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Name: BeefCAMPus
Author: ErnstMax Nielsen
Subject: Welcome to the "BeefCAMPus Container"
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Welcome to the BeefCAMPus "Container".
You can request a password from me at max@icnet.dk and you may be granted access to the files I use for my courses , workshops and mentoring in the BeefCAMPus context .
Click on your browser navigator to get back to the main page
Name: wtb1
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Preamble & Introduction
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(I) Where's the Beef? Introduction
This series of articles are dedicated to discuss a methodology I call "Where's the Beef". Inventors (professor or otherwise) approach the Technology transfer offices (TOs) of Europe regularly – probably in excess of 100,000 times every year – so we induce from surveys of university tech transfer offices.
For all players the big question is: is it worthwhile time and effort to try to commercialize (of the professor, the TO etc)? Gradually the staff of a TO builds up a portfolio of IPR. A common practice is to file a patent application immediately in order to protect potentially valuable intellectual property. But hereafter – we also know – very few inventions make it to the market place. A lot of effort may have been wasted in IPR management. Pick the winner? If only we had a method to ”pick winners” at an early stage, it would be possible
to weed out those inventions, which will never make it.
Not only the TO staff meet this challenge in their daily practice. Typical seed and venture capital portfolio managers report about how they carry out such a filtering process and find the ”one out of a thousand opportunities”, in some stages based on time consuming ”Technology Valuation".
The poor record (1:1000) is the background for my using the very American expression : Where’s the Beef? Which refers to a famous article in the Journal of The Smithsonian Institute and then a US TV ad for Wendy's burgers about disappointment after our hero having bought a sales message (”buy my burger sandwich!”. After which I open it and see no beef), which turns out to promise more than it holds. Quite often this is the experience for the TO manager or the investor.
The topic, the challenge, therefore, is to look through the invention, understand it and decide whether there will be a business opportunity in it.
Over a period of ten years I have developed a simple, quick-and-dirty methodology in "clinics", workshops, brainstorm sessions etc.
In this series of articles I am going to engage you in discussions about cases, methodology and theoretical backgrounds for the exercises. I am going to take you through some rather simple cases from consumer goods via the automotive sector, health and biotechnology to test the framework I suggest to adopt.
In my “Where’s the Beef” workshops I am going to engage you in how to find the Beef- if any- through discussions about cases, methodology and theoretical backgrounds for the exercises. I am going to take you through some rather simple cases from the consumer goods industry via the automotive sector, health and into biotechnology to present and test the method. I’m not suggesting we can ”pick winners”, but we can make some substantial statements about the potential, if or when our invention hits the market. I claim that we can find the Beef (if there is any) in 1 to 5 working days depending on the nature of the invention and on your level of experience and training.
The most important questions to answer are:
Is the Novel part of the invention good as well? Does it stand out against the ”art”?
Is the Good part, on the other hand, novel?
"Where's the beef?" is a catch phrase, which has, since its first usage, become a somewhat universal, all-purpose phrase questioning the substance of an idea, event or product.It came to public attention in a 1980s television commercial as part of a fast food advertising campaign for the Wendy's chain of hamburger restaurants, featuring the elderly actress Clara Peller (commercials were aired with other people doing
the line, but they were less popular). After receiving a competitor's burger with a massive bun (the competitor's slogan was "Home of the Big Bun"), the small patty prompts the gruff Peller to angrily exclaim "Where's the beef?" The first commercial was aired on January 10, 1984. The humorous ad and Peller's memorable character soon gave the catch-phrase a life of its own, and was repeated in countless
TV shows, films, magazines, and other media outlets.
Name: wtb1.1
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Two fundamental approaches
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Two fundamental approaches
If you have searched the web for hits concerning the keywords concerning the topic of our clinic, you will find some typical approaches. In general, I see two radically different approaches: one which takes an economist view on the issue of valuation, which is philosophically a ÓreductionistÓ and analytical approach, namely to find or reduce all the aspects to one common numerical denominator: money, (how fast do I get my investment back?); the other is a holistic approach, which tries to ÓoperationaliseÓ uncomparable qualitative indicators, an approach using socalled multi-criteria decision support tools adding weights or rating to qualitative aspects thus allowing some sort of numerical ranking.
Let me state immediately that I have seen a lot of economist methods employed but never been impressed by their power of prediction; the number of uncertainties are simply too many to attempt to make a science out of business decision making. If indeed, we (someone) could predict Where's the Beef?, we would be rich and not sit here today
Name: wtb1.2
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Petra keller ad
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 Petra Keller asking the overriding question: Where's the Beef?
Name: wtb2
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Value Chain; Porter; TIM
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(III) Where's the Beef? TIM
Technology & innovation management (TIM)
The theory of technology & innovation management (TIM) is a relatively young discipline. I shall refer to some key authors and sources, leaving it up to you to study the details. I shall refer to TIM as if it were one body of knowledge, which is a simplification, which I use for practical reasons.
The theory of TIM tries to establish a model of how a given idea or invention reaches the market place ands stays (competitive) there. In so doing we need basic concepts of the actors/stakeholders, their rationale for existence, their predicted/observed (innovation) behaviour and their interrelatedness.
Basically, TIM is a chapter of elementary business theory in that it challenges classical economic theory’s assumptions of behaviour, rationale and factor conditions of the economic actors. In the “Where’s the Beef” Model, we first try to build a model into which our invention fits business-wise. Once this is done, we must ”populate” the model with real companies, markets and people. Then we must test the model assumptions with the population of targets to get a basis for judgement.Michael Porter has developed a complete body of theory, methodology and empirical evidence (plus a fair amount of misunderstood paraphrasing) to support his view of what makes industries and nations competitive. Industry in his terminology is not the individual legal entity called ”a limited company”, but rather a cluster of stakeholders who shape a given market. This is perhaps one of the most important lessons: we should not assume that the individual legal entity is the locus of innovation. Mr.
Porter has summarized his work in a number of diagrammatic ways. One such diagram is the “Porter Diamond”. Another useful diagram is Porter’s model of the building blocks of what he calls an ”industry” or a ”cluster”. Both diagrams are important, which we shall use as mnemonic devices to develop a methodology for rapid biz planning.
I ask you to prepare yourselves by searching the web for ”Michael Porter supply chain” and ”Michael Porter diamond”. In the BeefBlog I have written and stored interesting articles on Value Chain Analysis
Name: wtb3
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Valuation IPScore
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(IV) Where's the Beef. IPScore.
