M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
Date: March 11, 2008
Duration: 0 / 36:39
Good afternoon everybody. It's my pleasure to open session
number three of our course ideas on fire. What we plan today is
to really look at the intellectual property issues, issues relating to
technology transfer so that everybody of you knows what to do when you
have an idea. How do you go from an idea to tell your university,
in this case University of Texas, that you have an idea and what do you
do with it how do you disclose it? What do they do with your
disclosure? How do they work it? And then once we got a
little handle on that what do we do when we commercialize? This
is license, where to start up, these issues. Once we go through all
that the last speaker will talk about conflict of interest issues
because we faculty, we have some problems when we wanna start up
companies and there are some rules that we have to follow to be good
citizens within the institution and so the last the speaker will talk
about these things what is allowed, what it is not allowed? And
again, you know, you're an entrepreneur you are thinking outside the
box. There is still stuff you can do outside the box that is
still perfectly legal and within the conflict of interest rules.
So, we're gonna try to tell you what that all is, okay.
So
our first speaker is a pleasure to announce to me we have here Dr.
Keith McDowell. He is the Vice-Chancellor for Research and Technology
Transfer at The University of Texas System and we remember this is an
office that has a budget of a little bit more than $2 billion and you
correct me if it is $3 or $4 billion in the meantime as I understand it
is growing by the day. So they do both sides. They do the
whole funding grants coming in all 15 campuses of the UT system and as
well trying to streamline the processes in the technology transfer
area. And they just announced as you know from the two sessions
ago with Cathy Swain who is the assistant Vice-Chancellor. She
announced the stiff fund, the technician ignition fund and I think
we'll hear a little bit more today. So they don't just do the
talk. They walk the walk and they make sure that there is some
money behind it because money talks, we know that, right.
So Dr. Keith McDowell came. He was chair of chemistry and
biochemistry at UT Arlington and after that he was kinda drawn away to
the deep south Alabama and started a tech transfer office over there
and was in charge of research. In the meantime he was somewhere
dean of a graduate school I saw. So he did, he hit all these
points, you know, that you wanna hit with the target. And then I
think just about six months ago he got recruited back into the UT
system to become the vice-chancellor for research and tech
transfer. So, it is my pleasure to introduce to you Dr. Keith
McDowell.
[ Applause ]
Well, thank you. It is really a pleasure to be here in
particular to be back in front of an audience and in some sense
students. It's been quite sometimes since I've actually been in a
classroom. I've been on the dark side, you know, I've seen your
administrators since about 2000 and so I have not much opportunity to
do things like this. So it is a real pleasure for me to be back
here in to a classroom and to be with you folks today.
You
are probably wondering about the title to my presentation today "Beware
of Dog." You're gonna find as I talk. I'm gonna try to
intersperse my comments today with perhaps some stories and a little
bit of humor because my view in terms of doing this thing you have to
have a certain amount of humor and fun with life because if you don't
why do this? So, and then so you are asking, okay why beware of
dog and what really is that got to do with talking about discovery to
commercialization and intellectual property? Well, I picked that
particular image and in fact I thought about it for a week or so when
they asked me to do this, talk about because sometimes the title to the
talk actually can be very interesting and tell you a lot about what it
is you are going to say. So, I actually googled "Beware of Dog"
got 198,000 hits on that believe it or not. And in particular and
it gave me just exactly what I wanted. Particularly the next slide will
show you what would you get when you do this "Beware of Dog?" You
get, you know, the whole image of the sign and the jokes and what have
you in particular the dog on the left, you know, is your
policeman. The dog that growls at you in your yard and all that
then here on the right you have the little yipper, you know, it isn't
gonna do much to you.
