Speaker 1  1:04  
walk on the ocean. So if you're under the age of 45 you could just stop listening just for a second. So one of the verses of the song says, and half hour later, we packed up our things, said we send letters and all those little things, and they knew we were lying, but they smiled just the same. And the operable phrases, it seemed they all it seemed they already forgotten we came, and that is what I feel like every time I give a faculty departmental talk, I go there. We talk about what we do for 10 or 15 minutes, and some people are there, some people listen, but everyone has forgotten about it 10 minutes later. So we thought to ourselves, thought to ourselves, what is a better way to get people to pay attention to tech transfer related activities, entrepreneurship related activities? So on the next slide, you'll see that we thought if there was some mechanism, if we could provide peer to peer information. So imagine having what you know, a volunteer from a department giving Carlie departmental talks about entrepreneurship, innovation policies, access to funding, things of that nature for their departments benefit they'll be listened to. Imagine if someone is there in the department that is a known commodity to go to, for people that have questions about COI policy, starting. Hello, and welcome to today's autumn. Innovation ambassador program, empowering faculty to help you, help them. My name is davio Young, and I'm a member of Autumn's educate team and today's staff host. All lines have been muted to ensure high quality audio. And today's session is being recorded. If you have a question 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 to acknowledge and thank Autumn's online professional development sponsor. Marsha Gerstein, we appreciate your ongoing support. Thank you to all of our presenters for being with us today. We're excited to learn from you. So welcome everybody. My name is Alan Bentley. I'm with Vanderbilt University, and I'll be your mod, your moderator for today, we're going to have three fantastic speakers from right to left on your screen is Doug hoxted from from Arizona tech launch. We have Devin Jones from Columbia University, and Phil swani from Vanderbilt University. Phil, I can assure you, is one of our top 20 employees in our tech transfer office. So let's move into the program. I think we need to share a different, different deck real quick. So we're going to start at the end, as opposed to the beginning, at the end. Why are we doing this? This presentation? Well, we've developed these at these institutions, this concept, this ambassador program. And I think that even each of us has found the program to be rather useful at our institutions. So we want to share with you all, what is it that we do? Why do we do it? And then you can decide whether there's some room for this program or something similar to it at your institution for your benefit. Next slide, the way we came up with the program was we have this activity that we do, occasionally called you sit around and you say, Well, you know, we're all sole sources for our institution. All inventions have to come through our own tech transfer offices. But like to ask ourselves, what will we do different if we had to compete for the faculties business and the that gets the juices flowing, and it usually leads to a bunch of new ideas and new programs, and some of them are good, some of them are crazy, but we begin to implement some new ideas, and then we thought to ourselves, Well, how do we know that our customer, our client, the faculty, is actually going to know about these new programs that we developing, and faculty have this unique capability to Just ignore all information that comes their way unless they need it at that moment. And so I'm gonna take a moment and quote, this is probably the first time in an autumn webinar, I'm gonna quote from Toad the wet sprocket Up a company things of that nature, and they can answer simple questions. And imagine they can point us, point those people in the right direction for the more complicated questions, whether it's the tech transfer, whether it's the Office of General Counsel, whether it's the sponsored programs or otherwise, that would be fantastic. And so peer to peer interaction, I think, is really important. And imagine having someone in the department that could share with us ideas about new programs and new things that would benefit their department, and could let us know if something went wrong, we would know about it from a friendly voice and we can begin to work on fixing it. So those are some of the benefits that we've seen from the ambassador program. Next slide, so my colleague, Phil is going to take the reins in just a moment and talk about the Vanderbilt ambassador program. This is just kind of a bit of a warning here. Real quick. Ambassadors for this to work, we found that the ambassadors really need to get trained, and they have to keep up with their training. So people, so volunteers, are important in our world. These are people that want to do this, and we have a faculty advisor committee. We've had one for many years at Vanderbilt, and they've been very useful. Our faculty advisory committee has written our return of rights policies, actually, for our technologies, for example. And faculty advisory committees are powerful. You can have friends, enemies, you know, not enemies, quote, unquote, but complainers or others. Anybody can make up a faculty advisory committee, and they can be useful to you. I don't see the ambassador program as as someone of that nature. You want, you want people to be motivated and interested and have, you know, be excited about innovation and excited about entrepreneurship and complainers may not be the, you know, the best choices here for ambassadors, certainly, they could be very valuable for faculty advisory committee. So just to make a distinction, this is really not a faculty advisory program. And so with those perspective, I'll turn this over to Phil Swanny, and he'll talk about Vanderbilt's program, and then we'll move on from there. Phil, great.

