Speaker 1 0:05 Hello and welcome to today's autumn webinar enhancing tto productivity using vendor tools. My name is Don vo Young. I'm a member of autms 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 online professional development sponsor, Marshall Gerstein, we appreciate your ongoing support. I would now like to introduce today's session moderator, Cynthia Kumar, Speaker 2 0:54 thank you. Don bill, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Cynthia and Surya Kumar. I am a senior intellectual property manager at Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures and I will be serving as the moderator for today's webinar. Today's discussion in identifying tools best suited for our respective tech transfer needs will not be limited to just patent search tools and market analysis tools, but broadly, we will try to touch on everything, including data management, task tracking and business intelligence tools available. We're here to talk about the toolbox, not just one or two tools. Please also note that today's discussion is not meant to be a pricing comparison between subs, excuse me, subscription based tools. Obviously we will touch on subscription based tools that offices that our panelists may be using. But again, today's discussion is not meant to be served as a pricing comparison in any way. Let me go ahead and introduce the panelists, starting with Sarah camper, Speaker 3 1:55 hi everybody, thanks for joining today. My name is Sarah camper, I'm a senior intervention manager at Northwestern University, tech transfer office, INVO, the innovation and new ventures office. I've been here for about 10 years now, somehow, after getting my PhD in chemistry from Northwestern so at our office, we kind of have whole portfolios that we manage. So I do patents and license management for a subset of our chemistry and materials inventors. I also manage our intern program, and so we use a number of vendor tools while working with our interns, which I'm happy to talk about later. Our office has about 250 invention disclosures a year from across the whole campus, and I think that's all I want to say for my intro. So thank you, and I will pass to the next person. Speaker 4 2:49 Thank you, Sarah, hi everyone. It's nice to meet you. My name is Dave narsimin. I am a patent portfolio manager for CoMotion at the University of Washington. CoMotion is u dubs tech transfer arm. My background is in Biomedical Engineering, both bachelor's and master's, and I also have a JD and I'm a licensed patent attorney. On average, we get a little over 300 disclosures per year. Last year, we got three 304 recorded. And our staff is primarily made of six, six on the patent team for patent managers and two paralegals. And we have, I would say, about over, over 10 licensing and IP associates and innovation managers, they help with the commercialization and the the licensing aspects of the technologies all through from conception to To patenting. Speaker 5 3:59 Hi everyone. I'm Elizabeth Harper. I am a postdoctoral fellow here at Johns Hopkins, and I'm also working with JH TV as a commercialization Academy Senior Fellow. So what that means is I'm essentially a student intern, and I am one of about 25 to 30 interns here that form up the commercialization Academy, and we support the full time staff. We have about 100 full time staff here at JH TV, and we get a little over 500 disclosures annually. I think that's everything I wanted to say. Speaker 6 4:36 Hello, everyone. Firstly, thank you all for attending this webinar, I just saw the participants list crossed over 110 people, which is great again. Thank you all. My name is Ashwin Ramanujam. I am an innovation manager at the University of Maryland ventures office. We are seven. Innovation managers in total, handling 160 280 invention disclosures per year. Our office structure, basically is almost cradle to grave, but we do have little support. Having one contracts manager and in house, IP, team, finance team and a subsidiary startup unit, which is all overseen by an executive director and an associate director. Yeah. Thank you. Speaker 2 5:33 Thank you to all the panelists. We want to start this webinar and engage the audience here a little bit. I'll give about 10 to 15 seconds for people to put answers in the chat, but we're asking the audience here what tools are commonly used in your tech transfer office. Again, please don't feel limited to just patent searching tools or market analysis, but feel free to share any sort of tools that you think are critical to your office's needs. I'll give it about 10 to 15 seconds, and I'll keep an eye out here on the chat as well to see what what answers are popping up here. Speaker 2 6:15 Awesome. We're seeing some usual suspects, minuet Salesforce, of course. You Speaker 2 6:30 first, Ignite Wellspring, Sophia, and again, if these, and for anyone who's not familiar with these tools, you know what we'd be happy to I think the panelists would be happy to go over it if they if they have any familiarity with it as well. Pat snap. Okay, all right, so we're getting a general sense here of what kind of tools are used commonly and like there seems to be a number of tools that overlap between our tech transfer offices, which is great, great to see that our offices are of the same mind here. I'll let the answers keep going in the chat