Ernst Max Nielsen continues his series on "Where's the Beef
This is the fourth in my series of articles about valuation methods. I have been half-mocking what I framed "American"-style economist methods. Now I have to take that back and call it "Danish"-style, as my compatriots from the Copenhagen Business School and the Danish Patent Office have developed a new software tool which will answer all our questions, it seems. In Patent Information News 1/2006 the European Patent Office reports on the tool and wishes to use it. Johannes Schaaf writes:
IPscore 2.0 was developed by the Danish Patent Office in co-operation with the Copenhagen Business School and industry. Similarly to the income theory, it analyses each patent using 40 different parameters relating to legal status, technology, market conditions, finance and alignment with overall business strategy. The results are illustrated using spider charts. Applied to a patent portfolio, it gives an overview of the opportunities (eg winning new markets)I will have a look and give you my opinion. This is the link: for IPScore
It's an interesting web site. It doesn't give you much information about the IPScore software. But you can pay 2,500€ to get it. But there are other ways to find information, as one of my later articles will show:
I Googled it and used the search string: site:.IPscore.dk filetype:pdf and found what I looked for: the Manual. The software asks the company and patent owner(s) to answer no less than 40 questions, of which a number are guestimates and the rest are qualitative. So in a way, IPScore seems to mix an approach developed by Warwick Ventures (called COAP: Commercial Appraisal of Opportunities, see later articles) with the economist's Net Present Value methods. IPScore's developers have then created a model where all these-now numerical- factors are brought together to create great
looking graphs, which could convince everyone that this must be right.
In my eyes, the level of secutiry in estimates, which are made up of 40 factors, and which are all assessed in an artful manner, is low. It mocks the user to believe in it, because it is numerical (and therefore "objective"). I fear that such software only serves to "quantify" all the biases and (mis)information of the assessor: where do you get the data from to support your assessments? Especially the future aspects cannot be derived from past performance.
Nevertheless, software such as IPScore serves a good function, namely to try to make an assessment, which could be the START of a real due diligence. And it does a great job of RECORDING your guestimates and assumptions. The faulty part is the attempt to model the future....
Name: wtb4
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Innovation Stage Gates
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Where's the Beef INNOVATION STAGES-GATES
This is the fifth article in the series "Where's the Beef": quick-and-dirty methods to make a go or no-go decision regarding whether or not and how to try to commercialize an invention.
Many TIM-researchers have developed a great number of refinements of what often is called the model for or ”method of innovation (stage) gates”, (web: Click here for example) which refers to the fact that most ”industries” (in the wide sense) go through a
series of check-points, when they try to manage their innovation portfolio (checking for technical feasibility, production feasibility, patentability etc), steps which correspond well to Porter’s concepts.
I have included a few generic diagrams in my material showing you the ”life cycle” of an invention. The headlines are technical feasibility/novelty, (which for us would indicate IPR protection strategies), market/competitor analysis, financial analysis and organizational analysis.
Any good school of management will train graduates in this discipline and call it business planning. Done well, such planning exercises will give an excellent perspective on whether or not to take a given opportunity forward.
The problem for the tech transfer professional is that we have a large number of potential projects to manage and that the business planning exercise takes due diligence and time. It is the scope of ”Where’s the beef”-planning to make shortcuts, quick-and-dirty ways to save time and money. Needless to say, such crude methods risk to send us off target, but ”c’est la vie”, the calculated risk of the profession: either you manage a few of your potential winners well or you manage all reasonably well, so you can pick a few you really believe have the beef.
The Stages-Gates method can be seen as a structure of individual processes and check-points, like in a quality management programme, which you should go through. For the tech transfer professional, it's important to rapidly understand the technology and its alternatives, the relevant markets, the value chain, the important companies and key persons in these companies.A search engine like JBEngine found at TII's homepage is really useful to help us throught this process in practice, In a later article I'll give you an overview of
the TT professional's "perfect search engine".
Name: wtb5
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Keith Pavitt: Segmentation and Taxanomies of companies
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Keith Pavitt: Segmentation and Taxanomies of companies
A second important contributor to practical innovation theory was Keith Pavitt from SPRU (Sussex University), whose pathbreaking analysis (together with good colleagues) has helped understand that we must ”segment” the concepts of business and of innovation to understand how innovation happens. Pavitt demonstrated how we may distinguish and predict innovation behaviour in and linkages between different types of businesses.
Not all businesses innovate themselves but depend on specialized suppliers, customers etc and such interlinked business form what Porter may wish to call a cluster. The usefulness for the tech transfer practitioner of Pavitt’s work is that we may direct our efforts to finding partners for inventions more precisely by being able to map possible interlinked businesses, who might have an interest in the invention. I have learned that quite often we need to bring together several actors in a cluster to push a given invention to market.Innovation is Innovation is Innovation
Pavitt has shown us that we should distinguish between product and process innovation; between technological and market innovation; radical and incremental innovation. He has effectively made it clear that the ”locus” of innovation is not (always) one business (ltd company) but the interlinkage between several businesses. By way of such insights, the practitioner will also make sense of the observation that often two businesses will act not only in the cooperative mode but in another moment as competitors.
Some companies, as in the petrochemical business, are process intensive: a slight fraction of a percent of improvement is worth millions. Others rely on launching new products with a slightly better profit margin all the time. Others totally rely on others to do the innovation, as, for instance the classical industries
such as textiles.
Pavitt and later attempts at adopting his thinking has actually matched the SIC code (for industry sector) with Pavitt’s segments, which makes it easy for you to make an early guess of what type of business you might be looking for (and finding them). Try to "google" "industry sic code pavitt" and see what happen ]
The European Commission makes regular innovation benchmark studies in European industry using Pavitt’s basic concepts. Go to Cordis' homepage and have a look, e.g. Trendchart
Name: wtb6
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Copy Cats: Schnaars; Manfred Kuehnle
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Copy-Cats
Personally I have had a lot of benefit from using the perspectives I learnt from Porter and Pavitt’s work. The underlying assumption is that the innovator, the pioneer, will capture competitive advantages by being smarter, faster etc. Basically this is why we are interested in the ”knowledge economy”.
On the other hand, experience is a good teacher. Through my years of practice, I have come to work with cases and hear and read about other cases, which have made me doubt the blue-eyed innovation naivism of some TIM researchers. We see many cases in which the pioneer gets punished for being first.Steven Schnaars has written an extremely insightful book (”Managing Imitation Strategies”) on how ”copy-cats” win over the pioneers, in other words that plagiarism and even outright theft of ideas (not well enough protected) and inventions is more profitable than being a pioneer. Mr. Schnaar’s gives 65 good cases to prove his point. The BIC ball point pen case is a classic, see this teaching material from Tulane .
I have tried it myself both in the loser’s and the winner’s role. In the ”Where’s the Beef” method this means that it makes sense to always think of how a good opportunity may be copied, and try to think smarter of how to prevent copying or make it too unprofitable by putting obstacles on the copy-cat road. I look for substitutes for the invention: how could the same function be performed in slightly different ways or how could the same objective be reached by totally different technologies (I call these functional and substantial substitution forms).
An interesting case is my good friend Manfred R. Kuehnle, a genius, who has been granted more than 600 patents to his name. Have a look at Daimler-Benz’ patent US5817407 and you will see that the good car-maker got all they needed in terms of insights from working with Manfred to slightly improve his discovery and claim a new patent. Who has money to take Daimler to court?