Speaker 2  6:49  
Thanks, Alan, thanks everyone. Really happy to be here today. So I just wanted to give before we launch into our program, just a kind of a high level overview of what we're going to be talking through today in terms of each program you're gonna hear from Vanderbilt from Columbia and Arizona. And this is roughly what we're going to cover, again, high level, four step process for how to create an ambassador program. And it goes to what Alan said earlier. We want you to be thinking through. Is this something that would benefit you? I'm a believer that it probably would in some capacity, and so trying to put you in our mindset as we, each of us, were creating our programs, I think seem to be really helpful. So we're going to talk about how to outline your ambassador program. What's the goal? Who's the program for? Why would someone want to join an ambassador program? Then we're going to talk about selecting your ambassadors. What's the profile you're looking for of an ambassador? How do you go about that selection process? Then training your ambassadors. What do you want them to know? What's important to make sure they understand? Then activating and supporting your ambassadors, launching them, sending them out into their department. How do you do that, and how do you support them in that when we get to the end, we'll do a quick comparison of some of the key similarities between the three programs you'll hear about today and some of the differences. And at the end, we really are trying to create time for a discussion. We've got a couple questions that we can sort of riff on a little bit, but love to hear questions during the presentation. We can talk about them at the end, because I really do believe that this program can have an impact for really any tech transfer office out there. Okay, so our innovation ambassador program at Vanderbilt, so again, we're going to talk about the outline. First, we're going to start with the goal, and I'll read it here, because, you know, this is our mission statements, kind of what we try to stick to provide faculty with peer delivered, access to information and assistance related to innovation and entrepreneurship on campus. There's two key parts of that, faculty and peer delivered. And you heard Alan talk about that earlier. That is really the crux of what we're trying to do. This is a faculty focused program, and we want them to be going to their departments and serving as truly ambassadors for our office as well as other innovation related activities on campus. So we launched this in the fall of 2022 before we launch the program, we need to get the word out there right. Having visibility and knowledge of a program like this is essential to it being successful. So we ran a university wide story to promote the upcoming program again, so that people knew what we were doing. And I'll talk on the next slide about selecting the ambassadors. Why this step was very important for the way we chose to do it. So we decided on a nominal two year term for ambassadors. And I say nominal because we've given ourselves flexibility with this program. We'd like it to be a two year term, but if an ambassador in a certain department, there's no one else who wants to serve as that next ambassador. Sure, we'll probably let them stay on. And so that's some of the flexibility that I'll try and sprinkle throughout this program, because I think that really lets it be successful as being adaptable as needs arise for a program like this. And then in terms of training, we had about six hours of initial training. So again, at sort of a high level, that's roughly what we wanted to, wanted to watch. But then we had to ask, what's in it for the ambassadors? So what if they know about this? Why would they want to join a program like this? Probably the biggest thing that is enticing to ambassadors is that participation in this program typically counts as a faculty's service requirement, right? I say typically, because it's not policy, we can't enforce a department chair to allow this program to count as service. But every ambassador who has asked at Vanderbilt, the university and the medical center, has been told that this will count as their faculty service. And why that's so important is, instead of serving on some committee that they probably aren't interested in. Now faculty get to serve in a role that lets them focus and encourage innovation and entrepreneurship. And as you heard Alan mention, we want people who are interested in that. We need people who are interested in that to be good ambassadors. And so now they get to be doing something they are really excited and passionate about which helps us and it helps them and the program. So next they get to be and think of it as an in the know, resident expert, right? We really want them to be and feel like they're in that inner circle of our office, so we'll tell them about things before they're announced to the broader university. They should feel as though they know the pulse of what's going on related to innovation on campus. And we want them to feel like they're in that, in that No, and we'll get feedback from them of things that are working and aren't working, and that's really helpful for us. And last, a fleece, right? This may seem like a really simple thing. Oh, great. You gave them some swag. But it's not it actually serves a really important purpose. And it gets back to that visibility of the program. We've got the logo of the innovation ambassador on the shoulder. And the reason this is so important is because we want them to go back into their departments and serve as an ambassador to those folks, they need to remember that someone is serving as an ambassador. And so having a really nice fleece with the logo on it, it's just a visual reminder of, Oh yeah, that person's an ambassador. I just had this new idea. I wonder if there's something I can do with this and, you know, commercializing it. So that's why we feel the fleece is actually really important. It's not just another piece of swag. It actually serves a really important purpose for us.

Speaker 1  12:46  
Yeah? So rule number one, don't choose a swag that sucks. I mean, there's only like 10 or 20 of these people, so put a little bit of money into for goodness sake. You know, it shouldn't be like a $5 thing. Yeah, I get I'm proud when these when I go into meeting and someone wears one of the ambassador fleeces into the meeting. That's still totally cool. Absolutely has happened multiple