for anybody that wants to provide but I'm going to provide but I'm going to hand it over here to the panelists to answer what tools are commonly used. So folks, please take it away. Speaker 3 7:15 Yeah, I can start we use, you know, a database for our patenting, for docketing, for managing invention disclosures. We also use patent app a lot for patent searching, and that's been really helpful, both for us when we're doing our prior art searches, and we also use that heavily with our intern program when teaching how to do prior art searches, also global data for some market info, and we've been kind of trying out a few new tools that I'm not going to name today, because we're still in trial mode for those, but looking at, kind of the emerging role of AI and how we can use that to write marketing one pagers and kind of, I guess, look at what would be a good market, or some good companies that we might want to license to. Speaker 4 8:10 Okay for, for University of Washington, we use a wide variety of systems for for patent searches. We use for prior art searches. We use Google Scholar, Google patents, espasonnet, also UW library databases for our docketing system. We use an internal system that was created within IPP, and we've been using it for many years. We also use a combination of students and interns to help with some of the functions for prior searching, for IDSS and writing non confidential summaries for some of the more complex innovations. For biology or chemistry, we use a vendor invention evaluator to do commercial searches for us for prior art. Searches for us because they have the better they have the they're more equipped to do that. We're starting to use scale IP for commercial purposes. Our innovation managers are training to learn, unlearning the tool and using to help with their commercial efforts. So yeah, Speaker 5 9:23 okay, I can go. So I think as far as IP searches, we're mostly using Google patents. Some people prefer Pat snap, but I know like within the commercialization Academy, at least, we almost exclusively use Google patents when we're doing searches, and that seems to be also very popular based on a poll that we sent around the jhtv office for market research, we use BCC research and global data for comps. So we're using PitchBook and for for our docket, we. Use minuet. I think that has been very helpful as far as organization, especially between all the different arms, ojh, TV, yeah, I think that's that's most, most of what we use. Speaker 6 10:15 So our office is big on tools all along our workflow, starting from disclosure, intake or docketing. We use Sofia, but there are other tools like intium and minuet, and I saw a lot more in the chat. Next in line, we also do patent searching tools like Google patents and NL patents. And I did see Pat snap being used a lot as well. Followed by market research tools like trade space, Grand View research markets and markets and other market research reports out there. Followed by once, once we have a good idea of what the market is like, we do targeted outreach by using scale, IP, rocket, reach and zoom. Info might be like other places you can check for targeted outreach. And coming to the end. We once we have leads there, we do potential licensee informations or competitor informations and data that we need for term sheets. We pull them off pitch book and other resources. Speaker 2 11:38 Thanks everyone. So I guess at least to the next question to the panelists, how often are you using subscription based tools rather than freely available tools? I know there was, you know, all of us have mentioned Google patents, which obviously it's it's free. But again, like the question here is really, what is the preference for each of your respective TTOs for using subscription based tools rather than freely available. And when do you feel like that situation warrants it? Speaker 3 12:09 I'll go first. I'd say we mostly use subscription based tools here at Northwestern we do use global patents, and I think especially when doing prior art searching, it's really beneficial to use more than one tool just to make sure we're not missing out on anything that might pop up, you know, higher in the priority list in one tool than another. So, yeah, we use both for prior art searching. I think sometimes, with a subscription based tools, they can be a little more powerful sometimes or maybe combining functions. You know, there's more granularity. You're more able to kind of hone in on what exactly you're looking for. So I think that's one benefit we see for using subscription based tools, also the ability to maybe combine a few functions in one but I definitely, you know, see benefit in using both categories together. Speaker 4 13:10 I would say about the same as well. I i have found in my previous experience that using tools such as before it was Clarivate, Thomson, Reuters and questel have been more robust because you do have more access to different jurisdictions, and you're able to do more targeted searching, whereas some of the free platforms, it's, it's, it's a little bit tricky. And I and I have found that you can also use the metrics function, the metrics features in those subscription based models, to help further target your search and be more efficient. It, for me, it depends on the timing of when we get the request, do the patents or