Speaker 1  0:08  
Hello and welcome to today's autumn webinar. Power of marketing in a tech transfer. What is a good strategy? My name is Don vo Young. 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 tool bar. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge and thank autumns online professional development sponsor, Marshall Gerstein, we appreciate your ongoing support. And now I would like to introduce today's session. Moderator, easy.

Speaker 2  0:55  
Thank you. Don well and good afternoon, everyone. If you're in the East Coast, good morning. If you're in the other part of the country or elsewhere, technology, marketing is a very iterative based agile process with an effective feedback loop. And you know, it helps us position and identify and capitalize on very high quality prospective licensees for our marketing resources, you know, for our ROIs. And thereby, it ensures, you know, a potential licensing revenue in the years to follow. I always tell my fellows and trainees whom I you know, mentor at Rutgers University, Peter Lebo from the National Museum of American History in 2015 said, This invention is a new and creative idea, but to bring it to market and get people to adopt it is tremendously difficult, often more difficult than the invention itself. So with this, you know my panelists away, my fellow panelists, and you know, the autumn professional development team, we sort of scoped the outline of this webinar. There are no universal guidelines for technology marketing and IP asset from academic tech transfer units. And that was the whole goal. Is to share our experiences with this community, autm community, share what we do, you know, how some of the tasks that we take on, which work, which do not work, and that's why we decided that we'll host this panel. In today's simple webinar, we're going to cover up the following sections, right? My panelists, my fellow panelists. We have six of us, you know, covering from different academic institutions. We're going to introduce ourselves, tell you about our function that our tech transfer units. We'll then head out into, you know, five small sections we are going to talk about, when to begin this campaign. What is the role of a marketer versus an inventor? How do we define a successful marketing campaign, and the role of social media networking in marketing? So taking the lead, I just want to introduce myself. My name is, you said, yo Perez. I'm very fondly called easy. I have a PhD in life sciences, and I'm a MBA in general management. I am. I have been a drug ghost for now five years. In January, I lead the effort for marketing and business development in our tech transfer office. The role is very internal and external facing as a part of my function at druggist technology transfer. I also train and educate graduate students and postdocs and technology transfer, specifically in the marketing function. I'm also a autum online professional development company member, so part of the group that hosts this webinar. I'm a part of the team as well. So with this, I would like to introduce our next speaker, who's going to say something about himself. Andrew,

Speaker 3  3:25  
yeah, so my name is Andrew Rankin. I'm the Lead IP Marketing Specialist at Idaho National Laboratory. So I've been there for almost six years. And I've been, you know, I started out, you know, from scratch, and then over the over the years, I've developed and established some tech transfer marketing strategies, and comparing the time before we had a marketing specialist after, our average patent licenses have increased by three fold. And I've also spent a lot of time developing AI driven processes for scaling, you know, the strategies that I've put together. And then just a brief overview of INL, we have nearly a $2 billion total research budget. A lot of that goes to classified research areas, so we don't necessarily see a lot of that. And then we have about 4000 researchers. This is an estimate, so don't, don't quote me on this, but and then we have about 115 new disclosures on average per year. Our tech transfer team has about 16 people, four commercialization managers or licensing specialists, whatever you want to call them. And then there's me, the intellectual property marketer. We have other marketing people that do other things, but that's me.

Unknown Speaker  4:48  
Thank you, Nadia,

Speaker 4  4:52  
hi. I'm Nadia Cantu. I'm from the University of Ann Arbor, Birmingham, from the bill harrow Institute for Innovation. Entrepreneurship, and I am relatively new to the position. I've been here for two years exactly. And we are, we are very well, very similar to the rest of the teams here, and we are around 14. We have four licensing associates and one marketing person, and then we have the rest of the team that works with communication and finances, and basically I'm the one in charge, like everyone here, all the marketing of the technology that we work with. Welcome

Unknown Speaker  5:35  
Nadia Olena.

Speaker 5  5:38  
Hello. My name is Olena doniluc, and I am licensing associate with Henry Ford Health from Henry Ford innovations. And my training and background is biochemistry and molecular biology. I worked 20 years with Wayne State University, where the last four years I worked in technology transfer and commercialization office, and also have experience in electrical and computer engineering and smart sensors, adapting them to biological systems. So today, I'm proud to represent our Henry Ford innovations. And we are small and unique and very niche research hospital office, and we are quite different from larger setups seen like in major academic institutions. And again, our outmost priority is to be instrumental in advancing clinical research, transforming care delivery, and ultimately improving patient care so and our work is inspired by spirit and Harry Ford commitment of transforming bold ideas into practical solutions, and that truly has to make a difference in people's life and bringing the gap between possibility and reality, and I'm only one who does marketing, reviewing invention disclosures, bringing it to intellectual property committee and moving forward with marketing solutions and strategy.

Unknown Speaker  6:51  
Thanks. Elena, Janet,

Speaker 6  6:55  
hey, I'm Janet Yancey Rona. I have a PhD in biology, but I've been working on the business side of science for quite a long time. I've been with the University of Maine for just one year. In that technology business development office, which is really our technology transfer office, there are three of us, and we're responsible for everything from educating faculty and inventors, managing inter institutional agreements, managing all the IP, prosecuting the IP, making decisions about the IP, and marketing the IP. Because of my background in several startup companies as well as large pharmaceutical companies, I've done a lot of contracting, licensing and marketing, and so I focus on those aspects of our IP management process.