Another good case is that of the world’s real cancer drug blockbuster, Taxol (I ask you to read the case story of Taxol, an extremely successful case from Prof Holton of Florida State University in the US ). Read how Bristol-Myers Squibb developed their own version of the technology they licensed from FSU.Nanotechnology, the next industrial revolution, is going to cause even more such legal wrangling, see the interesting article from Lux Research about how around 3,000 US nano-patents in 2005 show ”vulnerability” for weak IP positions, thus opening the field for copy-catting.
Frank Stephenson tells the fantastic story of how Holton invented the anti-cancer blockbuster drug at Florida State University's Tech Transfer Office site CLICK TO READ
The tortured trail of the best-selling cancer drug in history began 40 years ago this summer. A thunder-clap of uncommon science and luck, it's a grand story still in the telling. Also a story of how collaboration between industry and university may turn foul when big money enters. This is a "must read" for all tech transfer office staff.
Name: wtb7
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Cambridge University Enterprises
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CUE a Master of Commercialization
Cambridge University is an excellent university. Even more excellent in my view is their way of commercializing inventions coming out of CU. Obviously the "Cambridge Phenomenon", first studied by my old friends from now merged Segal Quince Wicksteed (Bill Wicksteed!), the region's history, presence of benevolent angels and so on are important for that success.
Some years ago CU merged all commercialization activities in CUE. Have a look at their recent Annual report and see how an already impressive record improves by almost 50% over just 5 years. One would assume that the quality of the (basic) research is not very volatile. Such matters take generations to build up and seldom make quantum leaps. I interpret the growth in commercialization successes as a result of the (re-)organization, really good people (look at the CVs of CUE staff: impressive) and then access to own seed funding (and, of course, lots of VCs crowding around CUE). A minor, but perhaps not less important resource is the creation of "Enterprise Champions",
faculty staff who advise CUE on different relevant matters.
PS: compare CUE's score with that of all Denmark, one of the most competitive countries and with the highest knowledge management score in the world: CUE (on the basis of 3,500 research FTE) creates almost half the results in terms of management of invention disclosures, patent filing and licensing and spin off more than 5 times the number of new companies (year 2004) - and with half the TO staff of all of Denmark!You can also compare CUE's score with other European (ProTon Europe ) and North American (AUTM ) universities and see that they are among the real masters.
Name: WTB8
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Value Innovation; Blue Ocean Strategy
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VALUE INNOVATION OR BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY
Dr. Chan and Mauborgne of INSEAD studied the interesting phenomenon, in line with Dr. Schnaar’s findings, that the gazelle, ie. high growth, profitable firms are not necessarily very innovative in the technological sense. Very often the fastest and most sustanainable growth in (new) companies has been found by entrepreneurs, who are not pioneers in a technological sense. But they know how to add value at critical points in the delivery of a product or service. How can we best identify and serve buyers’ overall needs and offer them unparalleled value? That demands the
mapping of an “innovation value curve”: a chart. You can get the book at Amazon .
The Value Innovation Chart promises to let you find the “Blue Ocean” of your innovation: a place where the big fish are (“where’s the big fish?”) and you see only blue ocean, i.e. no other fishermen. In my course I give examples of Innovation Charts and let participants develop a few themselves. I have found a number of other references, which we use to understand and use the concept.
Drawing a VI Chart is the “acid test” of any invention. You need to focus on your strong and weak points compared with that of the competition. To do so, you need to iterate the process many times, finetuning your parameters and your competition, which in turn requires support from good intelligence sources, which is another topic in my clinic. See later
I quite often find that researchers are not very keen on or even understand that there is a need for an added value proposition. How does your invention (radically) improve existing practice? Very often researchers will tell you that their goal was to find something Novel, not necessarily to test whether it is Good compared to prior art. I teach and practice some interview tricks to find the Blue Ocean.
In a later article, I'll review and give reference to the Danish Gazelle studies, a very interesting body of insight for the tech transfer professional.PS: ;-) recently, some microbiologists, I work with, told me that they don't understand the "Blue Ocean" metaphor. For them the Big Fish are close to the coastline, not in blue oceans!
Name: wtb9
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Valuation US Style
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Valuation Methods
his model explains a simple way to value a start-up company when working with investors. It is provided courtesy of Joe Ollivier of First Capital Development, a private investment and hard money lending firm based in Provo, Utah.
Valuation Model: "Company Valuation Model / Ownership Percentage Offered This model explains a simple way to value a start-up company when working with investors. It is provided courtesy of Joe Ollivier of First Capital Development, a private investment and hard money lending firm based in Provo, Utah. Explanation Example of XYZ.com 1. Assumptions Investors will want somewhere between 50-100% annual return on their investment (ROI). The market will value the company on a P/E basis somewhere between 8-15 times earnings if it was a public company. While some internet companies have outrageous price to earnings ratios, you are better off to use a conservative price
to earnings ratio. XYZ.com Assumptions ROI per year Investors want on their investment: 100% The market will value XYZ.com somewhere around 15 time earnings. Third year after tax earnings: $1,650,000 Initial Investment Needed: $1,000,000 2. Valuation Multiply the p/e ratio by the third year after tax expected profit. This number gives yo"
Name: wtb10
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Valuation Computer based
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I have participated in a number of discussions about patent valuation. Here is a novel approach by two US patent attorneys.
GOFFMAN MARTIN (US); NEIFELD RICHARD (US) filed a patent in 2002 and have built a company, web site and software which automates patent valuation.
Here is the Abstract of WO0075851 A computer system implementing a macro economic model based upon macroeconomic data and relative value characteristics data of patents that determines nominal values for (1) goods and services and (2) profits generated by sales that are covered by the rights of a patent, implements an income value theory to value the patent based upon the predicted values of profits or goods and services covered by the patent, determines patent terms from patent filing, publication, and issue dates, determines patent assignees from patent data, and uses the value of a company's patents, the patent issuance data and term date data, to determine trends versus time in: the number of a company's enforceable patents; the number of a company's patents obtained; the nominal value of net
earnings and of goods and services sold that are covered by the company's patents; the nominal value of the sum of the company's patents, and provides comparisons of those trends between companies, regions, and economic sectors, providing the results of the analysis to users of the computer system. The computer system employs a user database enabling a novel electronic accounting model enabling payment by affiliates, programmed securities trading, and accrediting of investors.
HERE IS THE TEXT FROM THEIR WEB SITE:
This paragraph provides a SIMPLIFIED explanation of how we value patents and companies. Patents are a right to exclude others from making, using, or selling a product or service covered by the claims of the patent. Patents are awarded by the Federal Government for new and useful products or services. A good deal of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of any industrialized country, particularly the US, is covered by claims in patents. Why? Because every company knows that it is important to get patents covering new products to prevent competition, thereby resulting in a large profit margin. We model this situation by assuming a substantial fraction of GDP is covered by all patents, and then estimating the fraction of the GDP covered by each patent using sophisticated data analysis and additional modeling
based upon macro economic data and financial data. We model the profit associated with a patent to be the fraction of the GDP covered by the patent (i.e., the nominal sales of product that our model predicts to be covered by the patent) times the profit margin. From that information we obtain the annual profit protected by the patent. Patents are each in force for a term of about 17 years. We calculate the current value of the patent to be value of the annual profit for the estimated remaining term of the patent. Adding up the valuations for patents owned by a company, we arrive at the company's current patent valuation. Based upon trends in the company's patent acquisition, we can extrapolate to their future patent valuations. We can compare a company's patent valuation to its sales to obtain a measure of how much of the company's sales are protected by its patents, - and therefore a measure of how well the company's profit margins are protected. We are or will shortly be able to
provide all this information - and more - for all companies that own patents - and for companies that are listed on stock exchanges.