the prior art search, the type of technology that we search, and the platform that's being used. We find that for complex innovations such as chemistry or biology or or antibodies or proteins, we, you know, we either try to, we either have the search done by a commercial vendor, or we, or we, we do. We try to be more specific, because it some cases, our vendor have have a has a better chance to do a more targeted search for the compounds. You know, of course, that said, we some of the caveats. We have caveats we have to watch out for are when, how well you present the information to vendors and when and how well they can do the search for you, because sometimes they could search on something that could completely be outside the scope of your claims. So that's something to watch out for. So a lot of it depends on how you put together the information, as well as the timing, technology and platform. Speaker 5 14:57 Yeah, I think I agree with everything. Something that they just said, I think kind of just to add my two cents in, I think that a lot of the subscription based tools have information that's not necessarily readily available through the free tools as well. And so I think just even access to those databases is something that I utilize a lot, especially like global data, BCC research. So I think, yeah, again, I don't know the patent search tools as well. I really just favor Google patents. But it is not necessarily the most intuitive. I think you get a lot of results that are outside the realm of what you're looking for. So if there are, if I would be happy to try out these other tools and see if they are more effective than Google patents. Speaker 6 15:55 I guess our scenario is about the same. So to answer the question directly, we use both subscription and freely available tools on a daily basis, and we use them sometimes as a combination of both. Right for instance, say, we could pull data of any journal and then feed it into, say, a tool like a trade space to generate market summaries and have, say, a perplexity, or a co pilot, either either the free versions or the paid versions, to sort of have the executive summaries And the key advantages and whatnot. So I would say a mix of both. But the trick part would come in when it comes to the confidentiality part. The subscription models seem to have a shield for the confidentiality items up much more than what the freely available tools do. So that would be a distinguishing feature, but nevertheless, we can still use freely available tools to do a market research for faculty who do not disclose much to the office, but have the potential to do so, right? So I would say those are scenarios where we could prefer one over the other and get creative. Speaker 2 17:33 Thanks, everyone. I'm going to quickly take the opportunity here to just check the chat and see if there are any questions. I apologize, it's a little bit slow on my end. So panelists, if you are seeing any questions here, feel free to jump in. Okay. No, looks. Oh, unless, oh no, yep. And, of course, you're welcome to Stephanie McBride, we definitely wanted to include small and large offices here to give a variety of perspectives. I'll jump to the next question here, then. So we're getting the sense that it seems like there's a combination of subscription based and freely available tools that offices use. It's not really just a sole preference, obviously, for one or the other. So I guess the question here relating to actually Stephanie's point about different TTOs being able to talk about this. How does the structure and the size of your individual tto or your respective tto offices affect your tool choice and usage? Speaker 3 18:33 Yeah, for Northwestern most of the vendor tools, I think, are probably used by our invention management team, which again, is both patenting and licensing. So the prior art searching and the market analysis, we've got about 10 people, I think, on our our investment management team right now, so we're the majority of the ones who use those along with the interns who work with us. But our data management team has also been using some of the vendor tools like I mentioned. We're trying a few out to work on writing non confidential summaries and see if there's an easier way to kind of automate at least the first step of that to maybe produce something that we can then go in and fix up a little bit to make it exactly what we're looking for. Yeah, so mostly from our im team, but there are some tools that are more useful for data management or other teams within our office. Speaker 4 19:35 Okay, for for us, our we're part of the patent team. Is part of the whole innovation development team, which is about, let's say about little 1515, little around 15 people. And you know, as I mentioned, we're there six, six on the patent team. And, you know, and most, most of the rest of the teams composed. Of innovation managers and the licensing and IP Associates, and they the and the innovation managers do the commercialization aspects of the technology, so they'll use scale IP or other tools and services to define potential partners or be the first point of contact for inventors and and spin outs. They say they also, they also work with us in tandem with the patent team on any patent specific questions or any IP terms and licensing when, when needed. But we, we we work