Speaker 2  13:04  
times. Okay, so we outlined the program. We have a rough idea of what we want it to be. Now we've got to select our ambassadors. So for Vanderbilt, our desired Ambassador profile was someone mid career, tenured faculty, so they've already passed sort of the tenure challenge and everything that goes into that. And obviously, as we mentioned again, we want them to have an interest in innovation and commercialization. We had a couple department chairs reach out and say, Hey, I'd like to serve as a as an ambassador. And we talked to them and said, That's you're not the profile of what we're looking for. But, and here's why, obviously, time is going to be a challenge for a department chair. Probably the bigger reason, though, is we didn't want there to be any sort of stigma with a junior faculty, I mean, pre tenure, really interested in innovation commercialization, but feeling like they couldn't go talk to their ambassador because of their department chair, and feeling like I should be working on something that's going towards tenure, and so we didn't want any of that, and our department chairs understood that. But what we did do to make sure that we were still engaging with them is we said, hey, who in your department do you think would be a good fit for this? And so that allowed them to continue to be engaged at this program, even though they weren't going to serve as the ambassador themselves. Okay, so now we have an idea of what the ambassador profile has been looking for, we decided to do an open call. So there was a website that you could go to and you could apply. We did have a select faculty, a group, maybe five or 10, that we encouraged to apply because we knew they would be good ambassadors. We very familiar with them, and felt like they would would be fantastic for the program, so we asked them to apply. But beyond that, it was an open call, which goes back to that news story that we ran. We needed there to be visibility for this program. If it was going to be successful, people needed to know it existed and that they could apply for it. And thankfully, word did get out, and we had over 20 applicants from departments of. Across the university and Medical Center. So before we selected our ambassadors, we decided to do an information session where we just got interested faculty. So some who knew they wanted to join the program and had already applied, and others who just thought it might be an interesting thing, they wanted to learn more about. That proved to be really useful, because it gave us some good initial conversation about the program, and then from that, we selected 14 ambassadors. When we launched, we've now had seven additional join because can we have an open call? It remains open. Two of those new ambassadors, interestingly enough, came from a school that we knew was really important, but we didn't have an initial ambassador from, so they had a new dean. We went to that Dean and said, Hey, we're doing this. He got very excited about the program, and said, Here are some people I want you to reach out to. I'd like to be ambassadors. So we got two new ambassadors that way. We had five other folks who just in some way, shape or form, came across the open call, maybe they came across some PR around the program, and they reached out, and we've onboarded them. Okay? So we've outlined the program, we've selected our ambassadors. Now we have to train them. So at Vanderbilt, we chose to do three training sessions, each one covering a different topic. And again, it's about six hours total. First one is tech transfer. So this is your basics, IP protection, whatever your IP policy is, what it says important things around that, what services do you provide? Something else, though, we tried to go into with this is a little bit of sort of behind the curtain. How do we make some decisions? We figured, if our ambassadors are aware of the processes we go through and the thinking we have, that could help as they're talking to their their department peers, especially if there's a situation where maybe we didn't move forward with someone's technology, and there's an ambassador who can talk to them about why, but say, hey, but that other thing you're working on that would be a really good fit for what you want to do. So that's tech transfer. The wondery. This is a specific group at Vanderbilt, but think of it as our innovation hub, and all things entrepreneurship, education programming related are done at the wondery. They've got maker spaces there. The mid south I Corps hub is located there, and so we wanted them to absolutely have training on that. And the last one was launch. This is our launch incubator. So this is startup support. What does Vanderbilt do if you want to have a startup? How do we support what's the incubator like? What other resources are available? And as part of that, we brought in our COI group to come talk to the ambassadors again. We wanted to make sure that they understood COI doesn't need to be a scary thing. It's there to protect everyone, right? And they want to make sure that they can get the conflicts managed so our faculty can do what they're interested in doing. So these were the three training sessions we had. We decided to hold these sessions at different let's call them innovation sites. So tech transfer, we held that at our office because we wanted our ambassadors to know where we were located, and so that they needed to point someone to us. They knew where to go, the wondery, that's a building on campus, and exact same thing there. We wanted the ambassadors to see the wondery, to know what was going on there, and to know where it was located. And our launch incubator, same thing. This is a different location. So we did that training at those sites. We also recorded these trainings. I'm very thankful we did, because with this open call, we've had again, folks join the program apart from this initial onboarding. And so it's been really easy to say, hey, here's videos of the initial training. Here's the initial decks that we went over. And we provide all this to our ambassadors as a resource. Again, we don't want them to become the goal isn't that they're going to be experts. We want them, though, to know who to go to, who within the Vanderbilt ecosystem is the right person to talk to when they get a question from their department. We created a website that's just for the ambassadors, where we can share, again, the decks, any sort of important news. We're going to send them to that website, and there's more training that's ongoing. If we have a local innovation event or conference, any ambassador who wants to go, we're going to send them. Okay? So we've outlined the program, selected our ambassadors, trained them up. Now we've got to launch we've got to activate them and send them out into the university. So the very first thing we ask our ambassadors to do probably one of the most important things is to go present to their department. Right, as Alan mentioned, when we go to present, usually not as effective when they go to present, much more effective. And we want them to do that soon, to make sure that people in their department know that they're doing this. And we ask them to continue doing that, maybe every six months, certainly every year, go and talk to your department about new innovation related things across the university

Speaker 1  19:45  
and Phil, we help them with content for that too. Yeah, we do, yeah.

Speaker 2  19:49  
We create a short deck for them to give. We don't want it to be a burden for them. We just want them to be in sort of an outlet for this information to get into their departments. Yeah. Quarterly meetings with ambassadors. This is where we get all the ambassadors together. We invite a guest speaker to come in. This is really helpful for them to again, feel in the know. We tell them about some new things that haven't been announced yet in this space. But probably the most important thing for us is we get feedback from the investors, both within the program, what's working, but perhaps even more importantly, within their departments, what are they hearing? What sort of initiatives that we're trying to do are working or maybe aren't? So some initial outcomes and early successes for this program. Now, just give you a couple examples of one innovation Roundup. This is a very unique newsletter that one of our ambassadors puts together. He puts a lot of effort into it. It's really a cool thing. Picks a topic each time, and I think his department has really come to love these newsletters that he'll send out. Increased disclosures. We just recently started tracking when we get a disclosure in, we ask a question, did you talk to an innovation ambassador? So that's very recent within the last couple months, but we can look back since we launched the program, and we know our disclosures have increased, so we can't say it's all due to the ambassador program, but I'm certain it's helped. And lastly, we have our ambassadors serving on an innovation fund. So this is a interesting opportunity that came up. We had a new fund that was going to be launching for commercialization activities, and we needed to find, I think, up to 40 folks to serve on that. We can do that. We can find experts in the space who are familiar with innovation and whatnot, but we already had 20 built in. And so we asked the ambassadors, and they all jumped it. They said, Yes, we'd love to do that both because it's an interesting thing for them to do, but even more so, I think they now got some insight into how these things were being reviewed, so that when they wanted to go submit them, better chance it's going to be successful. And in fact, two ambassadors did submit and were successful. So that's, you know, a interesting way to have kind of some flexibility, again, with the program, not what we set out to do, what was a benefit. So we support this program. Internally. We have a several tech transfer tech transfer personnel, myself and my colleague, Cameron Sargent, run the program, and Alan's obviously quite involved. So we spread the effort around. But there really is minimal dollars needed, right? We buy the fleeces, we buy some snacks. That's really it. But the impact is, I think it's really, really big with a program like this, anecdotally, and maybe Alan can talk a little bit more about this, that the university leadership loves this program. Don't really know why, but it seems like it's almost once a month Alan saying, Oh, I was in a meeting with leadership, and this program came up again, and they just love it. I don't know if it's the upscaling concept of training the faculty in innovation, but they really do seem to love this program, all right. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Devin at Columbia to talk about their program.