Name: wtb11
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Methods of Calculating Reasonable Royalty Rates:
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Methods of Calculating Reasonable Royalty Rates: "Some time ago, Stephen of Patent Baristas fame, wrote a very interesting article on calculating reasonable royalty rates called What’s a Reasonable Royalty Rate?. Although the article is in the context of royalty rates for licenses with universities for therapeutic technologies, I believe the objective points regarding calculating royalty rates are worth repeating here at IP Counsel Blog.
Three methods of calculating royalties were described:
1. The Market Method – royalty rate is based on what others have paid as a reasonable royalty for similar technology.
2. The Cost Method – royalty rate is based on the cost of developing or obtaining the technology or intellectual property.
3. Income Method - royalty rate is based on the total revenues the technology is likely to produce.
The article further mentions that a practical way of deriving a reasonable royalty rate is to first develop an economic model that factors in the cost to develop the technology and the overall revenues expected from sales of the technology. The model should also include risk factors, such as expensive processes that may also delay time to market, or any other potential risk factors. For example, sales my start out slow at first for a few years before reaching higher levels of expectations. Lastly, duration of patent terms should be included.
It seems to me that a good starting point would be to develop an economic model that utilizes information from all three methods of calculating royalties. Develop a model that takes into account estimated or realized revenues, cost of development and bringing the technology to market and compare royalty rates for similar technology under similar or related circumstances. From a more inclusive model, you can glean a great deal of information about the technology and what its ultimate value would be to you in order to determine what you are willing to pay and whether you can obtain alternative technology for less.
It is not surprising that a great deal of effort must be used to evaluate a license agreement before negotiating a reasonable royalty rate given the increasing costs and other pressures researchers and manufacturers face when developing new technology.(Via IP Counsel Blog.)ANOTHER GOOD OVERVIEW you can get from WIPO's web site with the same conclusions. "Valuation experts" walk you through these methods in more or less sophisticated ways, but the conclusions are always the same: valuation is more an art than a science. Conclusion on my side: the value of a patent/invention is what you can get for it. What you can get is what you negotiate. That puts increasing importance to Negotiation Skills, a topic I shall come back to in later articles. In negotiations, you can use all the arguments you may derive from the three mentioned methods.Nothing is objective in this game, so you need to be able to communicate effectively with your counterpart/partner. I learned a lot from Neil
Rackham's S-P-I-N methodology (get the book at Amazon), on how to sell complex products and projects. I'll return to S-P-I-N in a later article.My good friend, Henning Sejer from the Danish Technology Institute has made a good book and a workshop series to teach some of the
tricks.
Name: wtb12
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Companies don't survive- do patents?
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(XIII) Companies don't survive- do patents?
I have started a discussion on this site about valuation of patents - and oppose econometric models, which assume extrapolation from past to future - without disruption. One condition for such assumptions would be stability over time - that products, markets, technologies are relatively stable. Now, more than ever, nothing is stable, however. To me the consequence is that it makes no sense to extrapolate more than 5 years, let alone 17 years, the lifetime of a patent. I'd even dare the statement that this trend undermines the logic of patenting!
I just made a sample of the Fortune 100 of Danish companies (www.borsen.dk has the list) and compared FY 2004 with FY 2001. 43 of FY 2001 companies are not on the FY 2004 list, as they have been acquired, merged, disappeared (sic!) etc.
The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and similar Danish surveys show that the average lifetime of a DK company is now 5 years. ifferent innovation surveys show that the lifetime of a product or market is less than that.
This trend was pointed out 20 years ago by management guru Tom Peters, eg. in his book Liberation Management, or Dee Hock's "Chaordic Age" books (amazon.com would have them). Check out British Telecom's futurologist, Ian Pearson, and his amazing book Business 2010 http://www.icnet.dk/amazonpearson or his web site http://www.btplc.com/Innovation/News/timeline/index.htm , which gives an eye-opening view of the future.
Name: wtb13
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: COAP: Commercial Appraisal of Opportunities
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COAP: Commercial Appraisal of Opportunities
The University of Warwick has developed its own version of Commercial Appraisal of Opportunities, called COAP. In the context of ProTon Europe, staff from Warwick Ventures have given us access to their methodology, which we bring to you in this course- courtesy of Warwick.
Like COAP, I suggest we use our toolkit with many by nature incomparable - tools to reach our decision. We may say that COAP is our container, which holds the results of many different test kits.
COAP is good and IÕm sure it works well for Warwick, but I suggest that we further develop the methods to answer the complex questions raised by COAP. Any given opportunity is tested in 10 dimensions or ways.
The ten dimensions chosen in COAP are:
Uniqueness of the technology
Readiness of the technology for production
Value of the market
Anticipated profit margins
Intensity of competition in the market
Competitive edge of the product or service
Ease of access to the market
Customer conservatism
Commitment of the team
Commercial experience of the team
The practitioner will attempt to rate a given opportunity on a scale from e.g. 1 to 10 or other such differential scale. You will see that COAP assumes that you have several opportunities to choose from, because the method only makes sense as a tool to help the practitioner choose from a multitude of possible candidates.
My experience tells me that it is difficult to answer the questions C,D, E, F,G and H, so "Where's the Beef" is one way to qualify the answer to these questions by different approximations. Some of the perspectives I have offered above, allow us to qualify COAP or use similar methods. Again, we need really good inteligence sources and ways to search them.
Later you will see in practice how you can implement COAP
Name: WTB14
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Search the RIGHT SOURCES
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Search the RIGHT SOURCES
As per estimate in 2005, 5,000,000 terrabytes of information exist in the world, only 2-3% of which are currently indexed and searchable. Google CEO Schmidt's timing for when all of the world's information will be searchable? 300 years, according to a presentation he did in the summer of 2005.Google indexes 3% per year, which doesn’t cover Extranet sources!! Clearly we need an engine which starts by looking the right places first.
So what to do about it? At the moment there is no plug-and-play solution. No one engine delivers what we want. There is a multitude of search engines and methods of using computers, which are necessary and helpful to the tech transfer practitioner.
The Good Search Engine searches not only the Internet, but also Extranet and in some cases, Intranets (requires “co-authentication”). The Good Engine uses experts to pre-select sites, known to be most relevant. Innovation & tech transfer professionals have to focus to be efficient. You will have to build your own subset of good sources for your line of business.
Each engine has its special language. And most users specify <5 keywords, when they search. What to do when we get for example 153,000 hits or more? The practitioner knows how to customize the Good Engine in terms of special templates, known to produce best results, and set up with 20-30 keywords and using Boolean language and other methods to focus the searches.