Unknown Speaker  7:46  
Thanks, Janet Sue,

Speaker 7  7:48  
thanks, easy. Hi everyone. Glad to be part of the panel today. My name is Sue Rhodes, and I'm the industry engagement manager in the Office of Applied innovation at Drexel University and urban research university in downtown Philadelphia, PA, I came to Drexel almost three years ago after a background in career in the private sector and industry, bringing new products to market and overseeing marketing efforts for a large public corporation. My role and the role of my team is to connect Drexel researchers and IP assets to outside industry and to really look at what are those unmet industry needs and innovation challenges where Drexel can help you part of the solution. We're a relatively small team within technology transfer at Drexel, we have one director of IP and two licensing managers, my colleague as an industry marketing analyst who also supports a lot of the IP kind of budget and finance work as well, and we've really developed, over the last two years or so, a Stage Gate process for our marketing efforts. Myself and my teammate coordinate and manage the the active outreach and marketing campaigns, where we involve our licensing managers to get Drexel ideas out to market.

Speaker 2  9:02  
Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. And welcome everybody to the panel. We have the next 10 minutes to talk about, you know, when do we begin campaigns? Right? So marketing, the process of marketing, is unique for every institution and an organization. And the question that most of my trainees ask, when do you guys begin marketing, right? So the question we want to talk about this a little bit in the next 10 minutes. When do you begin this marketing? So I want to start off by saying that, you know, Rutgers tech transfer. We are a staff of 23 we are a pretty good, decent sized staff, but for the number of disclosures that we handled, which are around 1200 active dockets or 1250 dockets, we're still a smaller team to manage all of that. And marketing is done by myself. So when a when the licensing manager triggers marketing request right for any marketing that go and needs to be done for a technology, it all depends on the decision point that the licensing manager has to make a decision on. So the decision point drives the licensing manager to request a marketing campaign. And this can be done anywhere in the life cycle of the you know, we call it a technology marketing life cycle. There are four decision points. We call them DP, 123, and four. And, you know, between the conversion of each of these stages, there is a time when the licensing manager needs to make a decision, and marketing plays an important check mark at that stage. So it's driven by licensing managers based on any upcoming filing days, you know, or an extension dates. We usually do that in the in the life cycle of a pattern application, from the time it's, you know, the NOI submitted to, you know, granted two or three times is what each docket would go under a marketing cycle. And every time we work on marketing it, you know, we change the marketing materials to ensure that it's not a repetitive from the older version. That's that's when we begin the marketing so I will let you know my colleague colleagues just chime in as an Drexel University now.

Speaker 7  10:53  
Thanks, easy. Well, from Drexel side, we consider a couple of things. We really begin a campaign when we need some market feedback, or if we have a promising researcher or IP asset that we want to promote to industry, and there are some specific a wise drivers or decision factors that we consider in kind of our Stage Gate process to pitch a campaign. Those can include things like, you know, how we perceive the timeliness of a commercial market opportunity for licensing that asset, if we need input for IP decisions at whatever stage of the life cycle, at beginning or at end. Also, occasionally, we'll run a campaign when we're trying to support a strategic priority of the university that needs industry feedback and input or awareness. And sometimes, as I'm sure is the case, many of you, we may do a campaign based on a request from a specific faculty member or leadership that requires industry connection and input in terms of when we actually the How to when we begin a campaign, we formally launch the outreach to industry after we've done our homework and we have all the materials ready. So the active kind of email marketing, classic marketing process starts actually as like step three of our process. It's critical to us to have buy in and involvement and commitment from the inventor or researcher for their role, and to have our design plan ready to go before we literally begin a campaign.

Unknown Speaker  12:18  
Andrew, you want to chime

Speaker 3  12:22  
in? Yeah? So the way that we do it at Idaho National Lab, I meet as the marketer for our IP portfolio. I meet with each commercialization manager regularly. Timing varies, but I we sit down and we go through and evaluate each technology that had a patent filed recently, whether a provisional or utility patent, and then we, you know, discuss, you know, potential market fit timing, potential impact, and determine whether or not we want to invest the time into Marketing that technology. So this, you know, helps us prioritize where to invest our outreach efforts, and helps us make sure that each you know, each campaign that that I do is strategic and it's it's grounded in the technology specific strengths, and helps us get a more organized process there. Thank

Unknown Speaker  13:19  
you. Nadia, what about Alabama?

Speaker 4  13:22  
Well, it's pretty similar. We have a deadline, or we where we have to make a decision when there's a PCT or converted or a patent that needs to be renewed. So that's a more reactive approach, contrary to what Andrew was saying, where they actually go over the things that need to be get market, which is great. The goal is to be there, right for us. The goal is to be post patent filing, or as soon as we decide to file a patent, start the marketing. But so far, it's just like whenever there is, like a deadline coming now within that sometimes we know that there's the pattern won't be renewed and we need to drop it. And we still do the marketing to make sure that we do that in the jobs with the inventor, to make sure that, hey, we marketed, we did everything we could, and the steel was not good, so we just gonna drop it. And now the BackFire of that is when you start doing that with the idea of dropping the patent, and then you get some feedback, or do get some companies interested, you're like, Well, yes, okay, change of plans, but basically it's very similar to what they're saying.

Speaker 2  14:51  
Thank you and Olena, I know you talk about, you know, the pre campaign. Tell us a little more about the pre campaign and what you do.