in we work in parallel, but we also work collaborative, collaboratively as well. And so that's, and that it's, I mean, it's worked out pretty well for us because they can, we, can both of us get both groups can bounce off questions or ideas off one another. Speaker 5 21:00 Yeah. So at JH TV, each technology, when it is reported, is assigned to an intellectual property manager and IPM and a technology licensing associate at TLA. And so these two will work together then to decide if this is something that is patentable, if it is marketable, and then they have a discussion with the inventor. So a lot of so they are going to be using a lot of these tools. They also can request market background, IP landscape, academic landscape from the commercialization Academy. And so a lot of our interns are using these on a daily to weekly basis as well. We also have fast forward, which is the arm of jhtv that supports Hopkins startups. And so they are also able to use these tools, and they're also able to request information from the commercialization Academy as well. And so I think that there's sort of, there's, there's a lot of people using these tools, and I think we all kind of use them a little bit differently, but I think that it's, it's important that we're all who have access to these tools and are using them, and keep continuing conversation between everybody that's on the team. Speaker 6 22:24 So much like what Elizabeth said, Our office also has the same access for all the tools for everyone. So when it comes to tool choice, ideally, we would want to have a tool that's useful for all subdivisions, say, right, from talking to portfolio management and the financials and agreements, right? So that's how the choice goes. Having said that one team may use one functionality more than what the others do. That's another factor that's taken into consideration as well. So off late, there's been a little bit more of a focus shift towards safe AI integration to help the innovation managers make informed decisions. So we as many other offices represented here, are evaluating some of those tools for safe integration and making better and informed decisions. Speaker 2 23:35 Thanks, Ashwin. Ashwin, we also brought up an excellent point about integration of AI into our tool usage again, I'm take that opportunity here to see if there are any questions again, especially relating to AI integration. I know that's a topic of constant discussion now with tech transfer offices. Okay, I'm not seeing any questions here so far, I apologize if I'm missing anyone again. Oh, there seems to be one here, tool. What tools and how are people using? Think, oh, for licensing and business development. I guess we broadly sort of answer that in a way here. So we'll move on to the next slide, Speaker 2 24:27 I apologize, it's the chat is blocking in here, but the question is, how often are you training staff on tools? Speaker 3 24:36 Yeah, we train new staff, of course, when they come to the office. We do a yearly training for our interim program. I think it depends a little bit on the tool, how often it's used, and also the types of training they provide. I know some tools will have, like webinars that they've recorded that are on YouTube. So sometimes that's a good way to brush up on things. But. We do sometimes, like we just did with a vendor tool, we're trying out, contacted the staff just to get, kind of like, a refresher on how to use it and some of the things that might be most useful to us. So I think it's been helpful to try to collect a number of people who are looking for that training or that refresher so that we're not asking them, you know, like every month to talk to one person in the office. But yeah, I think with a lot of these more powerful tools, there are a lot of features that we maybe are not aware of after the first training, or maybe we get a training, and there's just so much great information, it's hard to take it all in so those refreshers every couple months could be helpful. Yeah, Speaker 4 25:50 our process is similar to to Sarah's, and we so whenever, whenever a new hire joins, or we have a student, intern or student join, we, we give them training on using the platforms, everything from from Google to our own internal database, IPP, as well as any other tools that we that were needed and we, we would also do check ins once in a while to make sure that their questions are answered, or if they they have any concerns while using the tool or even their work product, or that we would check their work product at times in the first few, first few weeks, so that they can, they can they can onboard. They can have a pleasant onboarding experience. For the commercial side, it's, it's more or less the same thing we, you know, whenever someone new joins, we, we have a period of two weeks where we go through training and orientations to to show them the tools and to to walk them through their day to day tasks, and help, and help make sure that they again, that their onboarding experience is positive, because we work in a fast paced environment where we essentially start with the fire hose running, and so, you know, we want to make sure that it says it's as least chaotic as possible. Speaker 5 27:18 Yeah. I mean, I think ours is a similar experience to Sarah and Dave as well. I know within the comm Academy, anytime we