The Good Engine, customized as above, must deliver results in easily reviewable formats, not only with headlines and links, as is mostly the case at present.
WYSINWYG: What You See Is NOT What You Want to Get. The right results may be down the pile behind the paid-for advertisers. Google and Yahoo are biased in their sorting, must be, it’s part of the algorithm (any system has a bias). The problem(s) are many: normally much too many hits (imagine what it may be when it all is indexed!), and it’s WYSINWYWG.The Good Engine makes its own biases, confirmed by peers of the trade. The practical - and affordable- solution is to combine different approaches. One of the best available tools is JBEngine, available through TII Click here. I developed that website and have included some other good hints and sources for searching, including Rollyo, whic I shall review later . There are other good sources and tools, some of which are not fully integrated in JBEngine.
Name: WTB15
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Search: Jacob Bar! Help me. About JBEngine
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Jacob Bar: Help me
With the Internet and databases it has become so much easier to find many of the answers to the above questions, to “populate” our models. ”Google It”, many TO practitioners now would say. That’s fine, but the problem is that the Internet (data and its complexity) is growing at an enormous speed and indexing is not keeping pace. It’s hard to choose what to believe when you ”Google It”. The advantage of Internet searching is that it puts an emphasis on the need for links, and that the practitioner must jump from one to another piece of information to patch together a final verdict. Don’t believe the first hit(s).
Jacob Bar, an Israeli gentleman with many years of experience in the theory of natural language and as special advisor to the Israeli Minister of Science & Technology, has developed a search engine, which is particularly well adapted to the needs of the TO practitioner. Jacob, who is a also a lover of good jokes, has called his engine: JbhelpMe.com or the Jbengine.
Jacob says that he has looked at the way we pose questions, when we do commercial appraisal and has reduced the multitude of questions to a few hundred ”natural language” queries. In a sense, he has qualified or multiplied the 10 dimensions of COAP (and other good business planning tools) by asking many more detailed questions.
Secondly, Jbengine searches not only the Internet, the few billion html-pages (and other protocols) which are publicly available via browsers. His engine also looks into certain Extranet sources, the large reservoir of ”internal” databases of different organizations. This gives the user exceptional search power of 700+ billion pages and also power to get to the core faster. This area of search changes its nature rapidly, so this verdict may be outdated in a few months. You will find Extranet sources, but then you will to have to pay to get the real stuff: what you find is only the teaser. A good example is Mindbranch
Finally, JbhelpMe collects information relevant to my query and presents it in one package. So I get Google feedback alongside information links from other search engines. For example, a search concerns only whether a given, keyword matches one or more patents. Jbengine returns information from several patent databases in one window, so it gives me faster and better overview.
The only real problem with Jacob’s useful work is that it is not always updated. I will show you ways to work around that problem.
Name: wtb16
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Search the Right Places II: Knowledge Management Tricks
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Search the Right Places II: Knowledge Management Tricks
Building "Where's the Beef" models takes practice and there is a lot of tricks which may make life much easier for you. In the clinic I will give you advice how to take -cheap- shortcuts (you can buy many/most information and get poor in the process. Question is: will you also get richer?):
Which patent databases to use and how to mine them. JBEngine does the start; the rest is up to you.
How to find specific case material about the value chainÓ JBEngine is powerful.
How to use indirect sources of information such as Edgar SEC filings, to get information of a whole industry. Because of the paranoic legal situation for publicly traded corporations, i.e. on the stock exchange, there is no limit to what upper management discloses about their own business, and thereby the competition.
Brainstorm keywords from different perspectives. Mindmapping, functional/substantial substitution; language versions (English is not the only- world language)
How to use the new RSS/xml standards (Web 2!) to monitor certain sources of information in specific terms.
How to Roll your own search engine (pack) with software such as Rollyo (mainly Yahoo). Use TII's search pages as well.
How to use indexing to store and find value chain relevant past findings: Copernic for PC; Spotlight for Mac
How not to trust the Internet and how to distinguish when (Advanced Cell case...)
Name: wtb17
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Patent Class Analysis
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Patent Class Analysis
A special set of sources is patent databases. Sources such as esp@cenet, WIPO, USPTO are really useful. I use a method of quickly browsing these databases in regard to a given invention or company and then collect information about the competition, “prior art” etc. This involves using your internet browser, a good spreadsheet, a good database and how to jump around in these applications to quickly get you the overview which is so critical for “Where’s the Beef”.It's amazing how much information there is in such files. The key to using them in practice is to employ methods which will allow you to quickly form an opinion. Once you have spotted a Patent Class or a Search Pattern which suits your needs and clients, then you should try to subscribe to these saved searches. There are many ways. WIPO allows you to subscribe to RSS which is a really useful method.
I generally believe Microsoft's products are not very useful. The Office series is of great help for patent mining, if you do it right. I show some tricks.
Once you have spotted patents, classes or other patterns in your findings, you'll find references to important persons, companies, prior art links etc. This information is really important for quick-and-dirty judgements.
Name: wtb18
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Technology Timeline: Ian Pearson
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Technology Timeline
British Telecom futurology guru Ian Pearson has convinced me that we need to think not only of concepts and methods.
In a time of rapid technology change and other technology-related development trends, we need to have a view on(an understanding of) what is coming and how it may change the way we know business. Pearson has co-authored an excellent book called “Business 2010” – read it and start wondering.At BT he and his colleagues have built a wonderful graphical interface to show you what
they mean!The Technology Timeline supports my point that we may not get much guidance about the future of a certain market by looking backwards, not even into the immediate past. It teaches us to keep a critical distance to the sources about and from the past For ther near future, I recommend that you get acquainted with nanotechnology, which represents the next industrial revolution: it will greatly affect and change the scientific and technological base of almost any industry or sector. I have made my own Nano-blog, as have many other good bloggers. Use your RSS feed reader to find them. Or use my Nano-Rollyo to search good nano-sites.
Name: wtb19
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Confidentiality and Disclosure
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Confidentiality and Disclosure
I work with many research groups around the world. I see a lot of poor management of confidential material, which in principle damages the commercial use of an invention. I devote a number of preaching sessions to TOs and researchers to think about what they do. The never ending list of breaches could start hereI enter offices, shared by many, where confidential reports, letters, patent applications etc lie around- often in piles. Students, visitors etc come and go. Not good enough. Get a locked drawer at least.
Computers with confidential material are accesible to passers-by. Terrible.
Password protection is a must. Better: don't store any confidential information on networked PCs. Use Collaborative Software.
Most use e-mail to manage their correspondence with fellow scientists, send confidential results, documents etc. Read this Blog about The Bad in Email or see why you should use Collaborative Software.
Very few keep track of their correspondence. Good scientists log their experiments. Once you have started inventive work which might involve commercialization, then immediately create a log with details of who does what, when etc and who gets what when etc.
Many grant funding authorities (governments) demand copies of research reports with confidential information. Wait to file here until you have filed your patent. Make sure that the authority manages confidentiality! Check what they do- ask them.