Speaker 3  22:51  
Thanks, Phil. So I'll run through the similar key points that were mirrored in Phil's portion of the presentation. What you'll find is many of the key attributes of the Columbia program, your what our colleagues are doing at both Vanderbilt and Arizona, again, with some key differences. So we've just recently launched our inaugural year of Columbia Technology Ventures Ambassadors Program. This was a recruitment during fall of 2023 with an initial launch or a kickoff meeting that we planned earlier this year. So this is envisioned as a celebratory meeting that really kick started the program in order to start the conversation for what can we learn from the ambassadors? But also, how do we envision Columbia Technology Ventures as the tto leveraging their expertise for our daily operations? So you know, those are answering key questions of, what can we learn from ambassadors? But also kind of immediately, what is the ambassador feedback that we can integrate into CTV operations? Similar to other programs, we've envisioned our program and our inaugural cohort of ambassadors as being a one year term, but again, this is a highly flexible program that we have the ability to modify as needed. So I can see that potentially being a key factor that's, you know, unique to some universities and flexible based on an ambassador's level of engagement. So answering the question, what's in it for the ambassadors? And you'll see, again, a mirroring of key concepts, but really we've anchored ourselves into faculty mentorship, so leveraging these ambassadors within their departments as in their ability to serve as mentors to more junior faculty, also driving engagement for the. Ambassadors themselves. So this is putting them in the same room as our executives and residents, industry contacts that we regularly have to campus focus around certain sectors, venture capital conversations. So again, like learning or a two way exchange of information there and then just, you know, pulling in additional resources for these serial entrepreneurs. And then again, similar to Vanderbilt, we, we thought to ourselves, okay, how do we make this program as visible as possible? And you know, really the easiest, the most functional way to do that, that people also really, really love. I'm always amazed how much people really love these sweatshirts that they can get from our office or other offices. So similarly, we designed Columbia Technology Ventures jacket, again, envisioned with, you know, please wear this when you're you know, within your office, walking around your apartment, exploring your lab, again, as this visual reminder to people to say, Hey, what is that? Or tell me a little bit about what that means to you, and then drive that introduction to someone who may not be familiar or currently in conversation with our office, so that we can initiate that engagement. Similarly, you'll see that little emblem of a light bulb. So these are our glass essentially trophies that we've designed to sit on ambassadors desks. They're personalized with the year the title of the program. Again, you know, a really nice symbol to the ambassadors for how much they mean to us. But again, you know, I always think to myself, Okay, if I'm a student, a postdoc or junior faculty, either, you know, in the office for office hours, or walking around the lab. How? How can I drive that interaction back to Columbia Technology Ventures? So again, it's that piece of recognition and swag. Next slide, please. So again, the question came up, okay, what do we envision for our Ambassadors Program and who should we target? And this is actually a little bit different from the path that Vanderbilt took. So we explored, you know, all of our options similar to Vanderbilt. You know, should this be an open call? Should we be targeting faculty of different levels? Should we be including non faculty that could also serve in this role. And Columbia's decision, after a careful consideration, was to tap, really a curated, curated list of key faculty. So these are faculty members that are known entities to our office. They're serial entrepreneurs. There's people, there are people who know where to find us, that we're in regular communication with their leaders within the departments, and our tactic was, okay, let's really for this first year, and again, highly flexible for how this could change in the future, but for this first year, let's engage those people who already have a very strong idea of what it means to be innovators within the academic system, and in that way, they can really serve as these pure level points of contact to people who are asking similar questions within the department, and also, for this first year where we're learning what shape this program can Take, how to run it. That takes a little bit of the original impetus off of us, right? That's, you can imagine. There's a little bit of a less training piece around there. So, you know, we don't have to do the the soup to nuts. What is tech transfer and what is Columbia Technology Ventures? So again, we attacked these, these 12 key faculty Columbia has, you know, can be envisioned as like kind of three main campuses. So we have the idea was, let's identify faculty on each campus so that we are spreading our resources. So that's tapping faculty on the medical campus, both at the hospital and then within the arts and sciences program, we have a mid campus where a lot of our neurobiology research goes on. Let's make sure we have a representative there. And then also tapping cap, tapping faculty on the main campus with engineering, computer science and climate again. So we have, you know, these departments that regularly pull invention reports into Columbia Technology Ventures, let's make sure we have representatives across departments and across campuses, so that we, you know, are spreading our resources evenly. Hey, Devin, yes, along

Speaker 1  29:38  
those lines, I think it's important to point out that, you know, these programs are adaptable to meet the goals of the institution. And I thought the way you you decided who your ambassadors are was a very thoughtful approach. I think Doug has a thoughtful approach as well. He's going to share, you know, we also selected a number of ambassadors, but we did have an open call. And with an open call, you don't know what you're getting. Yet, right? So there is some danger to that. Phil, I don't know if we've actually said no to anybody, but you know, there are different levels, different governors over this that, you know, different controls you have. And I thought you guys have done it really well.