Speaker 5  14:57  
So at Harry Ford health, our campaign. Campaign starts very early, so it's a moment when intellectual property is actually disclosed, or when inventors are outreaching to us with their ideas, or invite us to look what they have and how to move forward. And we call it like pre campaign phase, and think it as a blueprint. Blueprint stage. During this phase, we collaborate closely with inventors. So we're developing very good relationship accessing also technology readiness in also we outlining its preliminary commercial potential. So it's objective, it's very simple, but very critical understand technology its potential market application, also determine intellectual property readiness for commercial viability, but also ensure that inventors teams it's fully on a board with a plan that's kind of the most important for us. Again, reiterate, adjust, correct and communicate, and once we have securing provisional filing, we shift gears to active campaigning. This is when we focus like getting word out. We leveraging our internal networks, doctors, clinicians, researchers, and also we reaching out to external stakeholders, like Michigan advisors, mentors in residence, so to look for their input under confidentiality agreements. And like one of successful example, we have quite aged, large exosomes portfolio and this way and be approached with this phase, with those phases, and it's allowed us not only successfully market all those technologies, build good portfolio to market, but also find a successful licensee. So that's kind of small success.

Speaker 2  16:42  
Just a quick, quick question. You do that the first pre camping is done with you and an external team, or just internal to Henry Ford. So

Unknown Speaker  16:50  
under

Speaker 5  16:52  
the under confidentiality disclosure, we bring some external aspects to if we seek some expertise from outside that's very

Speaker 2  17:02  
good to know, very unique. Thank you. Thank you. Let's look at Main

Speaker 6  17:06  
Yeah, I think overall, our plan is very similar to what we just heard from Elena. Often before a filing, confidential discussions have already happened, often between our staff who are working on the whatever led to the invention disclosure, they may be working with an industry partner, or have found their own industry partner, need that that invention addresses so those known contacts are really part of the original marketing campaign. As a marketer, I'm then looking at is our marketing campaign going to be about retention, or dealing with people who know us, who we know, who have some idea about what's going on. That's a little bit different of a marketing campaign that will be developed. Then, if this is, you know, a brand new invention, no no discussion with outside people at all, has happened, then it will be a stimulate demand campaign where you need to generate awareness, and it's a more of a broad shot marketing campaign so often, like I said, those known discussions may happen even before a filing, and it's just really important that we do that under confidentiality agreements to prevent accidental disclosures, and then once we file a provisional, I do initiate the outreach, because that outreach helps me determine also what our patent strategy, what our IP filing strategy will be. Will we go PCT, and do we need, you know, some other country worldwide coverage, we do do a number of PCT filings at this stage, I utilize some AI programs to help create messaging one pagers, and also utilize social media. I'm sorry I don't utilize social media as a broad sense, until we actually file a patent, but under once we file a provisional, I do targeted outreach to companies, known contacts, new potential contracts, who may be interested with non confidential information. Then, once a patent is filed, I do some broad, broad outreach marketing campaigns, such as through mark, through social media.

Speaker 2  19:17  
Oh, good, and that's needed to a good way to a next segment of, you know, what is the role of the marketer? What is the role of an inventor in the entire process of marketing? So we're going to spend the next 10 minutes to talk about, you know, the difference in roles, whether they are aligned, they are different. And while we do that, you know, I request my panelists, you just talk about the marketing team. If it's like, for me, it's an n is equal to one. But I do have you know fellows and trainees just talk about who your team and the size of your team for marketing is that will give a good perspective to the audience who's listening to what are their roles. So I'm going to just take off and lead it's a team effort at Rutgers, right at Rutgers technology transfer, we believe in being open and transparent about our processes. We in. All the, you know, the as the request comes in to the marketing team, and that's, again, me and a bunch of my fellows and trainees that we train. The licensing manager is kept in loop for every material that you know, is prepared for their assigned technologies. We then, you know, review those informations with the inventors. And again, inventors can be external and internal and internal to Rutgers. It's sent to everyone, depending on what the inter institutional agreement states. We, you know, we keep that in mind while we reach out to the inventors on the technology. So it's a very productive marketing campaign. I say it's a lot of back and forth between the licensing manager, the inventor and, you know, the marketing team, and usually my fellows, take a lead on this. And I, you know, you know, they, they given great training, and then we just let them launch it. We start off by, you know, creating marketing documents like the one pages. And again, we do it like, you know, like Janet said, we do employ some of the AI platforms that are available. We then also, you know, reach out to, we identify companies in the space, and then we launch a campaign in terms of, you know, the inventors, inventors, you know, they will always come back to us and say, easy, why don't you write, you know, say, for example, BD, right, there's a person that I know at B I met at the conference. You should, you know, send them the marketing flyers as well. So it's a bit, it's bi directional. We launch it. We initiate it. The inventors give their feedback, and then as the marketing gets completed, you know, the entire campaign gets completed, we send a final summary report to the inventors, you know, stating what the campaign was, copying the licensing manager as well. So that's what we do.