In many experiments you get the help of advanced technology suppliers (microscopes, biological material, special materials etc). if you give them critical (to your future IP) specifications, make sure they sign a Confidentiality Agreement, before you enter into collaboration.
Many projects and experiments are done with and by students, who are not part of the inventors' group, Make sure they are under non-disclosure regime.I'll follow up on this awfully important topic.
Name: wtb20
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Common Business Sense
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Common (Business) Sense
However, the use of the methods I suggest does require some common sense of what business is and means. Business methods and perspectives have changed a lot over the last 20 years, so this cannot be learnt from a textbook or via courses like ours. The practitioner on a learning curve must try and try so as to develop his/her own Ógut feelingÓ for what works and what doesn't.
For instance, one of COAPÕs dimensions is "ease of access to the market", but what does this mean? Which sector is more monopolistic: the automobile industry or the power industry? I don't think there is an objective answer to this question. The trained better at horse-races knows how to piece together his jigsaw before he puts his bet; the same goes for commercial appraisal of inventions.
Name: wtb21
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Where's the (Horse) Beef: Multi-criteria decision making tools.
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Multi-criteria decision-making tools (MCDM)
In view of the deficiency of economist methods, another body of thinking has developed, for instance in operations analysis, ending up with alternative methods referred to as multi-criteria decision-making tools (MCDM). They are multi-criteria in contract to econometric theory's single criterion: money. John Friend and Allan Hickling's book is one of the best and most pragmatic books on the topic of MCDM, and they have even built a software tool to support their method. If you search the web, you'll find a host of competing projects and tools, so have your choice.
John Friend and Allan Hickling
With the above mentioned elements of TIM, we try to create a toolkit. A toolkit is a container with different tools, which fit our purpose. I have already mentioned that I have little confidence in economic theory and methods in our profession. I shall refrain from a theoretical debate, but ask you to read John Friend and Allan HicklingÕs excellent book on "Strategic Planning Approach" in which they start with a good discussion of the philosophical background.. (http://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/dstools/choosing/strach.html)
We could say that the economist's methods has only one tool and container, namely money. I -with many others- insist that we know too little about the numerical parameters of our opportunities, so we are forced to make assumptions about time ranges (what will the interest rate be over the next 10 years? What will the profit margin be in a given industry?). Try and read Ian Pearson's interesting book: Business 2010 (article 18) and you'll know what I mean!
Statisticians will tell you that when you do so, you increase the margin of insecurity in the power of prediction of your economic model. When you start to multiply and combine several such parameters, the precision of the model is lost and the purpose of the exercise defeated. Furthermore, if we talk about something, which is truly new, how from a philosophical point of view can we say anything relevant about customer behaviour, readiness to pay etc. other than gestimates? In my slide show I have some good examples of how poorly many well known businesses were capitalized when they reached the market place. In another wording, I suggest that horse-betting is easier or less risky than investing in new technology.
With horse-races, we normally know who the actors are, we even get expertsÕ words concerning the odds for success. We also know the race-track, can foresee (weather) conditions etc. Compared to this, in betting on an invention we donÕt know who the actors are, who the competitors might be, on which race-ground the race is to take place. In a way, the good practitioner attempts to increase his/her insight into an opportunity, so it becomes equal to the horse-betters
Name: wtb22
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Experience and Practice: Shortcut to Sources
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Experience and Practice: Shortcut to Sources.
If it's hard to deduce a certain value of a patent, one important source which never fails, but is hard to get : experience and practice. The shortcut to experience is not easy, but I find that there are rather interesting sources to help the practitioner: for example the Licensing Economics Review, or Gordon V.Smith who has devoted a special website called Royalty Source to the topic (it costs a fee to get to see real transactions). Gordon Smith is a frequent speaker at WIPO seminars and his documents can be downloaded from the WIPO site.
Another interesting source is onecle's sample database of all kinds of agreements, including Licensing agreements.
A third important source is different databases of "Annual reports", eg. from Dun & Bradstreet or the like organizations, and for example The US Securities & Exchange Commission database Edgar.
There are different associations for professionals, who offer training, conferences and other forms of knowledge sharing, for example my own "baby" ProTon Europe, now the world's largest associations of TO professionals from universities and research organizations in Europe or the US AUTM, which organizes several thousand individuals/professionals in the field. TII is ther longest standing such association, and I and Jacob Bar often attend TII's workshops.
You need to be a member to get access to their knowledge management databases. many countries have similar organizations, RedOTRI in Spain, NetVal in Italy, Reseau C.U.R.I.E in France, AURIL in the UK and Ireland etc.
Name: wtb23
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Technology Opportunity Communication; Negotiating the Deal
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This is the Introductory Paper for the TOP Course
Skills Development Course for the Technology Transfer and Innovation Support Professions
Technology transfer (TT) professionals tend to communicate mainly the technical aspects of a technological opportunity (TOP). The business or market aspects are too often neglected or unknown. In order to succeed in the market place TOPs must, however, be made interesting to people who speak and understand mainly the “language of the market”. This course attempts to give TT professionals a tool box to better communicate TOPs thus enhancing the chances of success of the TOP, the TT agent and his or her organisation. The tool box consists of a framework of understanding (models), practical standards and a number of case studies. The course is intended as a one-day workshop possibly followed up individual tutoring in relation to real cases.
Definitions
A TOP in the context of this course is defined as any opportunity to introduce new technology in a market-based business in order to innovate and enhance the profitability and sustainability of that business (and possibly other businesses as well). The TOP may be generated by either a Technology Request (TR) from the business side or a Technology Offer (TO) from the research side. Technology is defined in a wide sense as not only “hardware”, machines and other tangible items, but also as the know-how associated with the practical use of the hardware and “orgware” or the managerial and organisational aspects of applying a given technique in a sustainable manner. Thus technology could comprise innovation of products, processes and markets and be incremental as
well as radical in nature.
Dr.Pavitt’s research, which can be supported by other studies, shows that businesses can be segmented according to their probable sources of technology and innovative behaviour. The same research documents that not more than 10% of all businesses innovate with the assistance of R&D institutions and/or TT professionals. In this course, we shall mainly investigate the innovative behaviour and TOP communication of businesses as it occurs with the intermediary services of a TT professional.
A simple Model of TOP Communication
A simple Model of TOP Communication involves at least the following elements: an Offerer, a Requester, who are assumed not to know of each other’s existence, for which reason communication must be established between these two parties. This communication is established through a description of the Offer and/or the Request done by a TT Broker or professional.
 Most often the TOP Communication takes place in a sequence of phases or steps such as contemplated in the following illustration of how the IRC network sees its own operations.
 When considering TOP Communication, we must differentiate between the communication needs and forms in different phases: Auditing, Partner search, Negotiating and Implementation. The nature of TOP communication is contradictory in that the parties wish as much openness as possible in the early stages and typically the opposite once the process approaches the final stages. In this course, we shall try to set standards for how to communicate according to this critical contradiction.