So the message I wanna send and leave you with if you walk out of here
with nothing else from me in my perspective at looking at things is
beware of dog. What I mean by that in particular in discovery to
commercialization of intellectual property is all the images that come
to you with beware of dog. It can be I fear is the most, boy this is
really tough, you know, how do I do this to, well this isn't so hard or
whatever. You know, it is in the eye of the beholder a little bit
about what this whole operation is. You still have to
learn. You have to know things about it. But if you keep
the image of the little sign on this that says, "Beware of Dog" and all
the kind of images that can go with that I think that will help you
understand at least some of my comments today.
So the big question is, "Why me? Why am I standing up here?"
Other than the fact that I am the vice-chancellor for research and
technology transfer, that doesn't really, you know, qualify me for much
of anything to talk about commercialization. Well, I've been a
faculty member, PI on lots of grass and got publications. As
mentioned I've been an administrator at just about every level I think
you can be in an institution I've tried to get away from the
administration a couple of times they always drag me back. I also
had a very unique experience that a lot of people with university and
things don't have. I spent 10 years at Los Alamos national laboratory
at mid level management. So I had an opportunity to see a
different perspective from discovery to commercialization.
There is not so much discovery to commercialization as there's
discovery to deployment. So I had the chance to see that. I've been a vice president for research at two different universities,
UT Arlington and the University of Alabama, and so I had a, I've had
some different perspectives on that and I hope to say a few things
about that today. In fact, I've also had the opportunity during
my career to help get started two different incubators, one at UT
Arlington and one at Alabama. So some experiences with that, that
I'm not gonna talk about it today but I'll certainly entertain
questions about it if you want to.
Another thing that we did at Alabama that I'm gonna say a little bit
about later on has to do with innovation. In other words, after
you've made your discoveries and you've done your, you know, you're
ready to move on and send it out on the street or whatever. What
do we do with that intellectual property that's sitting there because a
lot of times it is very ill-formed and there's lots that can be done at
the innovation level with that and do we form as universities a center
to do that? Do we hire people to take where you've taken it and
then to take it further to do the development side of the issue.
And of course my answer to that is in the 21st century yes because we
did that at Alabama with this AIM center. Just a couple of
comments too, let me paraphrase these last two by saying that as I did
at the beginning a few minutes ago that I don't consider myself a
technology transfer professional. I am a person that's been, you
know, a scientist. In fact, I told people I spend a lot of time
studying infinity and most of my 70 papers probably people would accuse
me of studying infinity too much, you know, and not of that I can
assure you is commercialized well any of the works that I had an
opportunity to do. So I don't consider myself a professional
technology transfer person. To somebody that's gotten into this
but in any case in terms of managing teams I thought I would just
mention to you that two things that have happened basically at Alabama,
my experiences there a year or so ago with the BASF corporation.
We did some deal structuring and the team and I do credit the team with
this suggest they happen to report to me. They won the LES
Societies Deal of the Year Award. And I got to see, you know,
what goes in to making a deal that can be the deal of the year. That particular deal took about a year to negotiate, very interesting
process in doing that.
I also had the experience at the University of Alabama being part of
and working the deal for a start up company. I'm gonna keep their name
private here because they never like for you to tell how much, you
know, monies and what went on with it. It was roughly a $50
million deal. Now, I know a lot of this and I'm gonna get to this
in a little bit. You are going to experience the, you know, the
time issue. How long does it take to do anything? Well, I'd
probably win the award for the slowest deal time on this planet and
this particular deal hurt because it took three years to negotiate this
deal. But in actual fact, everyone associated with the deal was
perfectly happy because it took three years to make it go. There
was no, you know, nobody had any problems with the fact that it took
three years. So, sometimes when I hear people in congress, you
know, or people talking to congress about how slow universities are and
all this, you know, sometimes the deal structure just takes three years.
So that is what I made and let me see if I can blow a few of through a
few things here, to give you some feeling for why we might be in this
position. A lot of times again speaking from the system level I
get asked the question, why commercialization and the more the regions
and wherever it is? And now, why are we doing this? I
thought I would put it in this one slide this came from the World Bank
and has something of the reasons why we do this and you can immediately
see the blue car versus the yellow car. We see that China.