Speaker 7  21:38  
Well, I'll pick up on that from Drexel, we do many of the same things. So our tech transfer office, it's a team sport for the industry engagement, for the marketing, but our marketing team of two really takes the lead on the how and the what that are elements of the campaign and kind of the why and the connection with the inventor and the creation of the basic materials, falls on whoever owns the campaign. In some case, one or two of us on the marketing team may own it, but more likely, it's the licensing manager who owns it for his or her portfolio that they're managing, and they have the relationship with the inventor. So they'll take the lead and using tools to create the non confidential summary, get that posted online in our site, and also use that in our targeted email marketing efforts. They'll do the plan. They'll spend the time figuring out who are the targets, finding target companies, finding target markets, finding target people at the target companies, creating the materials so that my team we can use platform tools to send out mass emails, to do the follow up to check the statistics, to really, really line up potential meetings and leads for coordination and follow up by the licensing manager who owns that campaign for that asset or for that researcher. The role of the inventor is important. We talk about this a lot in kind of pitching a campaign. Do we want to do a marketing, active, external outreach for something, and how are we going to do it? It's critical before we'll literally pass the Stage Gate of go to launch external part of a campaign, to know that the inventor or professor or faculty member is bought in and is willing to spend the time if and when we bring leads to the table. Who need more technical insight, whoever owns the campaign, typically, licensing manager is going to do the screening call with the company that's interested. They're going to set up the communications for the inventor, but they're going to try to find out, kind of what's in it for the inventor. What are their expectations, so that there's clear alignment. But by doing the screening, when we get companies who might be interested in learning more, they understand what's important to the company, and they kind of speak the language to align expectations and set up a hopefully fruitful technical discussion if they want to go further to explore, you know, an SRA type of partnership or a licensing opportunity. So we try to lay out and clearly establish the different roles. A lot of the How to are on the small marketing priority, but we work together. We have weekly meetings where we always update our pipeline. Where are we at? What's active, what's in progress, what's being pitched, what's in the planning stage, what's closed. And we loop it at the end with lessons learned. We do kind of a debrief after a campaign, closes with what we've learned. Our goal is always, obviously, to get a license, if we're licensed, trying to market an asset. But a lot of times, kind of what you learn is just as important, if it's the value of the IP or lack thereof, or other decisions that need

Speaker 2  24:24  
to be made. So I like the fact that you said you know that the the inventors want to learn about the company. And at Rutgers, we do the same thing when there was a meeting aligned, I sort of sent a brief, you know, a Snapchat for the company's overview. And on the other end, I also let the company know that, you know, when you're talking to the inventors, give, give us a broad overview of the company. What are you looking for in this potential partnership with the Rutgers and see whether where the bi directional fits and matches, you know, can, can, can synergize. Thank you for sharing that. Andrew, what about Idaho? You're muted.

Speaker 3  24:58  
There we go. The way I see it, that the marketer and the inventor, they both bring unique, complimentary roles to the table, and close collaboration is essential for success, essentially. So as a marketer, you know, I work across hundreds of technologies that I know, so I I can't possibly expect to understand each one of those to the depth that the inventor does. So I rely on them to help me grasp the nuances and technical details that make their innovation unique. And then together, we work to shape the message. So, similarly to what others have said, the inventor provides the what and the why, you know, the foundational elements of the technology, and then my role is to translate that into a strategy that resonates with the market. So without the inventors insight, I am sure that I would miss the mark most of the time. So with with the guidance and with the collaboration there, we create campaigns that are accurate, and also can connect with potential licensees.

Speaker 2  26:03  
Andrew, you very well said, you know, even in my role, right? I'm a Life Sciences by training, I know little about, you know, software copyright. So this is where, you know, tech transit trainees, fellows, who have that expertise as their subject matter for their PhD or the post Doctor, come into so much of help, right? They understand the language of the technology, so it makes it easier to communicate with the inventors about technology specific to their discipline. So great, great point. Nadia,

Speaker 4  26:33  
it's very similar. Really. What we do is, once the marketing campaign has been requested, we I basically go over the materials that we have, if there's a if it's a particular technology that I really need some explanation. Many of them are I meet with a la, can discuss them. And I create all the materials the one pager. I create a list of companies that I consider relevant. I create a LinkedIn post, and I think that's it. So I share that with LA, so he can review it and share it with the PI. Once the PI review and say, like, Okay, we have re approach this company, or you should have more about these or I know a person in this company and things like that. Once we get the feedback, I incorporate that information into the campaign and launch the campaign. Most of the times, the PIs are not very involved in what companies are important or or if they have any other idea of where the technology should be applied. So when I do the regional research, is where I start adding those points. Sometimes the pi comes with a particular idea of what industry we should focus on, but when I do the research, is like, Oh, well, maybe this should apply in this other industry, or this other type of companies could be very interested as well. So that's where I play my list of companies. So the very input is very, very important, but sometimes they just, they just let you do the thing and say, like, Okay, I agree. I like the the materials are okay. If they are something that was said, that was not right, they will come back say, like, hey, fix things, or use another figure, or something like that. But that's pretty much our approach. Once we get there, okay, we launch it.

Unknown Speaker  28:42  
What about you? Elena, so

Speaker 5  28:44  
at Henley 40, we're still refining our the best marketing process, but I want to use a lot of techniques, what my colleagues are using, and you already shared, but also it's very important internal marketing, starting with promoting technologies internally in our institutions, and that brings more visibility to our inventors and researchers. And also, I think it's encouraging inventors think as of end user and end user of their technology. So if you would be owning that the company would you take this technology and how you would develop it? That's kind of entrepreneurial trainings also, it's very important and build this understanding that technology would have the final use, and help them to put on a team to work together. So we all bringing distinct expertise to the tables, but we encourage inventors to participate in meetings with our potential industry partners, and always we have post discussion internally how we would like to outreach. And one important point our researchers and clinicians, they travel and share their research a lot, so sometimes they bring potential. Shall listen these to the table. So we also it's very important to keep a nurturing those collaborations, partnerships and outreach to them properly, and again, teach and learn and iterate.