SPIN Selling
Is TOP Communication different than other business communication involved in innovation processes?. Often you will hear arguments that innovation is driven by “technology push” or “technology need”; or lately that innovation is an interactive process with a of balance between “push and pull”. It is argued that there is “market failure” because most SMEs or most researchers are not able to find each other without high transaction costs , for which reason there is a need for professional intermediary between the parties. Taxpayers’ money is given out in most developed countries in order to counterbalance this assumed imperfection of the market mechanism. Accordingly, it is assumed that the resulting TT profession makes use of
special tools of communication different from those of the commercially driven innovation projects. In this course, you will be asked to discuss:
Is there a difference between communication in technology transfer and in commercial innovation practise? And if so, specify how and why!
Certainly TOP Communication has many similarities with models of successful business communication in relation to complex sales/business operations. Neil Rackham has studied more than 35,000 cases of what constitutes communication in successful business transactions and reached the conclusion that the answer is SPIN. SPIN stands for a method of asking questions between parties so as to understand the following aspects:
S Situational aspects, understanding the general situation of the Requester (potential client)
P Problem related aspects, i.e. Questions related to what the problem in question is, technical specifications etc
I Impact related aspects, i.e. questions related to how the existence of the problem Impacts the Requester, understanding the scope of the problem (how much, how often,...) and how a solution might impact the success of the business.
N Net Value questions, namely increasing the understanding of how much a solution to the problem would be worth.
Successful business communicators, according to Rackham, use these question types in complex negotiation cases, never at the same time but always in a sequence of meetings (communications) and always in this order. A solution is never offered immediately, but only after a thorough mutual understanding of the SPIN aspects has been reached. In many ways, the IRC model above corresponds quite well with Rackham’s SPIN model, which leads me to claim that TOP Communication is not generically different from complex sales negotiations. My own experience suggests that successful TT corresponds well to Rackham’s observations. Another interesting observation from Rackham’s research is that a complex sale is never terminated in one meeting but rather over a series of meetings.
Furthermore, the first contact person is seldom the final decision maker, which means that your first contact person also has to convince others in the internal organisation, before a deal can be made.
My conclusion from this is that there is no reason to believe that the TT profession is very much dissimilar to ordinary SPIN Selling.
One important distinction may be made in the case of application of early stage or prototype research results to commercial practise. In most of Rackham’s cases, the “interviewer” has a limited arsenal of solutions, namely his company’s products and services, most of which are well described both in terms of technical/operational aspects and price. In TT cases, where the TT Offer is not a fully developed technology, there will always be questions concerned with whether the suggested Offer will work in real life. If there is only theoretical evidence or a simple prototype, how can I convince a businessman that my Offer will work, since I often have no clear evidence that the prototype can be made into an operational production item without excessive cost? In
such cases there will often be a need to actually carry out pilot projects to test the Offer. It is clear that communication between the parties will suffer from the fact that the pilot project must be funded – who should pay? The risk is, in other words, higher for TT. Furthermore, the risk profile for TT also includes the potential business of the Offer once it is introduced into the market.
In summary, I find it useful to apply Neil Rackham’s insights as guidelines for Best Practise Standards in TOPs Communication. Later in this course, we shall see how this can be done in practise.
Porter’s 5 Forces
Michael Porter from Harvard Business School has studied competitive forces which can be used to diagnose an industry’s structure and average profitability, which in turn may be used to predict or at least indicate expected innovation behaviour. I find that Porter’s model is useful in understanding the structural framework which we meet as TT professionals, since new technology is always associated with certain industries. Which entry barriers exist? What determines Supplier or Buyer power? What determines strategies of Rivals? And how will a new technology substitute existing ones? Answers to these questions are helpful tools when we wish to understand how a certain new TOP could or should enter the market.
“Porter's 5 Forces
A framework for diagnosing industry structure, built around five competitive forces that erode long-term industry average profitability. The industry structure framework can be applied at the level of the industry, the strategic group (or group of firms with similar strategies) or even the individual firm. Its ultimate function is to explain the sustainability of profits against bargaining and against direct and indirect competition.
Porter's five forces, or factors that shape business strategy are:
- Threat of entry to the market from other organisations
- Supplier power
- Buyer power
- Availability of substitute products
- Existing competitors
 The elements involved with each force are shown in the lists below
Entry Barriers
- Economies of scale
- Proprietary product differences
- Brand identity
- Switching costs
- capital requirements
- Access to distribution
- Absolute cost advantages
- Proprietary learning curve
- Access to necessary inputs
- Proprietary low-cost product design
- Government policy
- Expected retaliation
Determinants of Supplier Power
- Differentiation of inputs
- Switching costs of suppliers and firms in the industry
- Presence of substitute inputs
- Supplier concentration
- Importance of volume to supplier
- Cost relative to total purchases in the industry
- Impact of inputs on cost or differentiation
- Threat of forward integration relative to threat of backward integration by firms in the industry
Determinants of Buyer Power
- Bargaining Leverage
- Buyer concentration versus firm concentration
- Buyer volume
- Buyer switching costs relative to firm switching costs
- Buyer information
- Ability to backward integrate
- Substitute products
- Pull-through
- Price Sensitivity
- Price / total purchases
- Product differences
- Brand identity
- Impact on quality / performance
- Buyers profits
- Decision makers' incentives
Rivalry Determinants
- Industry growth
- Fixed (or storage) costs/value added
- Intermittent over capacity
- Product differences
- Brand identity
- Switching costs
- Concentration and balance
- Informational over complexity
- Diversity of competitors
- Corporate stakes
- Exit barriers
Determinants of Substitution Threats
- Relative price performance of substitutes
- Switching costs
- Buyer propensity to substitute “
As with the other models presented so far, we shall see later how Porter’s Forces may be used in practise.
Porter’s Generic Strategies
 Segmentation of SMEs
Many innovation researchers have tried to create taxonomies or segmentation of enterprises. The purpose is, of course, to predict innovative behaviour and consequently design and implement appropriate (public) innovation support mechanisms. Similar research is used by venture capitalists and other investors when trying to target areas of investment.
Different segments of industry are located in typically different core sectors according to Pavitt et.al. The following categories are interesting for the TT profession:
–Supplier dominated (SD), e.g. agriculture, housing
–Scale Intensive (SI), e.g. bulk material production (steel, glass)
–Specialised suppliers (SS), e.g. machinery, instruments
–Science Based (SB), e.g. electronics
Each of these segments show differences with regard to what determines their “technological trajectory”, i.e. which sources of technology are most probable, “types of users” , and which “technological trajectory” they will choose; sources of process technology, the relative balance between process and product innovation, typical size of firm. Actually, Pavitt has attempted to create an unambiguous relationship between these segments and statistical codes for industry sector (often termed SIC), which means that you can “predict” which kind of business you plan to visit.
 From Pavitt
In the course we shall test some of these assumptions and see how well they may assist us in understanding the prospects of success for TT, even before we have visited and audited a given enterprise.
Business Plan Paradigm
An American colleague of mine is fond of asking: “Where’s the Beef, Max?” when we open a new case of TT. His real concern is not culinary but concerns the business side of TT; how money can be made, the scope and size of business and how easily it may be made. These questions are of prime importance for success in TT. The best Model for analysing the factors which determine the potential for adding profitability to a given business is known as creating a Business Plan.