Their GDP is expected and this is World Bank projections in 2012 to
surpass that of the United States. And so that causes a lot of
concern by the politicians. Overlaid with that is again the great
stuff that researchers do and I have to mention this book the
Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil if you haven't read it. Yeah,
it's an interesting book.
I certainly wouldn't recommend it if you try to read it and it will
absolutely put you to sleep. It's one of the most boring book
I've ever read but profound at the same time if any of you try to read
this book. And I bring this up just to mention the discovery and
the things and where we're headed. Kurzweil has predicted
something called the singularity. In essence what he is talking
about is nanoborg or what, you know were all gonna be turned into
nanoborg. I actually have my computer chips inserted into each of
my ears because I am slightly hearing impaired. You know,
eventually they're gonna stick 'em inside of me and I am probably
gonna--and these are wireless. Now, they're gonna be wireless
inside of my head or whatever. We are going to become the
nanoborg whether we like it or not. Not only that we're gonna
have, you know, chips and so forth attached to our brains so we've got
all kinds of infinite storage capacity or whatever and then there's
gonna come the day when one of these computers because of the
complexity of the circuits as we build 3D chips and so forth is going
to become center. And what are we gonna do when that happens, now
you got the cylons for those of you that like to watch Battlestar
Galactica.
And so, you know, there's all these great stuff going on and you in
particular in the life science side of it I suppose--I still happen to
be a chemical physicist myself. We're gonna be right at the
forefront of all these things that are going along and what we have to
do with that. So, I say that then to get us to discovery.
Now, you've had your discoveries. Let met get a little bit more
pragmatic. Now, what I wanna do is I say for the next few slides
is just talk to you from the perspective of a person who sat at high
altitude and looked down on these things and give you a little bit of
my own view of what goes on. So the issue with discovery is first
thing, do I disclose? And as I indicated to you an awful a lot of
stuff that comes through really doesn't need to be disclosed.
It's you know, studying infinity as the kind of things that I do.
A lot of things do need to be disclosed. Well, you know,
discoveries and ideas are not necessarily gonna turn on to some kind of
intellectual property by itself. Somebody has to make a decision
about that.
So the question for you is how do I know and I know there is gonna be
some probably or other speakers are gonna talk about this but there is
a point I wanted to make when I put this slide in. You need to
talk to your professionals in your tech transfer office immediately as
soon as you can. Don't wait any time at all. Go in and talk
to them because one message I wanna get across today is your tech
transfer folks or your commercialization folks are professionals.
They know how to do this really well. Talk to your
colleagues. Also don't forget, believe it or not that a lot of
grants and contracts that you have. You have a federal obligation
to report it. In fact, an awful lot of faculty don't realize
that. For example, in the office of Naval Research I think it's
60 days from the moment you have you're "aha" moment, you're suppose to
report it to the ONR. Now, how many people actually do
that? Of course, it is almost no one. So, ONR did a little
study about that a few years ago and they were not happy to find out
that faculty were not reporting their "aha" moments to them. So,
you do you have federal obligations.
Another point I wanna make is that you may not be recognized but across
the entire University of Texas System we have almost a hundred people
doing technology transfer of one sort or another. It's actually
more than a hundred if you count people like myself. So we are a
very substantial operation in the UT system in terms of technology
transfer. What about the invention disclosure? I know
you're gonna hear some more about that today but I've got to get my two
cents when after listening to these things for six or seven
years. And my storyline on this is this what I'd say, get the
storyline up front in the first 25 words or less if you possibly can
because most of the people sitting on your invention disclosure
committee meeting are not gonna understand anything at all about the
technology or the science or whatever it is you are talking
about. They are gonna tuned it out very quickly because in a lot
of times while the science is absolutely essential and you are great at
explaining it to people that is not the main message.