Unknown Speaker  30:14  
Thank you. Janet,

Speaker 6  30:16  
yeah, I'll try to just add on. I think a lot of a lot of similar messages I have to what what others have said here, I want to reiterate how important the relationship with the inventor is, making sure that they have the time to participate in industry discussions and ongoing industry and this addresses another question in the chat. You know, the fact is a lot, and I would say the vast majority of our IP is not ready to be a product. And so when I'm reaching out, I'm not immediately saying, are you ready to license this? It is often going to be how can we partner to show that this will work in your you know that this will solve your problem. What parameters do you need to see and so we were really through marketing, trying to build a relationship with that industry partner to have those discussions. I do involve the inventor in those discussions with the company, so that they can get more of that technical information, and then we can go back and decide, does this, going to look like a research collaboration? Is this going to look like a technical services kind of project where we just need to do some testing and show them that it meets the parameters that they need? Or are we ready to go directly to a license? So again, it's, you know, figuring out what does that customer need, also, I would say the role of the inventor sometimes is if they're going to participate in various entrepreneurial training programs, such as our I Corps Marta programs, where they're doing some of their own customer discovery problem statements and things like that. I might hold off then on a marketing campaign until they've completed that program, because then they bring a lot of that information to me. Like Andrew said, even though I don't manage nearly as many as he does, I am not an expert pretty much in any of our IP that we have, and so having that expertise from the inventor and that open collaboration with the inventor is just really important to be able to appropriately target the message for the most part, though, I would say the inventor is really involved in marketing with CUSP potential contacts that they know they also often want to publish or present on their technology. So I try to encourage them. They'll they'll put on their LinkedIn page that they just published this paper, and I'll chime in on LinkedIn, saying yes. And if you'd like to talk more about this technology, you know, please contact me. So we try to collaborate in those kinds of efforts with them. The inventor often targeting people they know, and then me taking that and going and saying, Okay, we're going to develop a campaign and try to do company matching and move on with the broader marketing campaign. Janet,

Speaker 2  33:11  
I do agree. The fact that, you know, I core, you know, letting the inventors go to the entire I Corps experience is helpful. It's all about customer discovery. And at Rutgers, we do the same. We encourage them to go, because that data is so important. It also gives you, you know, it pre identifies some of your companies that you want to, want to, sort of, you know, target later. So thank you. Thank you for the segment. The question folks definitely ask is, how do you measure the success? Right? I think this group, the group, a group of panelists, you know, we thought about this section very mindfully and thoughtfully, and we want, would like to share this so, you know, why don't you go ahead? Dreadful first, yeah.

Speaker 7  33:47  
In terms of, you know, success is obviously the goal along the way. A lot of time pivots or adjustments are needed. You kind of think about it as a road map to get to your successful conclusion. So I'll just mention a couple of things that you see on this slide. In terms of what it means to learn and make adjustments during a campaign, just like a company needs to do based on their plan. And when we do campaigns, we try to make sure we learn something from every response, including lack of response to a campaign that tells us something right. If we've done our job reaching out with industry or companies who should be interested with the right roles and there's not interest there, you can glean some understanding from that, or from, you know, very from responses that you get. And it's really important during a campaign to pivot when needed, so that you can find your way to potentially a successful conclusion. This can mean a phase one. Phase two. Adjust your materials based on feedback you're hearing. If something's not clear or not getting through. Maybe change your approach or your targets. You might think the best application is this area, but they say no thank you from those contacts, but you're finding interest in another area. Dive deeper, find more companies there, or you might find that the application you thought was a winner. It's either not needed in the industry, or it's a very crowded market. But, oh, that's an interesting competitive advantage in a different application that people are interested in. A tough part for me learning, because I like to chat a lot in the marketing sense, when you're on phone with the company and doing the screening and the outreach and understanding what their needs are, if you're running a campaign, you really have to work on listening skill skills for the people talking with the company so you're listening and not selling. You're trying to learn and then follow the path of where the feedback is taking you to try to get to that successful conclusion. And finally, you got, as you we all know you have to do your homework to set it up, right? You have to do your homework on who you're talking to you. But there's lots of resources for this, public, private, AI, tools, but really kind of leaning on that larger network to put the right materials together and adjust and pivot as you go, doing your homework on various sites to make sure, you know, you guess why a company might be interested, and then listen well and adjust as you go, to try to lead to that, you know, SRA license, whatever the case might be. Thanks.

Speaker 2  36:00  
Thanks. What about Elena? What about you? So

Speaker 5  36:04  
with Henry Ford Health be we are aiming to on each stage of developing and maturing technology, to bring an impact, from invent research standpoint, to feature our researchers, to feature their research, and help them to bring resources to make to develop their technology, engage them in every steps and again, train them with entrepreneurial mind. We have a Davidson fellowship available for our all employees, so they could train and learn to feel how to be an entrepreneur and what it means. Also with assets development, bringing from mission, from Mission stakeholders different grants or participating in different rounds. So it's very important for them to develop this mindset and commercialization. But on each standpoint, we would like to bring an impact and again, engaging inventors as a partners and coaching them so they would be grew up with us, with Henry Ford and and developing their technology. So that's kind of our outmost impactful aim.

