we look down the partners, we were able to bring together in order to begin to conduct this strategy development. They come from different parts of the US. They're not all from Puerto Rico. They're from different places, and we've joined with them, and they've joined with us because of the strength, because of their interest and how we bring these consortia together and then really focus on driving new manufacturing practices, as well as advancing biopharmaceutical technologies. The National Science Foundation. Engines is a second stage of that. Some of them have been implemented already up to 160 million over 10 years. There were 10 awards that have been made since 2023 and if we look at those engines, those engines are in a variety of the the places in the US. And some of you may know folks that are part of those engines, again, regional consortia, driving particular technologies and particular sciences within an ecosystem that consists of all of those things that I mentioned before, use inspired research, the translational component, workforce development, and really then holding the holding the consortia group together under commerce with the Economic Development Administration, tech hubs, also similar to the way the National Science Foundation approached it. Strategy, Development Awards were made. 29 of those, in fact, were made in 2023 there was also a designation regions came forward from across the US and presented their strengths. Were they ready, in fact, to become a tech hub? And in those cases, the competition for phase two is now underway. The proposals were due at the end of February, somewhere between 40 and 75 million for each over 10 years, with really about four to five years of consistent funding. And it's really focused on building the workforce of the future, enabling growth, innovate and commercialize the things that are really important to the Economic Development Administration, as well as the communities that these tech hubs serve. We were fortunate in Puerto Rico to get both the strategy development and the designation award. So we've been very busy over the last six months working on these and in fact, again, focused on our strengths, and that was really on biotech. You can see the island there, which also looks like the island's flag. And really three consistent regions, each has strengths. Each has strengths within areas of science, manufacturing, research and entrepreneurship. And those three regions, then all came together with a number of different stakeholders. In fact, 22 different COVID. Collaborating organizations in order to carry out this particular activity and focus on gaps in our ecosystem. And we fortunate. We're fortunate to have a very good study that was done that gave us a map of those gaps and so we could address those and this, those things that we brought to the table were access to capital for entrepreneurs to advance our next generation workforce, to support entrepreneurship, lab, bench to market, through facilities that allow that to happen, where small companies as well as faculty inventors can work. Also focused on really the advanced tech of bio, next generation therapeutics and AI drug discovery. And also, again, more facilities to accelerate new drugs and precision medicines. And then a very large program that, in fact, is located in the Aguadilla region with links across the island, is really an Advanced Technology Center to support pharmaceutical manufacturing and enabling technologies. So we're very excited about this tech hub and what the opportunities are, but it took a lot of skill, took a lot of people to come together and a lot of support from not only those within our trust, but those within all of the organizations, the 22 collaborating organizations that we had to work with.

Speaker 2  21:22  
So what are the implications for those of us that work in tech transfer? Because you know, and I know that in both these NSF programs, in the NIH program, in the commerce and EDA programs, the tech transfer office professionals are involved. We're all involved in this at some stage. So the models that we're dealing with are complex, multiple stakeholders, consortium decision making. So there's not a hierarchy really set up, but it's really driven by consortium and and a group think, if you will. There's also distributed financial models that are deployed through these and they also present new risks for us that we need to think about some of those risks that we faced and that we had to develop plans around were in risk mitigation. So our cybersecurity environment really needed to be reviewed, if you will, assessed and then improved to be able to address some of these potential risks that we have to know about threats that may come and to know about best practices that need to be deployed throughout these consortia groups. Also to have security audits, audits and assessments that are done by third parties to really identify the vulnerabilities we might have in the work that we do. We have to have monitoring systems incidents response, and we also have to have a lot of training of staff to ensure that these kinds of things, if they are preventable, that they are prevented. But then if something occurs, what needs to be done, and also cyber insurance coverage to mitigate financial losses and liabilities by those that might hack into systems in our IP and technology control element, we have to have consistent IP governance and legal protections within these groups, because, as you know, whenever these groups and consortia are all working together, public and private, the relationships can be very complex, and therefore the working relationships need to be spelled out through standard governance documents that plan for the CO development and perhaps co commercialization of these types of activities. Also we needed to ensure that our systems inside were both resilient as well as a risk, risk mitigated. And then also the vendors that we use that the vendors also were managed, or any risk that could come there. And then also all of the kinds of practices that we use in handling data access control. Again, we deal with 17 campuses, publics and privates, so having access and security control with them are really, really important, as well as understanding when we do have incidents and what we have to do, and then compliance with all the regulatory environments, both at the federal level as well as our Commonwealth level, And then within the trust itself, and last financial investments also was, was brought up whenever we were looking at risk mitigations and what we needed to do. And this again, relates to how we deal with the private sector, inside and outside, in our tech transfer operations, but looking at foreign investment and how that might prevent a risk to so we need a way to assess potential investors, and then also to review and evaluate all potential investors for risks that became another component that we had to adopt inside our office. So these, again, are a number of risks and two. Tools and knowledge that we needed inside the tech transfer office in order to participate in these large consortium programs. And that's, again, a picture just from the US and these, these few programs, I believe Fauci let now will be talking about the EU and Turkey. Thank you,