Also I talked to people, I spent a lot of time in Washington over the
years talking to congress and to congressmen and so forth and I can
tell you when you wanna do something to them we call it the elevator
speech. You know, you have to do it in about two minutes.
You walk in, you say, "I want the congressman". You say "Hello
and how's everything back in Texas" or whatever and then two minutes
later you better have done whatever is you gonna do business with them,
are you finished? That's how quick it is. And so how do you
that? People ask me that. Well, I say it is tag line, tag
line, tag line or punch line whatever it is and I've listed a few here
kind of expressions you can use. Like GNP in a box, Marks in,
smart bay, whatever it is. If save the whales, if you got a tag
line or something that you can put together that will help everybody
remember what it is you are trying to sell to them that is great.
I mean you can't walk in and say well, gee, you know, I am looking at
hyperfine resonance in the vanadium oxide compounds and that's really
gonna be very important to the world. I can assure you nobody is
gonna be listening to you after you get to vanadium oxide or something
like that. So tag lines are important. That is just my view
on that.
Another point that I wanna talk about just for a minute that can get
confusing and ask the question I always enjoy asking this
question. What is intellectual property? So, again having
some fun I asked some legal people and you know, I heard the Charlie
Brown nye-nye-nye-nye and then they got to this intangible rights
treated as property manifested by a patent as then I tuned out again
after that. So for the legal side of the house it is not your
widget or whatever, it is the patents, it is the copyright, that is
what they think of when they think of intellectual property. You
- when you think of it and why, what I tend to think of it. I
have to think in two different ways about this. So, I think about
the widget, you know, my watch or whatever. That is the
intellectual property. You have to pay attention to which sphere
you are in when you are talking about intellectual property and what
people mean by intellectual property. Who owns it? Well, of
course here in the UT system the regents own it that. There are
some exclusions around. For example we all know the scholarly
works are excluded. The books that you write and so forth unless
the university or whatever commissions you to do it.
Depending on the institution that you're at. You can also
maybe do intellectual property and own it if you do it in your
garage. It depends on the institution. There is no believe
it or not system view towards that. We have some regents rules,
they are very broad. They can depend on, depending on the
institution, the scope of your work. Usually scope of work means
you can't do it in your garage if it is you know, if your s chemistry
faculty remember when you did chemistry in your garage that scope of
work. Some institutions use job description that has to be
specifically in your job description, so there is all kind of legalese
about that. You need to know what the situation is wherever it is you
work as to who owns the intellectual property because this can be
really big. And I can tell you the courts generally are not gonna
favor the faculty member, unless it is really clear that they own
it. The courts are almost always going to this side for and the
fact that you, the company, you know, the notion is that the company
owns it.
So those issues. Another thing that comes up is what I call
a validation of the invention. That gets to the notion of proof
of concept, production of practice, prototype. Again, there's
lots of buzz words that go around. And this gets to a point that
I mentioned a minute ago that batteries not included. What I mean
by that is again sometimes you really do have to innovate on top of
whatever it is that you're doing and maybe your institution needs to
have an innovation center to do that. I was mentioning one at
lunch just a little while ago, it happened at the University of
Alabama. We have something we just call ionic liquids, these are
basically organic ions that get together and form a liquid. And
there is probably a thousand ionic liquids now and you know, once
you've thought up the various ionic liquids, the trick is that does in
essence an enabling technology. Now, what do you do with
it? It turns out that there is some ionic liquids that will
dissolve cellulose and will dissolve biomass. That is really
important to be able to dissolve cellulose for those of you that pay
attention to the biomass argument. So, if you can do that but
also hmm well, gee. I can dissolve cellulose but now I can make
cellulose with plastics and I kind do all kinds of things. So, if
you own the core technology ionic liquids, now you have an innovation
center that's sitting there thinking about all the possible kinds of
tricks you can do with an ionic liquid and there's a lot once you start
thinking about that. We were very lucky at the University of
Alabama that we had a particular core technology that worked really
well for us to create this innovation center to help people working on
that.