Speaker 2  37:07  
Thanks for being that. Eunice UMaine, yeah,

Speaker 6  37:11  
I think just to echo what a lot of people have said, adjusting your messaging, your materials based on what you learn. And again, this is where the I Corps program and other such programs can be helpful to really identify what is the problem. And often, you know, inventors will go in. So we have a lot of manufacturing and advanced materials, kinds of technologies, my customer is often not the end user. We certainly need to define that end user problem, but my customer, if you will, or my partner, is going to be the manufacturer, and so there's, there's a need to identify it might like what the end user need, and what this technology solves may be very different than what the manufacturer is going to need in order to be receptive to adopting a new process or a new material into something that they're making. So I spend some time really trying to understand that with the inventor and through informational interviews and our known contacts, so that we can adjust our materials appropriately. The other thing that is important is, you know, we have these large centers where a lot of these inventors are working who are staff, and if the ongoing development activity is not prioritized, I probably will change marketing, or maybe just downplay the marketing of those technologies based on the departmental support that they will provide to that staff member to continue development, because the last thing I want to have happen is find an active lead who's really interested in doing something, but they require some testing or further development, and The inventors not available or not committed to doing that. So all of those things can change. And then I also want to mention environmental factors. For example, it in Maine. We have a real problem with PFAs, the Forever chemicals, and this has become, you know, very newsworthy. It's in the news pretty much every day, and we have a lot of technologies around PFAs, and so that might cause me to highlight and focus on a portfolio of technologies because of that environmental factor, the news and what's happening in the environment, In our in our ecosystem, because that will generate activity and interest in the communities in which we're operating. So again, I think being agile, having a plan, but making adjustments, just like you do during product development or any other kind of thing, is is what we need to do to really manage a success. Campaign.

Speaker 2  40:00  
Thanks, Janet and you know, at Rutgers, for us, we track every response rate of the campaign, right? So we have a we run the campaign with, we get a response of yes, no, not interested in this time. We track all of that, and we share that information with the licensing team as well as the inventors. We definitely tomorrow, you know, to to ensure that the marketing has gone successfully and that we all are sort of contented with the work that we the hard work that we put in, we'd like to have at least three or five meetings scheduled with an industry, with our inventors, you know, preferably under an NDA, but not all the time we get it to an NDA, but at least at initial meeting. We sort of aim to have at least three, if not five of those with the industry. Sometimes we get none. Sometimes we get more than five. So it all depends on how exciting, early or late the technology that we're marketing, you know, the technology we're marketing as TRL improves, right for the technologies and we tend to remarket based on, you know, new developments. I want to address one of the questions that came in the chat that, do we approach companies every time till they respond? The answer is yes and no. You need to be mindful about how you approach those companies. If you know that XYZ is a company that you really would like, you know potential introduction or an opportunity to meet with the inventors. You would then reach out to them at least two times, if not three. And if there's no response, and you still think that the company of your interest, I would find another contact within that company. So we definitely reach out to companies that are shown an initial interest and said that, you know, reach, reach back when there are further development scores have improved. We keep them in mind. Folks change at industry all the time. There's a turnover, right? So we definitely want to have more than one or two connections that we keep licensing if there's a licensing agreement in place, you know, that's, that's how we count as success at the end of the day for us at Rutgers, well, what about Andrew? About you?

Speaker 3  41:57  
Yeah. So when it comes to measuring the success, you know, obviously the most the most obvious metric, of course, is going to be, you know, number of licenses, right? But for me, that's really only one piece of the puzzle. So success and tech transfer marketing can look very different depending on the goals of each campaign and the types of relationships we're building, right? I also look closely at other positive outcomes, like securing funding through joint proposals with industry partners, establishing craters and, you know, other forms of collaborative agreements. So these outcomes help advance the technology toward commercial impact, even if they aren't a direct license. And you know, often those lead to a license in the end. So you know, it's also important to keep in mind that whether a technology gets licensed or not depends on a lot of factors that are outside of the control of the marketer, right? So, you know, market, you know, commercial readiness or technology readiness level. You know, I mentioned this in the chat, but early stage technologies are often much more difficult to license because a bigger company is often don't want to invest into that technology until it's proven right. So, you know, the point of that is, you know, to say that there are a lot of things outside of your control for whether a technology gets licensed. So, you know, I prefer to track, you know, a meaningful range of positive outcomes like I mentioned, not just licenses, and it gives you kind of a fuller picture of the value that the marketing is creating, and it allows you to capture the broader impact of tech transfer. Yeah,

Speaker 2  43:35  
I do agree that the fact that, you know, capturing feedback is very important with that sort of you relate to the inventors, right? And it definitely helps improve their TRL that they've sort of employed that feedback in there. Let's look at Nadia. What do you? What about you?

Speaker 4  43:52  
Okay, so our rate of success internally are basically feedback from the companies. The main goal would be to get a license going as a result of the campaign. But we all know that this is that is very, very hard. So most of the times I'm I'm just looking for any type of feedback, even we are not interested, or is too early, or we already are partnering with someone else, any type of feedback, I mentioned that my success into replies from companies, because that means that at least someone inside the company saw it. So if they say we're not interested, or whatever, and I think like, Okay, this, this campaign, the at least this approach, was successful, because someone inside the company saw what I sent and had an answer, and basically we are looking for, of course, meeting, having a. CDA is in place again, this kind of paint a lot of the other companies approach to do collaborations with universities. So I cannot use, we cannot use as a as a goal or goal metric for us. So I'm gonna stay, I'm gonna say that basically just having replies, having feedback, and then a different bucket where, when there's actually collaborations going where, okay, we want to keep hearing about these, and let's talk about future steps or things like that, even if it doesn't lead to a licensing, but at least that collaboration in the future, our relationship with the company, that's a different bucket but we probably said, we're very proud of it. But for the day to day our campaigns, it's just like, how many replies did we get from this technology? I

Speaker 2  45:51  
think we all do agree that the response rate is important from a marketing campaign, people who said yes, people who said no, if they've given reasons for either of them, that's important. But Nadia, what I liked about you is your calculation of your success rate. What does the percentage look like for you?