Speaker 3  25:21  
Fauci Yes, thank you very much. I will put my screen up.

Speaker 4  25:34  
Is it okay? Can you see it? Yes, thank you very much. I will be actually addressing you through my experience in the various national roles I've helped throughout the years, and also some of the international responsibilities. So what I will be sharing here is the accumulation of that and giving a GL perspective to what's going on. We know that TTOs and universities have been forever trying to bridge the gap between academia and society, and maximizing societal impact has become a core value in New Generation universities. On the other hand, societal challenges of sustainability goals require innovative solutions. We all know that, so commercialization of research outputs is imperative for societal welfare and economic growth. So So we're talking about long term how do we maximize the impact of research? This requires a firm commitment to research led mission and the support of powerful and visionary leadership in the form of political leadership, in community leadership, as well as managerial leadership at an institutional level, which all come together for intellectual leadership. And for that, we need to work collectively to to attain a sustainable network regionally, nationally and internationally, and bring together in house, in country and international resources to support the specific needs of the innovation and IP based tech transfer ecosystem. However, we know that increasing the resources allocated to research and supporting key players in science and technology is definitely not enough for widespread societal impact. The complex and interlinked challenges of the contemporary world require extensive, coordinated and long term, interdisciplinary DNI collaborations, exploiting all the available tools and mechanisms in the ecosystem. So I believe that a holistic approach needs to be seamlessly implemented, from the initiation of research, development and innovation activities up to the assessment of the socio economic impacts of the of the research. So when we talk about a holistic and integrated approach, what do we mean, basically bringing together the various actors within the ecosystem? We all know that there are three main actors, the public sector, the industry and the higher education sector, and they all have their various responsibilities. The government defines priorities, provides clear policies, including open source and data management currently, and also provides proactive support for wide scale exploitation of these research results. Also, there is the dimension of national security and taxpayers rights and so on. The industry has certain responsibilities. The main thing is fast decision making, for exploiting incentives, providing resources for investment in research and also accept risks. Because they're also, they are very, they're not very comfortable with that, basically. And in addition to these singular responsibilities, there are also bilateral responsibilities that they have to carry out together for the implementation of the policies supporting innovation and growth. The university TTOs is our public so I'd like to the left it to the very end, and the tto have to exploit new opportunities. Is the administrative burden of researchers and also contribute to networking for strategic partnerships, which is the core of big Consortium. So we need to maximize the impact with effective partnerships. And I believe that differentiated set of actors integrated in line towards defined results is very important for maximizing impact. We've already defined the stakeholders. Versus public institutions, academia, industry and so on. But and the outer periphery, there are other stakeholders, like the certifying bodies, designers, NGOs, policy makers and so on. So we need to recognize the differentiation, understand it, appreciate it, and organize it, depending on whom they are, and also integrate these different stakeholders, bringing unconnected parts together to create a higher value, which is really a challenge in many, in many cases, so effective and successful partnerships and part consortia need shared understandings of challenges and solutions. They need a well functioning, innovative ecosystem, minimizing obstructions, but and this is a lot on the shoulders of tto professionals. So if we look at it, they have to define the core values, write out a road map and define the the outputs expected from these collaborations, the core values. The major important topic is a shared vision, because people have to believe in what they're doing, the value proposition. Why are they doing this? Of course, communication is, is a horizontal thing. We need to communicate a governance, a good governance model that treats people fairly, creating resources. And, of course, evaluation and accountability is also very important. So I will, I would like to mention some EU examples in the European model. There are two other dimensions to the classical pillars of universities, public institutions, large enterprises and public grants. These two are SMEs and civil society and private investors, and currently, there are two main initiatives in the EU one is regional innovation values. These are aiming to boost innovation and foster excellence throughout regions with lower innovation capabilities. And this is a map where these regional innovation values are currently active throughout Europe. The second one is the European cluster partnerships. These are again EU wide consortia pulling resources and knowledge to work concretely together, supporting industrial ecosystems, in particular the SMEs, and this is also very widespread, they have actually developed a zero to eight scale evaluation of the cluster initiatives in The European countries and throughout the world, and Turkey seems to score seven, which is making me rather happy. So in these large scale research consortia, research management is becoming as important as the research itself, with a timely and successful delivery of expected outputs. Now what is research management.