My grant will not pay for this that is a typical comment that I hear
from faculty and it is true. Most of your grants are not going to
pay for proof of concept or innovative research or something like that
on top of it. So, we've created, I'm just briefly gonna mentioned
it here and I'll come back to it a little later, we've created
something called the Texas Ignition Fund at UT system. These
$50,000 grants and they are proof of concept kinds of grants.
We've just had the first round come in about 16 proposals they came in
within two weeks and we will soon be awarding those. I'm not gonna say
much more about that about the Texas Ignition Fund except they are not
intended to be research grants. So they really are intended to be
some money that we can put in really early to make things happen.
We want that to happen again. We got to have money in the game to
make it go.
Another thing that happens along here is what is called sometimes
devaluation of intellectual property and there are lots of ways of
doing that. You know, you can have your market studies, you can
have students do it and sometimes they can get expensive to do
that. You can have external experts come in and try to tell you
how to do it. Sometimes and I've done this at various
universities. We've had venture capital people or entrepreneurs
or folks like under a non-disclosure agreement to sit on their
invention disclosure committee 'cause they're really good at helping
you to make those kinds of decisions about valuation.
One point I really wanna make in getting across on the valuation
of IP to all of you today and that's to manage your expectations about
what you're gonna get out of it. If there is any simple message on
evaluation of IP is just that one because everybody comes into thinking
they got the latest and greatest mouse strap or whatever it is and they
can't possibly be that there is no market for this. I mean it's
the most wonderful idea in the world. But, you know, they didn't
get to talk to the market experts because it maybe that you're just
gonna go out and compete in the big market and the people are gonna
have to change their equip meter or whatever it is; it is gonna be so
much cost to change to what did you do. There are so many reasons
why that great idea which is a great idea and a new invention is just
not gonna make commercially viable. So you need to manage their
expectations. Remember, it's only worth when somebody is gonna
pay for it. It is not worth what you think it's worth.
Another thing I usually try to bring up to faculty on this one,
I've run in so many issues whereas they often don't understand the
revenue of distribution policy of the institutions. Again, while
there are regions rules about this, each of the institutions in
University of Texas System has a different way that they do their
revenue distribution policy. So when you are doing the evaluation
of your IP, make sure you understand what those are. Now, we get
to protecting the IP in the "Beware of Dog" of business. Actually
I only made it one transparency or slide for you today. And there
are lots of different methods and I've listed them for you.
Again, protecting and I feel you really well I can involve some
exercises in doing things and certainly patents can ultimately be a
whole lot more work in the faculty usually things they are. Now,
everybody the common complaint is part of this as I mentioned
disclosure for many of you to have a short form or long form and I've
had a faculty come and say, Oh gosh so long and I want the short form
two pages allowed and that's it. That's great but the minute you
get to do patent, you're gonna be talking with some patent lawyers,
some boutique patent lawyers or whoever it is, not a guarantee.