Speaker 3  30:12  
Yeah, you know, thank you. I also think there's, like, a huge advantage to tapping. I'm really hoping in year two again, we continue to modify, let's bring in junior faculty, we've actually already heard the feedback. Hey you guys, I know as you guys tapped like the 12 known players, it'd be great if we could give some more voices to other people who have that feedback, not only for Columbia Technology Ventures, but within their department. So again, yes, highly, highly flexible. Let's see what happens in year two. Next slide, perfect. All right, so we've already kind of touched on the ambassador training piece, and ours was much lower touch in comparison to our colleagues. So we really centered this around, let's do a celebratory kickoff event and a it was like a 45 minute review of what is Columbia technology adventures. So again, a celebration with cocktail hours networking. I'm sure we all have, we're always running up against, like, can we get these 12 important faculty in the same room at the same time? So it's a bit like herding cats, but it was a really great first event where we just again, highlighted the key attributes of the program. So again, what is our mission statement? And I'll just read this directly from from the slide. Our mission statement is the CTV Ambassadors Program. Aims to foster collaboration and strengthen the connection between CTV and faculty members from various departments with a goal of leading to more Columbia innovations becoming products that benefit society. So just the general overview, certainly a concept that these, these faculty already are aware of, but this is our, essentially our mission statement. During this kickoff meeting, we again spent that 45 minutes going over just general aims. We did a very general recap of the CTV organizational structure. So not only Oren, but who leads up the licensing team? Who are the technology licensing officers? What is the BD Business Development Support look like, and then our other departments and just doing that general overview as a refresher, an initial refresher. And then, you know, giving them, not only me as a point of contact, but hey, do you need to talk to our lab to Market program? Do you need to talk to entry relations? Always just reach out and you'll get a quick response from someone. This introduction also included a review of just how Columbia interacts and views larger ecosystem of innovation within within New York. And then the thing that was really nice about this initial program is we went ahead and did a round table of initial faculty feedback. So already we had the feedback from these faculty members. Hey, I can remember when I reviewed my first term sheet, that was definitely a learning process. There's a great, a great topic to cover with more junior faculty. Hey, you know, Phil mentioned conflict of interest, that always comes up for us, like, what's the training we can do around conflict of interest, and then just further industry engagement from there. The second part of this Ambassador training piece is, how do we stay in touch? So similar to Vanderbilt, that's just kind of like constant emails. Let's stay in touch about upcoming campus events that CTV will have a presence at where you can interact with us further and ask some questions, or just generally, meet with us. We had a lot of interest from our ambassadors to have regular meetings with our executives and residents. And also, we're organizing monthly lunches. So these are not just training opportunities, but again, that activate piece, which we'll cover next, but these monthly lunches to All right, what are the rest of the training pieces that we can do for our ambassadors? And then just stay in constant communication in that way too. Next slide, please. Okay, so where are we today, and what is activating these ambassadors look like, and you know, what do we envision for the future? So again, these are the four key points under this first bullet point of what we're aiming our program at, and that's improving Faculty Services, or services to the faculty, and getting that input from the ambassadors. Our goal, of course, is that these ambassadors return to their home departments, or just the New York City innovation ecosystem. And are these pure level, peer level points of contacts for Hey, you should be talking to CTV. Here's how they can assist you. They're, you know, they're responsive, they're flexible. Here are their resources, and then again, organizing these Ambassador meetings, where it's really a two way conversation, and they can provide the feedback back to us as well. The other points that I wanted to mention is similar to Vanderbilt. We also after, getting the sign on for these ambassadors. You know, of course, it's very flattering to see a these, these ambassadors that we that were on our wish list or they we tapped, were overwhelmingly a positive response back to us we would love to serve the university and club Columbia Technology Ventures. In this way, we benefited from Columbia technology ventures, and now we understand how this process works. We can do the same for other more junior faculty. And then also we did the the formal announcement to Columbia leadership. And similar to Vanderbilt, it was a overwhelming, wow. This is a great program. We're excited to see what this generates for Columbia as a whole, a lot of excitement around there. And I mean, I'm in with careful management. I'm sure this will continue to grow into something that will continue to benefit not only CTV, but departments and the university as a whole. One of the key components, and kind of where I'll wrap up to this is, you know, how they interact with us, and I am in that role at Columbia Technology Ventures, where I am the program manager, where I am the direct contact. So they have my card, they know my face. If they have any question, it can come into me. We keep them all in the same email chain. And it's just like a, basically like a listserv, where, if one faculty ambassador has a question about operations, then my assumption is that everyone does, and we just run that feedback to the group as we continue. So right now, we're in the process of organizing lunches throughout the year. My goal is that these, you know, we're organizing these lunches around certain topics, like conflict of interest. We'll do like industry introductions, network networking events with our x IRS, we actually added to the swag that I outlined earlier. We're now designing little pins where, hey, you're showing up to meeting and there's different people that you're interacting with, you know, slap on a badge name or a pin, so that you're recognizable and and my the final goal of these lunches is, I'm really hoping that they, we give them the opportunity to bring additional faculty with them. So, like, let's pull more people into the loop. And that's it for Columbia.

Speaker 1  37:39  
So, Devin, a couple of things. I didn't think of the pin concept. I love that idea, traditional recognition element. But I love your point about the lunches we haven't done lunches we've done we bring cookies to our meetings with them, and the extra cookies go home with me. And so I put on about seven pounds since the program began. Nevertheless, it indicates, however, through your through your comments about the lunches, that this is a sense of community. It's not just a one on one with different ambassadors. You're building a community of a really key constituent, people that are really involved and interested in innovation. So I think that's a fantastic

Speaker 3  38:14  
thing. Yeah, it's really nice to see them. You know, a lot of these faculty members, again, are across campuses. They're excited to meet each other as well. So it's, these are really nice events, yeah.

Speaker 1  38:24  
So one final comment, then we'll move on to Doug. One of the questions that we had was, does the program result in any way the ambassadors viewing tech transfer more favorably? Do they get to know us better and appreciate us better? And you had kind of spoken to that, if I remember correctly,

Speaker 3  38:37  
yeah. So, so we did. We got that initial feedback were, you know, I think across any university, no matter how effective the tech transfer office is, there's the feedback you're going to get from faculty and faculty or faculty ambassadors. Hey, this is what you could have done better, like, this is something that that was confusing to me when I went to this process the first time. So it's really just having those open years, and it's a really a two way conversation. I remember, I was in discussion with Columbia leadership about what this would look like, and in the early iterations, is like, okay, they're all going to be our eyes and ears out into the campus. But really it's now a 5050, split with like, what can they tell us about what we can do better,

Speaker 1  39:21  
yeah. And actually, we've seen a little bit of benefit in terms of preventing misplaced blame, because people are talking and they say, Well, no, that's not tech transfer, that's sponsored programs, or that's Office of General Counsel. Or they say, No, it's not sponsored programs, it's actually tech transfer. So it kind of goes both ways, but that's been helpful. So yeah, so thank you, Devin. Let's move on to Doug, and you can talk about the outline, but Doug, if there's anything that you want to mention in terms of how your ambassadors view your operation to address that question, please feel free,