Speaker 4  33:23  
We define research management as a long process, starting from research strategy all the way to commercialization, involving many different stakeholders, some related, some not so related, but it's a whole big cloud that supports the idea all the way to becoming a product on the shelf. And in the traditional sense, technology transfer was in this little circle, and this is what the tto professionals were more or less focusing on. But under the current circumstances, we believe that project development and R and D funding and project management and all the implications under this umbrella should also be taken into consideration. So in another word, we are now broadening the traditional definition of tech transfer professional to generate impact for that, we need to listen to the public demand institutionally or the the industrial demand. We have to look at the problem holistically, form the right team with complementary skills and expertise, and we should not be limiting our activities only to IP management and licensing, but get involved in the process right from the beginning and in this schematic flow diagram, going from project idea all the way to the start of the project, we see that there are different units that are responsible and. Are contributing to the success of the whole process. And traditionally, the TT tto professionals were contributing more or less to these little circles. But today, the implementation of the project idea to all the way to a good project and then to a product requires the contribution of different units. Currently, there is a project going on in Europe. There are two projects actually going on. One is Cordia, the career competence framework for research managers. The other is European Research Management roadmap, which I'm involved and this defines these two projects are trying to define what skills and competencies the tto professionals will need in the future to provide a more holistic perspective and integrated services to academia and to all the stakeholders. I would like to give an example for collaborative research networks from my own domain. These research networks, as David has mentioned, try aim to create a new cultural ecosystem in the industrial sector, initiating long term collaboration. And they aim to facilitate seamless translation of high cost research projects into commercial technologies and products for the market. Um, my institution is coordinating two of these platforms, and we are actually involved in five other platforms. So we have plenty of, plenty of expertise, experience in running these as a center. My Institution, being very, very short about it is a nanotechnology research center located in Istanbul. Turkey is one of the first four national research infrastructures funded by the state after a very competitive selection process, and it is under the auspicious of sabanji University, reporting to the Ministry of Industry, it conducts multidisciplinary research in nanotechnology, obviously complementing the expertise of different internal and external stakeholders, encouraging pre competitive research between technology readiness level three to six through strategic partnerships across sectors. So in the light of this, with our experience and expertise and infrastructure, we got involved in this new initiative that was started in Turkey, in 2018 developing these huge research platforms. This involved three phases. The establishment of the collaborative networks is phase one of phase zero, you can put it the output was the thematic road maps and the the formation of the partnerships. Phase two is the pre competitive research platform with outputs and technology readiness, level five to six, led by research institutes, and as a follow up, a second hub, led by industrial companies with outputs in technology readiness level eight to nine. Uh, currently, of course, being a research institute, we are more in the pre competitive research part of it. And there are 20 platforms doing the in the in the second stage, the pre competitive research stage involving 250, plus projects, over 100 companies, 70 universities, research centers, international organizations, are 1500 researchers. So it's a huge ecosystem, and all of these little stars across the lab show where the leaders are located and the ones that the other red areas are where the partner institutions are coming from. So it's more or less distributed across the country. I would like to talk a little bit about phase one, the process of forming the collaboration on the consortium. In a total, we had 33 meetings in seven months, equivalent to 5500 person hour effort. This involved an open call for partnership, individual confidentiality agreements, identifying the competencies and infrastructure. Teachers of the different institutions, face to face meetings, a survey, a patent landscape analysis report a background know how declaration competency map, a Delphi analysis with a large group of stakeholders determining sector trends and collection and expression interests which led to the identification of the specific focus of the platform, the final product to be targeted based on the strengths and weaknesses of the partners. We identified the themes of the research pillars and the leaders of the research pillars based on prior knowledge and partner complementarity, and lastly, but not least, the governance model of the platform involving 24 institutional partners, academia and industry, and the governance model also involved a Joint IP and commercialization plan. The theme we selected was integrated scalable, functional nano structures and systems targeting and developing sensors, basically for diagnosis and mental monitoring of health related data. And this theme was in alignment with the priorities of the partners, as well as national development strategies and global trends, as verified by our patent landscape search. We ended up with a platform involving 24 partners, as I said, and some of these big conglomerates were very fierce rivals in the real world, but they agreed to collaborate within a pre competitive research platform, which was really surprising for us. It turned out to be a pivot technology platform for applications in different sectors. So because all these companies were active in different sectors, there was no competition as such, for the for the products themselves and the expected outputs were very ambitious, 65 work packages in 15 technical projects involved prototypes, intermediary products and auxiliary products. This is funded for five years, for 6 million US dollars. This may not seem a very large budget in US standards, but it is a big budget in comparison to the other R and D funding. There's also a horizontally position societal impact project that covers the social implications of all the products and prototypes that are being produced.