You don't have to do the work to do all that stuff from the patent
because the people in the invention disclosure committee have no idea
how to explain it as well as you can do it. So ultimately,
particularly on patents, you're gonna have to do a certain amount of
work with that. An issue that has always comes out but I'm not
gonna go into detail on it because the a little bit on how each tech
transfer office handles it but lot, in fact, come in who've never done
it before usually have this concern about publication. And to be
honest then, in my six and seven years of doing this, I'm talking about
a lot of professionals; I've never seen the publication issue to be a
real problem. If you got any kind of tech transfer office that
knows how to work with this and you show up on day 1 with your
invention, with your discovery that you wanna talk about, the
publication issue should not be an issue whatsoever for you. Now
we can start getting to interesting part thing here and I'm gonna see
if I can speed up a little bit here. You get, now you know, we've
got to protect and so forth. We gonna do tech transfer. And
typically what that means now is that it means license versus start-up
and so I've put down a number of my favorite little expressions here
that I hear from people on this. I don't have time for
this. I don't make cash. You know, I've got 16 grants and
you know, 30 graduate students at post stocks and blah, blah, blah and
that's true, they don't. So that you know, that's why you need to
be talking about your tech transfer. If you want to be an
entrepreneur, hopefully, you are gonna have time for that. I'll
take cash up front. That usually what happens but this time if
they've gotten through all the patent and they've worked with the
lawyers, you know, oh men, I won't cash up front. The BASF deal,
the faculty members so said, with that, I am sure he would mind telling
the story. He walked in and said, "You know, I am the world's
greatest negotiator." I said, "No, you are the world's greatest
salesman, maybe you're a terrible negotiator 'cause would he wanna
do? He was willing to walk in the BASF that this is the Deal of
the Year award. And asked for half million dollars cash on the
barrel he had not set. Well, when we finally settled that deal,
that's probably gonna be worth about maybe you know, some of my friends
have made a million dollars a year to this faculty member in his own
pocket. Plus we got a sponsored research agreement for about 300,
400, 000 dollars a year for this person. So he is gonna be
driving his Lamborghini around, you know, his past portion of the
public forced thing. He didn't force. He's gonna be driving
something else with that kind of money. So, you know, sometimes
cash upfront is
the easy way out. Another game that sometimes I've heard also the
equity, boy, I love paper. I mean if you give me the equity I
won't, you know, paper for this, hold this paper because I know this is
gonna multiply a zillion times and I'm gonna be enormously rich.
Well, most of us know that a paper is just paper if you deal with
paper, paper isn't money folks. So, you need to think twice of,
you know, whatever it is. There is another one that happened to
be not too long ago but the nice person for making you rich said, you
know, they come in to me with this and I have a faculty member about a
year ago that had one of these sort of instances and just, I mean, it
is a New York folks involved with this particular one and they had
absolutely convinced this faculty member that you know, you just do it
my way and what we promise you will be very rich. I knew they're
gonna have some problems particularly like one story, you know;
sometimes you get the punch line exactly right on the first
instance. We've had about some meetings and the next day they
come in, they got the New York lawyer in about seven or eight more
people and they surround me on this table and then lawyer sitting there
and he looks me and says, "I'm really sorry that we got you outnumbered
and surrounded like this." So, I looked at him and I sort of
doing this and I stopped and I looked on and I said, "Not yet." And the
guy just, I mean, did his whole case after that because you know what
because he thought he is gonna somehow, you know, forgotten
Alabama. He is gonna make this thing go. Ultimately, that
faculty member came back and worked with us and then, you know the
hatch of it because this makes you rich folks. One that makes you
rich. They were just gonna take his money, you know, take his
intellectual property and get away with very small potatoes. So
you've gotta watch out for that. Then there's the other side of
the house, you know, I don't need your help. I'm in charge.
I'm the world's greatest entrepreneur, you know, and sometimes that's
true. And hopefully the tech transfer office and the people have
worked together enough for the people to see that indeed you are.