Speaker 4  39:49  
sure. Well, I'll start with that in that it was interesting because most of our ambassadors I'll get to were, were big supporters of what we do. Two. There was one that was a supporter, but was also one of those contentious people all the time, and he, I think, was very much won over from the training, and was really, got really excited about what we were doing. So anyway, I wonder. I wasn't planning on saying this, but it was funny watching both of you present and seeing you know, we're all calling them innovation ambassadors. I thought it might be worth bringing up. We did not start with innovation ambassador. We actually started with a fellow title, and I was a big proponent of using fellow we talked about it quite a bit. The faculty we had talked to really thought fellow was a valuable thing to put on their CV. But after some more kind of research, talking to the group of universities that were all thinking about this together, we we went to Ambassador for various reasons. The funny part was when we finally just start. Decided on Ambassador. The next day, we found student ambassadors with the ambassador title, and they were in a completely different role. And so we actually that's where we got into actually naming them, faculty innovation ambassadors. Alan, you're gonna say something. I'm just

Speaker 1  41:23  
gonna say Doug, that universities would be such a better place to work if it wasn't for the students. What are you gonna do?

Unknown Speaker  41:32  
It's true.

Speaker 4  41:35  
The goal of us was really similar to what you guys have said already. We were creating kind of an arm of TLA that was peers, and they would be in our our most IP producing units. So we were selecting the the ambassadors, rather than doing the open call. And our goal was really to improve our reputation, to spread the word, and overall, to increase invention disclosures. So that was, that was our goal, and why we decided to do it. We just launched this in January, and we picked eight faculty, innovation ambassadors, like everybody else. Oddly, we're all getting them jackets or sweaters. It looks like we got a jacket. And I think you all know Arizona is largely a desert, so they only get to wear this some of the time. So the other thing that we're doing is we're creating an aluminum plaque, just a five by seven type plaque that will designate this person as an ambassador, and it'll have a little QR code on it, and it'll say, ask me about innovation, and that way they can actually put that on their door, on the window, next to their door, or set it on a stand, on their desk. So we're hoping we get a lot more visibility from people just walking by and seeing that again, like everybody else we we decided to do a two year term with our option to extend that, if it makes sense, and if we can't find somebody to replace, and like everybody else, we get the faculty innovation Ambassador logo on a jacket this we actually went out to our deans before we did this program, told them about the program. They all liked it, and asked them specifically about, can this act towards service? And all of them said yes, that they would support this, working toward the service department and faculty that join. And then they also get early access to anything we're doing. We're going to do quarterly meetings. I'll get to that at the end, but they'll get early access to information. They'll get early access to inside stuff, and we will kind of celebrate them each, each quarter. Next slide, the ambassador selection for us was curated. We kind of took a step down from what Devin did. We didn't want all like the leaders in the units or the really the high people, what we wanted were the IP heavy department colleges and someone that had some kind of ongoing engagement with us, so they understood how we worked already, hopefully have had positive experiences with us. They understand the processes to a large extent. They have a little bit of entrepreneurial spirit, and then they can act as that peer advisor to anybody that comes, that comes in front of them. And the way we did that was we went personally, and it's mostly me. I went out to the people that we chose and asked, told them about the program, and asked them if they were willing to participate and help us. We actually got the one of the eight say no, not that they didn't want to, but that they just simply would not have the time to give it that they thought they should, and they suggested another person in their unit who was the one that joined us. We're currently limiting that number to eight. We want to see how that works. Um, we don't want to double up in the same department, mainly because we don't want, we want them to feel like they're unique. We don't know about multiple ones in any individual College. We haven't yet done that, but we may, and we're actually thinking about adding a training level member, so someone that's not heavily engaged with us that gets to start circulating with these people. Don't know how we designate that. We haven't fully fleshed that out yet. And then I'll just throw in another thing that I don't know if Phil's going to talk about later. We may actually throw in some students and create a separate, a separate group of student ambassadors as well. Next slide our training, the way we did it was, it was just a half day, and we gave them breakfast and lunch, and we did very similar to the topics. First thing we did was we talked about the entire TLA process, so how this process works, from invention disclosure through startup, through license, etc. And then we highlighted different resources that were available through TLA during that process, so things like our asset development program, or our mentors in residence, or I Corps, etc, so they would have kind of key touch points when they're talking to people about what TLA can provide to anyone that's looking for help. And then we also, and although nobody else mentioned this, I don't think, I think you probably all did it. We We illustrated to them what we expected of them, what we wanted them to do as an ambassador, and what we thought they were getting from this, and that, the meeting went very well. Everybody was really engaged, and we didn't do it overly formally, because we wanted it to be more of a discussion. As a result of that, we then created an ambassador website, and that was part of the benefit they saw out of this. They wanted to be highlighted at the university as these special people. And as part of that website, besides highlighting them, we're actually rolling out about a one minute video of each one of them explaining kind of who they are and why this faculty innovation ambassador program is important. We've also created a shared folder, a private one that we can share information with. One thing that we may change in the future, and we're looking at right now, is rather than a shared folder. Actually, our university uses teams pretty heavily, and I'm creating a team for the ambassadors so it can it would promote more immediate questions and answers and sharing of files, etc. Our our ongoing training is going to be quarterly meetings, so our first one is actually coming up. Our plan is to do that before the literally the day before World IP day. And we're going to part of that meeting. We'll be essentially telling them we expect them to show up at World IP day, when we celebrate that in our office and we give away some awards and stuff like that. We'll also do like round table discussions, and we'll probably also have a speaker that comes and talks at that that quarterly meeting. Next slide, please. So ongoing things we're doing, regular email outreach from us to them. The con i really like Devin your your kind of program manager role we don't have that we've essentially given them, although they always had it, but the idea that they just reach out to me directly, reach out to our director of licensing or director of venture development, and then we're using our marketing director as kind of the main person to help drive the program internally, pushing information, making sure we're staying on top of things. The other expectation is, we expect them to do, at least twice a year, some kind of CO speaking opportunities with us, and to do some kind of organizing of presentations within their own departments. And for that, we would provide a short deck that they could include as well, or they could use. And then, like we all are, they're acting as advocates, and they have to come to these quarterly meetings. There's not a lot I can say about early results. It's only been about about three months since we kicked it off, and I'm not sure if how many of you follow what's going on at the University of Arizona, but there are a lot of distractions right now, and so that has kind of slowed down the process in the first quarter. There are the program support is minimal. It's, yeah, we bought them a coat. We bought we're buying these little plaques, and we pay for food when we when they have them meet us. That's about it, and we're not. We have not hired somebody or dedicated somebody's time. To it. I think that's about it.