Speaker 4  46:09  
I'm very proud of it right now. We are 35% 40 per campaign, and that's a lot of work. That's a lot of work because it's really reaching out to the right companies that in the right person inside, the companies that you know are going to look at the technology and understand what you're saying. And that's a pretty much broadening your the amount of people, or the type of people that you approach in bigger companies, you will say, like, there's already a team very specified to deal with all the collaborations with universities or research institutions, but sometimes you want to reach out someone inside A Latin mission that understands exactly what you're talking about. And then they're gonna reach out to the to their supervisor and say, like, Hey, someone reach out to this, and I understand exactly what they're saying. Do you think? And the upper level will be interested to discuss this. And most of the times, they pass along the information that's what you want, and someone replies sometimes, most of the times, I don't get like, the reply from the person I send it to, but they forward that information to someone who will reply. So yeah, that is very much what we are looking for.

Speaker 2  47:35  
That's great. And also, I'm looking at some of the chats and the Q and A's talking about social media, LinkedIn marketing. We're going to the next segment. Next segment is all about, you know, marketing, using social media and networking as a part of our function. So I just want to sort of kick off in your answer. There's, there's a question put about LinkedIn marketing. Right? At Rutgers, we promote our technologies very strategically, right? I work with our communications team. We do also work with Rutgers foundation, you know, to identify leads for some of our technologies. But in terms of social media, we leverage LinkedIn a lot Facebook, you know, people who follow us, they definitely get or they get to hear about Rutgers innovations in general, that would mean, mean our IP assets, and potentially also startups that we want to sort of promote in terms of activities we have. We call it the technology of the month, and that's we identify one technology that has great potential. You know, there's a question about, How do you decide which one to promote, which one not to promote? So technologies that, you know, the licensing team has defined as, oh, high, you know, priority great and great technology that would excite the industry. We use those technologies to sort of promote them. We call them technology the month. I also run a marketing bulletin from the tech transfer group. We send that out bi monthly. We again identify key areas. We have Firefox. We classify them under discipline. So under each discipline, we work with licensing managers to identify a technology that we want to promote for that for that bi monthly period, networking is very important, you know, I tend to go for most of the networking events, especially attending conferences such as bio, you know, help me to get in touch with pharmaceuticals for our life sciences, licensing. But universalized announcements. Social media posting is what we do all the time, often, and I work very closely with communications team to do that. What about Drexel Sue? I'll

Speaker 7  49:30  
just take a couple of high points here. One big one that's not really related to social media is leveraging opportunities to meet people. If you're the marketing person for your tto, and that could be online, but, you know, getting to understand the tech scouts, the corporate VCs, the academic liaisons at companies that do open innovation, all of those things, try to kind of understand and build that network and leverage opportunities to meet them and figure out who they are, depending on the IP portfolio you have, depending on where you're based. Different types of companies might be relevant to you, and you kind of get to know who the regular players are on the industry side and different industry sectors, and they may not be the lead technical people that would be reviewing but who's in charge of business development or relationships with the university. Just understand that in your marketing role, and then use some online tech networks and events to help get your message out there, extend small budgets, try to use things strategically. We don't use LinkedIn for our active technology marketing or outreach, but we try to use it, you know, to build a personal network on behalf of the tto to share good content to spread awareness about the credibility, the capability of your research institution, the type of research and IP that's done, or things that are relevant to industry, to show you understand industry's needs and problems and things that may help them. So it's not all institution specific type of marketing. And then finally, be proactive in your LinkedIn. Use in particular, because it's just a good industry networking area. We often use this after kind of formal email marketing, after two stages in an email sequence, if we don't hear back, but we can one see a company or contact is really interested, from click rate, opens other types of things, but they haven't responded. Maybe reach out on LinkedIn to try to kind of elicit a response. Or if we think there's a technology with broad potential, it's important to university we want to be to show that we're trying to grow awareness. We may promote those more of like a technology of the month, like easy said, even though it's not a formal program for us, some of our campaigns, we may try to get out there from our LinkedIn site. So those are some of the things that we do.

Unknown Speaker  51:42  
Nadia, what about you?

Speaker 4  51:45  
Well, we pair or active marketing campaigns with LinkedIn posts. Now that is something that we've been back and forth. We stopped doing it because we didn't see any any benefit. But then we went back, because it's actually just increasing the marketing exposure of a technology. So whenever we start a campaign, we create a LinkedIn post for that. We already have a flinbox already in place, so we can just share the link of the film box in the LinkedIn post, and that post, I think it goes on x and maybe on Facebook. I know that our main focus will be LinkedIn. Other than that, we don't have we don't use LinkedIn for any other passive marketing. Whenever we refer to a passive marketing is just how the technology public, public in clean box. But I do, whenever we meet someone from the industry, I try to link with them on LinkedIn so they are aware of mostly, I should say, people in their business development or partnership area. I try to make a name on LinkedIn so they are aware or technology, so at least we are actively marketing or technologies.

Unknown Speaker  53:18  
That's great. What about Olena?