I mean if that's the case what, you know, go for it. Most of the
time that's not the case. You really do need help. Now, you
can tell when you're gonna, when you're starting to get some of these
pushbacks from your tech transfer always on the list. I heard I
just gave you few of the acronyms that go with it. So, if they
are pushing back, here is what you are gonna here, "Well, you know,
there are a lot of research and here is the nerve effect sounds like
pre-evaluation of IP." Don't forget the IRS is gonna get you with that
one. That brown eyed tip blah, blah, blah. I mean there is
about 30 or 40 of these little catch prizes, you know, that they really
like to do with faculty and you maybe get familiar with some of those
and make sure that you do understand when that person is using as
various prices when you want to know what it is that they are talking
about. Let me switch a little bit to commercialization issues and
I'll try to finish up fairly quickly with some of these. This is
more moving a little bit broader skill than just individuals and people
trying to become an entrepreneur. As you know, there are lots of
goings on watching about the BiDole and testimony about whether or not
BiDole as you get rid of it and so forth and I don't think so. I
mean there are some things around the edges that need to be downloaded
by BiDole and most people have taken the view of a reporter from the
Department of Higher Education that calls that a stable marriage with a
question mark and those of you that are married and they really don't
know what a stable marriage means. I think that's really what
we've got with BiDole universities. These are stable marriage and
all the things that that implies. Another commercialization
issue, business decisions versus lawyering. Lawyers love the red
line. I mean they got Microsoft Word and we can email and we can
red line forever. It's just amazing to me how many times you can
get a red line. That will slow things down. So, everybody
whether it is you, it is the entrepreneur, or the tech transfer officer
there, comes a timer once in a while, we have to make the business
decision. One of the things we did with that 50 million-dollar
deal it was, it got stuck in lawyering. So what do we do?
We put our lawyers on a plane from Birmingham, Alabama flew into
Washington and made them sit in a room with the business folks sitting
in another room breaking coffee and having a good time. All
lawyers are doing a Marka and said, you know, we're not gonna stop
until you finish with this. Because we know what the business
decisions are, so you the legal thing figure it out. It took them
about a day and a half and it costs the money but like I say a
50-million dollar company cannot follow that. Deal making.
I could give an entire talk on deal making. Those who work for me
know overtime in watching this. My view of this whole business in
commercialization is let's make a deal. I mean if you are not
willing to try to get into deal making space and make a deal, you know,
for example, I had situations when I stepped into a couple of these
jobs where, you know, they had this sheet that said, "Well, gee if we
do this and so it has to be 3 percent royalty or more or not
less." You know, 2.9 not gonna work. Well, that's not a
very good deal and now it gets me to the next point which I think is
the single problem that goes on all these things and I call it
negotiation skills. And this here I am beating up a little bit
not only on the tech transfer offices but on the venture capital as
everybody else. And like that lawyer from New York who came in
and try to play his tricks with me. I mean you can be, you can
now everything there is, you know, tech transfer. BiDole, you can
put the chapter and verse. You can know everything about deal
structuring but if you don't have any negotiations and negotiate the
deal. Now what I have found so many times in these things is that
people just lack negotiation, basic fundamental negotiation skills and
they need to take one on one on how to do this. So this is
something that I take. Stop passing and start fixing. Again
this is a lot of goings on. It occurs here in the state. It
occurs in Washington. It occurs, you know, some of our large
corporate Americas as we don't know how to do this. We're
off-shoring and all these sorts of things. A lot of this is
actually and dull stories and really it is like self fulfilling
prophecy because I've asked a lot of times, "Can you please quote to me
the deal where you had this problem?" And of course they
can't. You know, well I heard it at the water cooler. And
so and you track around. You can never find out what it was that
was the problem, so you can go fix it. So we need to deal with
that issue. Another issue that comes up is what I call the
spectrum of deal space and sectors in tech transfer because again
sometimes if you are, particularly this happens with the external
venture capital, external entrepreneur folks who come to the University
of Texas system transfer offices and I say, "Well, you know, whatever
their monitor is. What they forget is they are just doing one
sector usually, one area and the university has to deal with the entire
spectrum of the space of deal making in industry on every single
day. And that's not easy to do. Deals are
situational. They are people dependent. I'm running a
little low on time here so I won't get you on some of my stories about
the gamesmanship. You can play with making deals but you gonna
have a lot of fun with that. I think another thing as happening a
little bit right now is we have 2 million dollars tracing to a few
quality deals. There is a quite a lot of money out there. I
mean, money is not then an object that I've seen in the last six or
seven years. You can find the money if you got the quality deal to go
with. I do not find that would be a problem. All through
with R and D, you know, again that's the threat of universities.