Speaker 4  42:41  
Governance structure was developed with a bottom up approach and signed by the top management of all partners. This also took something like six months to reach a consensus. It includes a technology roadmap for the next five and five plus years a governance model, IP commercialization agreement, risk communication and procurement agreements with their respective annexes. And the governance includes a decision making platform board comprised of the platform leader, the pillar leaders and their proxies, and they added the technical administrative managers there are outside the platform board, there is the extended board that involves all the project leaders and work package leaders. And we come together every month to discuss the advances in the in the respective projects in the last month, the General Council involves everybody, from grantees, post doctoral researchers and so on. So it is a huge Council, and we come together every two months, and we are introducing the long term strategic partnership concept with that the advisory board is comprised of the top level management of the stakeholders. And what happens to the ownership of IP from the platform it belongs to the partners who produce it, the principle of joint ownership is applied if IP belong to multiple partners. And for joint IP rights, we decide and basic based on the invention disclosure of the inventors. And upon receipt of an invention disclosure, the project lead seeks consent and disclaimer from the parties involved in that particular project, based on this flow diagram here, and it has worked for the last 3638 months, with no problems whatsoever, the patent application can only be submitted after the platform Board approval, which involves the consent of all related researchers and joint ownership in the definition of the joint ownership, the party who contributed to the patent with that. Least one claim may be included as an applicant, multiple partners may claim rights in a single claim, and the distribution of rights is determined according to the ratio of the number of claims contributed by applicants to the total number of claims. So it is basic arithmetic subsequent to a patent application, a joint patent and commercialization agreement is signed, and in licensing the platform, members hold the first right of refusal as a privilege of strategic partnership. There are other fringe benefits of strategic partnerships, as summarized in the box. I'm not going to go into that. If there are any questions I can answer that. Concluding, I would say that for successful partnerships and large consortia, there are basically eight golden rules. One, the first one is communication. Although we like to talk a lot. Real communication is difficult, but we need to keep the communication channels open. Communicate often, regularly, and also build good, good personal relationship. Second is defining the goals and expected outcomes. Everybody goes into this partnership with expectations. So there are individual expectations as well as the communal expectations. We have to set realistic goals and define the clear benefits for all parties once the goals are defined then and a work plan needs to be identified, and all the parties have to agree on deadlines and deliverables and so on. So there should be a consensus on this timeline of the project. A leader is extremely important. So choosing a leader or a leadership structure and agreeing on that leader is imperative for us for the success of the project. Once the leader is chosen, then the roles and responsibilities of our each participant to be identified with the perspective incentives and responsibilities overall, similar to communication, managing relationships in this long term, commitment is very important. We have to delete the leader or the administration of this the consortium has to maintain flexibility in responding to changes, identify incentives for continuing commitment and maybe finding opportunities for continuing ongoing projects and so on, and create opportunities for the development for the development of relationships. Administration, the major point is, of course, budget administration, we all have to agree on that it has to be fair and transparent, but but in addition to that, data administration, material management, all the these other issues are becoming more and more important, and the rights have to be decided and discussed before We start the collaboration. As I said, particularly with respect to the IPR issues, but also publication and authorship plans, because that is also very important for academic stakeholders. As a last word, I would like to say that successful consortia should really mimic natural ecosystems comprising of interconnected, interacting parts operating in harmony and strategy synergy. So in successful consortia, all partners should be able to function in a synchronized and synergistic manner towards a common goal. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker  49:09  
There are two questions, but I think