Speaker 1  50:07  
Fantastic. Thank you, Doug. I think that you know, with the three presenters, there are a fair number of similarities between the programs and certainly some differences between them. Just in summary, some of the things that we heard from looking at the slides that this has been directed toward faculty generally. That's, you know, kind of our key constituent here. We do have expectations of the ambassadors in terms of getting training, in terms of engaging. I love the idea Doug of putting the plaque out outside their door. Hadn't thought of that one. That's a great one. If you have, if you have 15 ambassadors, that's 15 plaques throughout campus. That's pretty cool. Everyone gets something that that can that they can relate to, that shows that they're part of the program, a quarter zip or something of that nature, or a plaque. The websites have been useful to provide information to them, give them information they can use for departmental meeting. Give them training materials, update those training materials on a regular basis. And these programs not very expensive, not really expensive at all. You can you can become, you can do somewhat elaborate things, but generally they're actually fairly inexpensive. And I guess, to kind of wrap things up here, there are different processes for selecting inventors. I'm sorry, selecting ambassadors. I mean in the inventor mode, we had a open call. There are curated approaches. I think that there that makes a lot of sense. The profile the ambassador, it can be interesting. People that are are steady customers of the office, versus people that are kind of newer to the office, Junior versus senior. Some have one year terms. Some have two year terms. That's kind of flexible. I think we've all heard some flexibility there. If there's a good ambassador, we'd be inclined to keep them on. If there's more than one ambassador from department, maybe we can get them to hand the reins over to somebody else. That's a good thing. And the level of interaction, I love the I love the lunch ideas, the monthly meetings or quarterly meetings, but that's variable, and even the name is variable. Doug mentioned that his first name was an ambassador. I like ambassador as a cool name because it's indicative of what they're doing. They are our ambassadors of innovation, but we have several other institutions that we're working with as well that are creating programs, and not all of them are using the quote Ambassador term. So with that, I think we can open this up to Q and A. There's any any particular questions people have, please send them to the chat. There is one question that's outstanding, and I'll open this up to the group, any suggestions for scaling the program down from a smaller for smaller research institution with only 22 faculty. So that was similar to something we had talked about as a group in preparation of this. Is this a large entity program or a small entity program? You know, how can we scale the program? So I'll open up to the group to give some feedback.

Speaker 2  52:46  
Yeah, I think you can absolutely scale the program. I will say, I feel like there's a benefit to having more than one ambassador, but it doesn't need to be 20 plus. You heard Columbia, they've got 12. Arizona, eight. I think you could have two or three, just so that there can be some discussion within and amongst the ambassadors. It's actually at the very first ambassador meeting, we had all the folks who were in more of the staff side tech transfer, we stepped out of the room on purpose just to let them have a very candid discussion, if they wanted to about, hey, is this actually working? You know, what should we recommend? And I think that was helpful. And I think they appreciated that, that they felt like they were a unit together. They were in the ambassador program together. And so there's a benefit to having more than one, but I don't think it needs to be, you know, 20 or more by any stretch, but I think everything else really scales pretty easily. You get to decide what training you want to give to them. You get to encourage them to present to their faculty peers. Or maybe it's not even department, maybe it's across the whole institution, if it is a smaller institution, but having the visibility there, I think, is really key.

Speaker 4  54:00  
Yeah, I would add or sing along the same lines, Phil, but with a small institution, you likely have a very small office, and by getting essentially free help within the faculty, I think would be hugely beneficial to you. And so even one, but one or two that you spread it depends how big your campus is or how spread out your faculty are as points of contact, and kind of celebrating them among across the school would be valuable.

Speaker 1  54:33  
Well, let's go the other direction. So how, in terms of scaling down? That's one thing. Scaling up. How big could you imagine the program being at your institutions, you know, what does that entail? How many you know, how many people could this be? I think we saw So Doug, you had the smallest program. You have eight. I think Devin, you had 12, if I remember correctly, and Phil has 21

Speaker 3  54:55  
Yeah, I can so definitely see scaling up. And if you. Sure, I think that there's a huge opportunity to not just tap these 12 key innovators, right where, I'm sure, similar to other academic institutions, there's quite a few, you know, satellite departments, satellite programs, things that are untapped, as far as bringing in more faculty. Also, perhaps it's a department that you don't regularly envision as interacting with the tto, but we know there's also untapped commercial potential in those departments that we don't normally hear from.

Speaker 4  55:35  
I would I'm somewhere in the middle. I definitely can see scaling this up from our eight, and then, the other hand, I don't want to scale it so large that it's not considered exclusive, where it's just another thing that people are doing. So it's, I don't know what that number is yet, but yes, it could definitely scale up from

Speaker 2  55:55  
eight. And I think if you do scale it up more, at least for us, there's probably going to have to be a reworking of how you manage the program too, because right now, it's my colleague Cameron and I largely on the front lines, which is great. We get a lot of back and forth with our ambassadors, but if you scale that up too much, suddenly you become the single point for them, as well as all the other sort of work and disclosures and just the traditional work that you managing, and so you have to change how you manage the program, just to make sure the ambassadors are getting the support that they that they need.