If you would just give us everything you own, all your intellectual
property, we'll give you this wonderful sponsored research very much
for your faculty. It might be 50,000 dollars a year or 100,000
dollars or something with a number like that and they blame and they go
to congress and say, is this intellectual property that's the
issue. Well, I don't believe that for a minute. I mean the
reason why companies are off-shoring is labor costs in intellectual
property and in fact when I sit down with them again and ask for the
specifics of it, they often have a very difficult time coming up on
specific. I've already mentioned basics science versus innovation
a little bit. I think there is a real debate that we need to have
about universities as Eco Deve [phonetic] engines economic
development. I didn't know about the Eco Deve then I got to Texas
and now I've learned all about Eco Deve so you can put that in your
vocabulary now. That's the real issue that we gotta deal with but
you've heard my opinion. I think in the 21st century,
universities do have the tech transfer and we have to figure out how to
do in some measure certain pieces of commercialization apart. If
you're really interested in some of the issues, there is a document
called nine points to consider in licensing and University Technology
came out a year or so ago. If you'll take that and Google that
you can find that is an interesting document to read. There are
lots of things going on in Washington again from high altitude or
something called the university industry demonstration partnership
where we got the people together. They meet regularly in
Washington to talk about all these issues BiDole, you know, outsourcing
all these kind of things I've been mentioning on these two
slides. Here's that group that is doing that. You might
Google them again and get some of their information. I do wanna
just finish up with a couple of slides on you know, with the Texas
system. Just to remind you that we are a very large operation and
we do lots of deals everyday. Again, this is my sector business
and my sector argument. Again, the last five, in a five-year time
frame we have almost three thousand invention disclosures, 553 patents,
lots of licenses, 151 million dollars in gross IP revenues, 66 start-up
companies. So The University of Texas system as a system is
doing, you know, we're doing deals constantly all the time. I've
mentioned the Ignite Texas initiative there with the Texas Edition Fund
and we got these ideas on fire program. We've also got a number
of other things I know Kathy talked about this so I won't spend any
real time with that. In the past, we have done the
showcases. We did one in 2007. I was talking about the
possibility of doing others. We're also getting some of our
smaller institutions to work together to have joint technology transfer
offices and try to again to deal with the issue of sector space on how
expertise throughout the entire University of Texas system. They
can deal of whatever sector you happened to be in. We also have a
group, you may not know about, called the University of Texas
Technology Management Council. They have something called special
interest groups or SIGS and we have three of them and one of them is
new ventures and start ups. They have a phone conference call
every month talking about all the issues involved with deal structuring
and so forth. Also, you've met Cathy Swain, my assistant
vice-chancellor, we've actually and you know, we have a person in my
office that works full time just on commercialization. I don't
tech transfer but with commercialization side. I wanted to end up
since I am here in Huston and you know, Rice is just down the road with
Richard Smolley, I started talking about discoveries you know, in the
computer center so that's gonna become essential one of these days and
all this I really borrow this from Rich Smolley, unfortunately, passed
away about a year ago and Smolley challenged all of us. He wrote
down what he thought were the 10 most important things that we needed
to be working on in the 21st century. Of course, he liked energy
first and always told you to send the money to him, water and
food. Now, you may not realize this but the engineers' society,
US Engineering Society, National Academy of Engineers recently did a
study and they wrote down, I think I don't remember the exact number
because it was about 20 areas to do research in. These are the
most critical issues for the 21st century. And then they put it
out on the web, you get to vote, you know, which one you like and so
what are the top vote-getters. The first two top vote-getters
were energy and the third one was water. And a little bit for the
down was food. So Smolley had it all figured out a couple of
years ago. So, you know, whatever it is you do with your
inventions and disclosures, if you want to plot a play in the world of
the 21st century, is simply as this list is. These are the things
you should be working on in trying to create inventions and discoveries
that will help us in these areas. So with that, I believe that is
my last one and I'm gonna stop. Thank you.
[ Applause ]
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