get new fellows, it is up to a senior fellow. So I train my team on these tools for the full time staff. I'm assuming, again, they're having a similar training when they're first starting. We have also had vendors come and give trainings. I know we had, like someone from global data come and do a training in our office, just to make sure that even if, like Sarah was saying, even if it's a tool that someone's been using for a while, there may be things that they didn't realize they could do with with that tool. And I think that's something that would be useful to have with some regularity in the office as well. Speaker 6 28:06 Yeah. So our perspective, I would say it really depends on the tool as to how often training is needed. So as as many other offices do we also have for for new employees, at least a quick training session, but say for very new tools that are just being adopted, it can be brought up as part of initial negotiations with the vendor to have a customer success representative to frequently train and also receive feedback from the office personnel. In our case, our office conveys to the vendor what we want in terms of training. So we have tools where, with one tool, we have bi weekly meetings with the customer success representative. For one we have quarterly meetings. And for another one, for example, we have one on one sessions very frequently, or when, when the new person joins or as needed. And I guess in general, it can range anywhere from bi weekly and sort of taper down to an ad hoc basis. So the frequency can change depending on how easy, difficult the tool actually is to adapt and use. Speaker 2 29:49 Awesome. Thanks, everyone. I'm gonna quickly again just check on the chat here see if there are any questions. So far, I. A question here, has anyone found a tool that can extract data from minuet and load it back with updates that are less are managed on less clunky interfaces, like, I guess, exporting data from like CRM software has? Can anyone the panelists comment on that? Yeah, Speaker 3 30:22 yeah, we do export data frequently from we use intim minuet as well, and we'll export that into spreadsheets for sorting or analysis. I think was the question also about exporting and then bringing that back into the system with with additional insight. I don't think we've found a way to do that. It might exist, and we just haven't found it, but most of what we do is pulling information from our database to use it in other ways. Speaker 2 30:54 Awesome folks. So we've wrapped up on the questions here to the audience members, we asked our panelists to provide one insight and one recommendation based off of, you know, tools and how effective it is in decision making processes. So the next few slides will be dedicated to that panels. You know. Please feel free to like, you know, expound on your insight and recommendation for the audience. Sarah, Speaker 3 31:21 yeah, we talked about this a little bit already, but different tools might be useful for different teams within your tto. You know, from our invention management side, we do use mostly the patent searching and the marketing, but we're exploring, like I talked about, some of the tools that incorporate AI from maybe writing non confidential summaries or marketing. So yeah, I think it's important to talk to everybody around your office and figure out what they could use and what tools might be helpful for them. Yeah, and that kind of takes me to the second point too, just understanding what the different teams need. And there's a lot of tools out there right now that are kind of combining multiple functions, which can be great, but just making sure, with an IDA cost, you know, that we're not subscribing to multiple tools that are kind of approaching the same thing from the same way. So our office at a manager does kind of keep a list of what we have and what we need. And periodically, we'll check in and say, What are we using this tool for? What are we using this tool for? Do we need all these subscriptions? And sometimes we do, but just Yeah, kind of keeping a periodic inventory of what we're using each tool for and how important they are for our office has been helpful. Thank you. Sarah, Speaker 4 32:44 so I, I think I might be going out of, out on a limb here, but I think in the coming years, we're going to be, we're going to be finding more, more and more IP being generated for from from foreign countries, and, you know, foreign corporations. In fact, I think some of the technologies that I'm working on, I'm seeing, I'm seeing prior art from, you know, from from the Chinese patent office, from the Japanese patent office, from the Korean patent office, as well as, you know, as well as other countries. And so I'm thinking that's going to be, so that's going to be, that's going to be something that the commercial managers, or whoever helps with the licensing and commercialization aspects, will want to keep keep an eye on when they're trying to license their IP to commercial partners and and also when patent managers are searching, that's something that they want to keep an eye on as well, because, you know, we're seeing a lot more, you know, foreign IP being generated. Another thing as well, for my second point would be to regularly check in with your stakeholders and your commercial partners to you know, on their on their