Speaker 5  53:21  
So we use the LinkedIn, and also we use posting one pages and technology descriptions on our Henry Ford innovation page, web page. So always, when I talk, I could always direct to our links and posts on our web page. And also through LinkedIn, we have we are marketing our companies and outreaching to to different potential stakeholders. But I want to also bring to attention very important personal meetings when we outreaching and going on multiple events. And Michigan is very active state where we have entrepreneurial blooming so as we have multiple events and finding those people on a LinkedIn and meeting them in person and starting a conversation and in a personal conversation, bringing our technologies and inviting them to visit us or schedule a meeting and talk, and I found such an outreach following West, LinkedIn, personal post. It's very important to create such a relationships, even technology is not developed and not mature enough, but we would have very good feedback from companies or potential how to develop it further. Or we are looking for some inventor started sponsorship or or a collaboration to move forward with technology development. So that's what works for me. Yeah,

Speaker 2  54:50  
I know I was just looking at one of the comments made by an anonymous attendee about, you know, on the punchline statement. And again, like for most of us all. Our technologies are at the very early stage right and there is no hard and fast rule saying that that technology will definitely be licensed to a company right away. Things have to improve. Trs need to need to improve. Development needs to take place. And that is the entire life cycle of marketing that I talked about at the beginning, that it takes a lot of time to get a potential licensee in place, but, you know, feeding that thought within a company that a technology exists from from an institution like each of ours, think that's important, because it's you're sort of putting your institution in the forefront of, you know, the world industry, and letting them know that there is a potential technology that could be a potential collaborator with with their institution. So we all at an early stage. That's what I believe. And we are, most of us in academia, are at an early stage. We do not have the resources to take them forward, and that is why we're looking for potential collaborators to potential licensing route. So I'm hoping that answers the question too. But any any of you would like to chime on that statement? Where do we stand? Basically, Andrew, you know, Lena again, whoever wants to chime in? Janet, you have a few minutes more before we close.

Speaker 5  56:15  
Always important to do. Also your homework with the company. I do my background research. I just named it Sherlock Holmes research. So I look for a company, I look for their investment rounds. I look where they are, who are owners of the company. So if we reaching out to them, at least I know if they are really interested to work and develop this technology, or if it's their interest to have collaboration with Henry Ford. And once you bringing it to their attention that you did this research is also helping to improve collaborations. Jen,

Unknown Speaker  56:48  
if you wanted to say something, yeah,

Speaker 6  56:50  
I was just going to quickly add something about LinkedIn and about just using the platform to really amplify the message that maybe the inventors are putting out there. I mean, I see a lot of times our inventors saying, Hey, I'm going to be at this conference, or I'm presenting this poster, or my student is graduating, or my student just defended their thesis, and being able to just chime in and say, Yes, this was a very exciting technology that you know that you may now has or you know, somehow wording it and amplifying that to again just create general awareness, especially for you. Maine, which maybe is not well known across everyone all the time, that really helps doing that, either from our office LinkedIn, or from my own personal LinkedIn page, and I get a lot of impressions that way on those posts. That's

Speaker 2  57:50  
great. I think we all agree that, you know, leveraging social media does help in today's world, especially the world of marketing, right? Why not? I just want to remind you know everyone that the fact that I made a cast. My opening remarks were saying that, you know, the invention is a new creative idea, but bringing it into market and adopting it by folks is tremendously difficult. And you know, we all have gone to that, but that doesn't stop us, because we doing marketing. We ensure that there's a successful pipeline of licensing revenues in the future. So I just want to close this meeting by giving, you know, a few take home messages that we, sort of, you know, put down together for this group. You need to compare your marketing strategy and tactics with the panelists, example. So take, take, you know, take, take notes down from I think autumn is going to send you the PDF of our presentation. Reach out to us at any time and to compare your notes in a set time to talk to us. We're happy to talk to all of you. We also suggest that you create compelling marketing messages to interested key opinion leaders. You revise your strategy or outreaching activity to ensure that industry sort of engages it. It takes a lot of time, like some folks mentioned, that do you keep bugging them? And the question is, you need to sort of engage industry and be mindful about their time as well. So you just need to sort of plan correctly. And you know, timely, spread them out, spread your message out. Timely, analyze the outcomes. You know, Janet mentioned that analyze the outcome is very important. And even Sue mentioned it that learn from what you have done in the past and adjust your subsequent campaigns based on that feedback that you've received. And like I said, again, reach out to any of us for any help. It's a big task doing marketing. It's not easy. It's not simple. It looks very colorful, but it takes a lot of effort, a lot of helping hands, a lot of time to actually get your technologies in front of industry and then adopting by industry to sort of potentially securing a license for that technology. So with that, you know, there are a lot of chat comments and a lot of Q and A's. We may have not been able to address it, but I'll, you know, I'll let Don will send it to us, and if you can address them via email, we're happy to do that. Donal, thank you for giving us the opportunity. Thank

Speaker 1  59:58  
you. I know Bucha. On behalf of autumn, I would like to thank our panelists for the informative presentation on today, and thank you again to our sponsor, Marsha Gerstein, a recording of this webinar will be available for viewing in the autumn Learning Center within a week of this presentation and is included in your registration. Please complete the webinar evaluation, which will open immediately when you sign off this session, and thank you for being part of today's presentation. Thank you again to our panelists, and have a great afternoon, everyone.

Unknown Speaker  1:00:31  
Thank you again. Bye.

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