Speaker 1  56:31  
Okay, so real quickly from each of you. How do you all measure success? Each of you touched upon that in your presentations, but maybe just for the audience, the two or three or four things that really you look at to identify this as a successful program or not? Doug, can we start with

Speaker 4  56:46  
you Sure? First and foremost, it's going to be, over time, an increase in invention disclosures. That's why we're doing the program. But I hope that another measurable outcome will be just an improved impression of TLA. And we do an annual, what the hell is the name of that? An annual survey, the one with one question that tells you how people think of your office. There's a term, marketing term for that, and to see that number increase would also be an outcome of this.

Speaker 3  57:20  
Devon, yeah, we're considering adding to our invention report. Have you talked to a faculty ambassador? Is that really nice readout for, are we driving invention reports? But also, I'd really like to see us talking to faculty that we may not be in regular conversation with. So an introduction via ambassador for, there's someone in my department who's new, a rising star. You guys need to jump on a call and do the CTV introduction.

Speaker 4  57:48  
So before Phil, before you guys talk, I just You saw me laughing. I am not known for being quiet, and I'm in my office with the door closed, and someone from my office just texted me, Net Promoter Score. They could hear me, and then somebody I saw, somebody in the group, also did it, but it was funny that somebody else in my office heard it. Yeah, one

Speaker 1  58:12  
of my colleagues put it in the chat as well. Net Promoter Score. So that's good. Bye. Phil,

Speaker 2  58:17  
yeah. So similar to the others, I think invention disclosures is one, but we are track an filter. We have a question now on our disclosure form, have you talked to an ambassador? So one of the cool things in the future we'll be able to do is look back over time and see what happened to this, right? What was the impact of having the ambassador program five years from now? Maybe there was a startup form. Maybe they had a successful exit. Maybe nothing, right? But we at least got the disclosure. If we get the disclosure in the door, that's one we may not have got otherwise. And if there's other benefits through that fantastic one of the other things we do is we ask our ambassadors every month, and this is just to keep the lines of communication going with them. We reach out to them, mostly through email, and just say, hey, any successes, any stories you want to tell us about, anything interesting, and that's a good way to just collect kind of those anecdotal stories that may not fit into a nice, neat metric, but they do sort of show the impact of the program, and you can highlight them when you're talking about a program like this to leadership in, you know, an environment like this as well. So that's another thing we're doing, not a hard metric, but a way to see if we're having success or impact with the program.

Speaker 1  59:30  
Yeah. Okay, we have a time for maybe one or two more questions. So real quick on this scaling up item, one of the great living steps that we have is the number of departments. So we like to try to keep it one per department for that exclusivity element that Doug mentioned. And so we run out of departments, we have found that some of the less common departments for as sources of innovation have been really good ambassadors. Our School of Education, for example, being one and then been really valuable to us. But that leads to the next question in the in the Q and A, the. Who in your office is heads up the program and how much time is allotted to that? So let's, let's go reverse order. Phil, can you start? Because we have one more question after that. Yep,

Speaker 2  1:00:08  
so it's myself, my colleague, Cameron Sargent, I'd say, you know, maybe depends on the week, but maybe 10% of the time can be allocated to it. There's more as you're ramping it up and getting it going, but, and it's more episodic, right? If an ambassador reaches out with some question or they want you to go present or talk on something, you know you got to show support for them. But there might be a week where there's nothing so but maybe 10% of the time, but certainly a little more as you're standing the program up.

Speaker 3  1:00:39  
Devin, yeah, I would say for for Columbia. So I sit in that role where I'm the direct contact for the ambassadors. Right now, it's very low touch for us. We're in that early first year of understanding, you know, what the program was going to look like for Columbia. So I would say it's even a little bit less than Phil currently. So it's very manageable for my, you know, my normal workflow,

Unknown Speaker  1:01:05  
and Doug, anything to add?

Speaker 4  1:01:07  
No, I mean, it's, it's, it's low touch for most of the time, and pretty heavy during spin up and when you're planning an event. Yeah, no. And it, like I said, I already told you, who, who's responsible So,

Speaker 1  1:01:21  
and we're getting the hook. We know we're at our hour. So we'll conclude with one final comment that Phil Devin and Doug are also part of a larger group of ambassadors from different universities that get together and share information quarterly. Phil, do you want to just make a quick comment about who's in the group? And you know, certainly there's room for others as well.

Speaker 2  1:01:39  
Yeah, absolutely, if anyone's interested or thinking about starting a program like this, please feel free to reach out to any of us, but Yeah, happy to have you join that group we've got, in addition to schools here, Baylor College of Medicine, Michigan, Utah, is starting a program. And we've had conversations with a couple other schools that are considering doing a program like this as well, and it's a great group, just kind of a working group to talk about what's working what's not. So for anyone interested, please reach out again. I think a program like this can have a big impact in what we do and really help us be better and have more resources available as we're asking our faculty to help us so that we can help them.

Speaker 1  1:02:23  
Yes, thank you very much, and thank you to all the panelists for sharing today. We appreciate everyone in the audience joining as well and learning about this program. We're obviously a very collaborative group, so please reach out with any questions you may have, if you want to start a program, or if you're interested in thinking about doing so, find us at the autumn meetings. Hopefully we'll have a workshop on this, but that's to be determined. We'll turn it back over to Miss Young.

Speaker 5  1:02:46  
Thank you so much. Thank you to all of our presenters for being with us this this afternoon, and then thank you again to our online sponsor, Marcia 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 sign off the session and will be sent in a follow up email tomorrow. Please find our May webinars on our website and thank you for being a part of today's presentation. Have a great afternoon. Everyone, take

Speaker 4  1:03:21  
care. Everyone, thanks you later. Bye. You.

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