Speaker 2  49:12  
thank you. Fauci let Yes. Well, someone actually had asked me earlier, I think when I mentioned about the diaspora in Puerto Rico, and that, again, it's very important to be able to reach out through your networks. And Puerto Rico, many years ago, established a group called ciencia, or science Puerto Rico, and it's made of individuals who are interested in science in Puerto Rico, and those that are outside of Puerto Rico, because there are more Puerto Ricans that live off the island, that live on the island, and so that became very, you know, a very good tool for us to be able to reach out to look for expertise, or folks that were interested, particularly in looking for mentors and folks that may come again. So they've got a science background. They're probably, you know, either in business or an academic world, continuing to do their work. And so it became a nice networking tool for us to be able to reach out into those, into the diaspora for that. So maybe another question, I guess. And this just comes to mind, since I don't see an open question, so maybe I'll make one. I'll make I'll make one. So it's interesting, when you look across the EU, for example, into those sort of innovation valleys, or the, you know, the innovation clusters, and where they're there, and it's, it's sort of the same tactic, and the US with the NSF and EDA programs and the NIH programs they're focused on, I guess the right term might be the under resourced regions where the communities might be under resourced, right? And to be able to bring these new resources together by forming these consortia, be forming these relationships and partnerships. One of the things that strikes me then, in looking at that over time, is the sustainability of the ecosystem, the different ways that ecosystems can continue to sustain themselves in both of our regions, we have ecosystems that have been developed for many, many years, and they continue to develop. But I wonder about sort of new ecosystems and competition with older ecosystems and and how that sustainability effort, how those sustainability efforts are going to work because government funding right, which sometimes gives birth to these things, comes and goes. There is ebb and flow, there's new interests and new priorities. And so sustainability becomes a really interesting question, I think, for consortia to deal with. How is this going to sustain itself?

Speaker 4  52:03  
I think in in all the consortia, the partners in the consortia has to really believe in this and continue investing in it after the first initiation is so this, these are funded for five years in the EU, five or six years at the most, and a sustainability model is expected in the proposal phase. But of course, you know sustainability can be divided into two, the monetary sustainability and also sustaining the consortia partners together. So I think the latter is more important, if the partners stay together, they can access to other funds, continuation type funds, because it's difficult for research to create revenue at such short notice and make this, this whole consortium, sustainable. In our examples, we do not focus on regional deficiencies, as if I may say so, rather than trying to set up hubs with excellence in the international sense, so that we bring together skills and competencies that Excel above a certain threshold, so that there is an initiative to bring together the science and technology know how up up to another level. So the two hubs that I have been talking about were not really regionally focused, but they were excellence focused the first the first bit, the first hub, is more research oriented, and the results of that is transformed into a leading industrial company who would like to pursue it further, to make it, to turn it into a Commercial, commercializable product in another six years, and they're all funded by the state, so, but partially funded by by the companies as well. So companies are only funded by 60% at the