research, you know, whether it's faculty, students, researchers, postdocs, and just proactively work with them to find these potential partners and help commercialize their you know, commercialize the IP, because the be more proactive will will help and get an early start on commercialization. Unknown Speaker 34:20 Thanks, Steph Elizabeth, Speaker 5 34:23 hey, yeah. So for my first point, I want to talk a little bit about jHP is two to two policy. So this is an expectation that jhtv sets with inventors from the submission of the ROI. So within two days, two business days, of the report of invention being submitted, they the inventor will receive some communication from jhtv, assigning them a TLA and an IPM. Within two weeks, the TLA IPM will set up a meeting with the inventor to discuss their invention and to understand more about it, and then, within two months, they will come back with just. Vision on commercialization. And so to meet these, these deadlines at jhc, it's very important to be using these, these vendor tools, and also to utilize student engagement. So that brings me to my second point. So the commercialization Academy is, like probably wouldn't one of my favorite parts of JP, which maybe I'm biased as a commercialization Academy fellow, but I think that having students who are passionate about the science and passionate about learning more business skills, learning how to do these, these prior art searches, learning how to do market research, and then setting them up for success in a career that is outside academia. And also, I think we found that sort of one of the side effects of getting these students interested and invested is that then they're also bringing faculty into JH TV and getting them to kind of think about their research in more, more commercialization terms. So I think that that's very important, and it's it's good, it's a it's a win, win for jHP and for the students as well. We have, generally stem PhD students, we have med students, we have MBA students, we have post docs like myself, and I think it's a great program. And I know a couple of other panelists have talked about having interns, but I think that that's something that any tech transfer office could benefit from. Unknown Speaker 36:38 Thanks. Elizabeth Ashman, Unknown Speaker 36:41 yeah. So in terms of in, Unknown Speaker 36:52 oh, may have lost ash one, I'm not sure i Unknown Speaker 37:06 Hey, hello, can you hear me? Yes? Speaker 2 37:11 Ash, cutting out a little bit. Yeah, we can you now, Speaker 6 37:17 yeah. So what I was saying was utilizing a tool to the fullest would be any offices goal. So maintaining relationship with the customer success representative or personnel, and holding frequent meetings with them would really help find that brand effectiveness in using that tool. And when it comes to rotation, I would say learning from peers would be the best way to go. Unknown Speaker 38:02 Ashram. Ashwin cut out again, everyone, I can't. Speaker 2 38:15 All right, well, I'll give Ashwin or maybe a couple seconds here to reconnect. In the meantime, we'll see if we have any questions. Okay, nothing so far. Unknown Speaker 38:34 Sorry, can you hear me now? Yes, ashram, we Unknown Speaker 38:36 can hear you. Go ahead, yeah. Speaker 6 38:39 Sorry, I'm having some internet issues here. I apologize. So I was, I was trying to say for the inside, maintaining that relationship with vendors would help try and maximize the utility for using the tool to find value and maximize effectiveness. Please, don't be pressurized into making any decisions because of the vendor trying to, you know, push things unless you find value, and unless the tool fits within your workflow, it might not be the best tool. So give it, give it the time it needs before choosing what tool it is, and in terms of recommendation, what I would say is Peer Assisted Learning is something that has helped our office, because we, all of us trying to use a new tool start at The same stage, so everybody has different appetite for learning, but everybody would have gone through the same trouble as where you are, so holding internal team info sessions might be a good way to adapt to a new tool easily. Thanks. Applause. Awesome. Speaker 2 40:00 Thank you so much. Ashwin, and I believe that concludes the webinar. I'm going to thank all the panelists and the folks at JTV that helped put the put this webinar together. I will stop sharing now. I'm not seeing any questions, or at least too many questions in the chat here. Speaker 2 40:29 Okay, all right, thanks again to the panelists, and thanks to the audience for tuning into this webinar. We appreciate your time. Speaker 1 40:37 Thank you so much Cynthia. And on behalf of autumn, I would like to thank all of our panelists for the informative presentation today, and thank you again to our online sponsor, Marshall Gerstein. A recording of this webinar will be available for viewing in the autumn Learning Center within a week of this event, and is scheduled with your registrations. Please be sure to complete the webinar evaluation, which will open immediately when you sign off this session, and thank you for being a part of today's presentation. Thank you again to all of our presenters, and have a great afternoon. Everyone. Bye, bye, Unknown Speaker 41:12 thank you. Thank you. Bye. Transcribed by https://otter.ai