Speaker 2  54:12  
most. So we did have a question, I think, related to companies in particular. And the question is really about partners that are in a consortia, that that are competitive, right? And, and I know you mentioned, you mentioned having competing partners in some of these consortia, and how? And the question is, how do you manage that competition within the consortia? What kinds of tools or approaches help manage that relationship? It

Speaker 4  54:41  
is all very, very transparent, and because it's a pre competitive research platform, the technology comes to a certain level, and then each company is has the right to take this and develop it further within its own confines. So. After that junction point, competition starts. But up to that junction point, they pull their resources and intellect and expertise to develop this pivot technology that could be applied to different sectors. For instance, in this platform that I give an example, there is an automotive sector company. There is a white good sector company. There is another company in the pharmaceutical sector. They're all targeting biosensors. One is, one example is, for instance, ammonia biosensors, which could have some implications in even safe security sector. But the white goods company is interested in this to sense some of the foods in the refrigerator, and another company is the spoilage. And another company is interested in this because they are trying to put this in, in the toilet to make them, to clean them, you know, to give them an alert when, when it needs to be. And then the health sector, ammonia is an important indicator for stomach cancer, if at ppb levels. So we can actually develop a sensor that is extremely sensitive. It could be a non invasive diagnosis, diagnostic tool for stomach cancer. So it's a pivot technology. We develop it up to a junction point, and the companies take it further, move

Speaker 2  56:32  
it further, yeah, and there's another question, too, about, in fact, this, it's more of a, I guess, a general question on that, about scouting the partners of potential licensees. And I think maybe from my perspective, and maybe from Fauci let as well, we can both talk about this, but within these consortia, we have companies that are part of the collaborations already, so so they may be natural licensees or companies that that that participate in that both the pre competitive work can develop those further. They may license some fundamental IP or something like that. They may need those kinds of things. I know, you know, we reach out through networks of companies all the time, and that's very important, and many of those funded. We have, for example, an NSF funded center that's really focused on healthcare technologies and sort of next generation healthcare technologies, which deals, in fact, with sensors. And we have companies that are a part of that, and so they're naturally being a part of the consortia are interested in the outcome of the work that occurs. Fauci let, do you have anything to say about sort of scouting partners or potential licensees? For

Speaker 4  57:49  
licensees, we have been holding commercialization workshops within the consortium itself with all the partners, and sometimes a partner that is not involved in a specific project says that they are interested in a technology that's been developed in another project. So there's been a lot of cross project collaborations per se, and in a couple of cases, some of the researchers decided to set up a spin off and get the license of the IP developed throughout the joint activity. As I said, the consortium members have the first right of refusal, so all IPS first offered to them. If there is no interest, then it will be open to the outside world, and in that we will be contacting key stakeholders and promoting it. We've been doing a lot of social promotion, research, communication about these platform activities. For instance, we have juvenile caricatures of the different projects so that we reach out to the general public, to the non technical people and so on. We've we've made videos, short videos, to communicate what's being, what's going on and so on, to pick up the interest of the non consortium members. Great. Thank you.

Speaker 2  59:27  
Do we have any additional questions? I think we're good, right?

Unknown Speaker  59:30  
I think the time is up as well.

Speaker 1  59:33  
Yes, yes, it is. On behalf of autumn, I would like to thank you both Dr Carlie and Professor Vidar for your informative session on today. And thank you again to our sponsor, Marshall Gerstein. A recording of this webinar will be available for viewing in the autumn Learning Center within a week of this event, and is included in your registration as a reminder please complete the webinar. Evaluation following this session, it will open when you signed off, and will be sent in the follow up email on tomorrow. This will help us serve your needs in the future. Thank you again for joining us. Thank you all again for being here with us. And have a great day, everyone.

Speaker 4  1:00:17  
Thank you for inviting us and hosting us. Thank you, bye, bye, bye.

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