There are many good models for Business Planning. You may just search any business school or the Internet, and you will be rewarded with millions of pages of reading. At the heart of Business Planning are questions which are also central to successful TOPs Communication. In order to attract the attention of potential partners for a TT deal, we need to give meaningful information about the probable expenses involved in acquiring a technology, how these expenses may be covered by different implementation strategies, markets, pricing etc so as to ensure profitability. Following this it should be possible to create an action plan with a cash flow prediction, financing, liquidity and such important financial information. Most businessmen will require or calculate themselves this piece of
information in order to finally evaluate whether a TT deal should be made. The successful TT professional should then of course be proactive and prepare as much business plan information as possible before even entering partner search and definitely before negotiating.
The Business Plan will, of course, consist of information, which could be derived from the other Model exercises mentioned earlier in this chapter (Pavitt’s segmentation, Porter’s Forces, Rackham’s generic questions).
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News Model
All of the other mentioned Models require a lot of information gathering and a well prepared TOP file will consequently be quite voluminous. On the other hand, this information is not requested nor needed in the early phases of TOPs Communication. Therefore, a final TT Best Practise can be learned from news editors or marketing people. The Headline and the first pieces of information should be eye catchers, so potentially interested partners will “buy” our story in a world crowded with useless information.
I claim that a TOP cannot be give a good Headline unless the groundwork has been done as required by the other Models, but also that all this relevant information cannot be communicated or ”sold” unless the Headline or sales message is very clear. Managers of successful businesses are extremely busy and will not spend scarce time on anything which does not fit into a tight timetable filled with core activities. The typical modern business acts “just-in-time”, has focused on core competence and outsourced most non-core competencies, the consequence of which is that it becomes more and more difficult to determine where in a supply chain the precise user of a given technology may be found.
Psychology at Work
Communication requires good basic information, good headlines, good sales channels. The process of communication itself is, however, also a psychological “game”. From my experience with hundreds of audits, interviews and case stories of TT, I have come to believe that understanding this and acting accordingly is essential to successful TOPs Communications and TT deals. Psychology gives us a lot of Role Models we play when we communicate; and there are numerous schools of social psychology which study communication from this perspective.
In this course I shall refrain from going into theoretical detail, but rather give you some of the Paradigms you may have met yourselves. Or you may even add your own experience.
”Underage Signatory” : A very typical situation in TT is that the TT professional will communicate or meet with a given person in an organisation. In the early stages” of TOPs Communication the TT pro will have to convince this person first; and at this stage only few ask whether the counterpart actually has “power of attorney” to represent the true opinion of the partner company/organisation. Many people don’t like to show that they lack power so he/she will tell you: “ I underwrite” and you believe that your counterpart expresses the true position of the potential partner,
but what the counterpart really means is “but I ... need my boss’ signature”. So this version of the TT game is like an underage teenager going to a shop, buying a lot with a signed cheque, but not telling the shopkeeper that he is underage and that the signature is not valid. The parents are not interested in buying....
The Fake: a variation of the “underage signatory” is the “Fake”. In quite a few enterprises there will be division managers responsible for certain functions. Innovation managers belong to this breed and are , of course, paid to make sure that innovation happens. He (yes, most often he will be a male engineer) feels or is under direct orders to create tangible results and to reduce the cost of acquiring new know-how and technology. So the Innovation Manager will firstly be extremely keen to talk with you, since he may learn something or get an important lead to a potentially interesting source of
innovation for his enterprise. Secondly, he will seldom give you access to upper management because of own mandate. It doesn’t look well if he finds an interesting TOP and goes to upper management to ask for funding for acquiring this TOP. His gut reaction will be to see if he can become a “copycat”. He will look for alternative routes to the TOP or something close to it – without using you, the TT professional. He suffers the NIH-Syndrome (“Not Invented Here”). An interesting observation in patent literature is that you will almost invariably make the judgement of any TOP that the “Good part is not New” or “the New part is not Good”: there is always a “second man”, someone who had your idea or close to it. This also goes for patents, which by International Search Reports have been deemed “novel”, in my experience. Innovation research has a name for this, Imitation Strategies. Steven
Schnaars’s book on this issue is an awesome analysis of 28 cases which show that imitators often are more successful in business terms that the “pioneers”. So the Fake is a real species to be aware of.
”Therapist”: is a special European Role which is typically offered by TT professionals. In EU there is a myth (and reality?) that especially SMEs lack the resources to become innovators, so they need the help of (publicly funded) TT professionals. As SMEs also lack the financial strength to pursue more innovation, taxpayers’ money are given out to foster a group of TT “Therapists”, as I call them. ”Let me help you, poor SME you”
”Adult Couples”: is a classical Role. The partners trust and confide in each other. Often they share many years of being together. Mutual respect rules the game. But beware, couples get tired, too. Or side steps may be costly. Divorces do occur. In TT terms this means that the enterprises with which you have enjoyed the best experiences, your key accounts, may suddenly get into “midlife crisis” and opt for other partners. I worked with Key account management in a large technology transfer organisation with more than 12,000 annual clients in the books, of which about 1,000 could be called key
accounts. Invariably, however, there would be a turnover of 25% each year in the key accounts.
”Business Partners”: is an evergreen. In this Role, the parties stay together because it makes business sense. The partners share information and prospects in order to benefit most, but either party will only disclose just enough to facilitate progress. Often legal agreements regulate the flow of information and prospects so as to share risks and profits according to signed Memos of Understanding or the like. With business partners you will also have a clear division of costs and profits arranged. For the TT pro this most often means: “pay for yourself” until we start making a profit”
especially on larger projects or projects where the payback period is long.
Name: wtb24
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Future Now articles
Keywords:
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Future Now: A Better Way to Deliver Cancer Drugs
This is a perfect example of Beef Thinking: Look at the Value Chain and then see if you can sell your stuff one step down the stream!!
A Better Way to Deliver Cancer Drugs: "Piquette-Miller"
Technology Review: Healing Bone with Stem Cells: " [1] Wednesday, March 07, 2007 Healing Bone with Stem Cells New techniques to boost survival of adult stem cells could improve surgeries for severe fractures. By Emily Singer Broken bones: New methods to boost cell survival after transplant could help heal severe fractures. Implantable materials that grab stem cells and spur their growth and survival could improve bone-healing surgeries. Linda Griffith and her colleagues at MIT have created a new tissue-engineering material that could help cells survive the harsh transplant environment--a key step in cell-transplant therapies. Scienti"
Future Now: Portable, Palm-Size Radiation Detectors
A good example of the world of business stated by Ian Pearson and his Future Studies at British telecom.
Portable, Palm-Size Radiation Detectors: "A new device, with sensors the size of human cells, can measure, record, and assess the risk of radiation emissions in real time."(Via Technology Review Feed - Tech Review Top Stories.)
Future Now: New Bedside-Diagnostics Tool
This is a perfect example of Beef Thinking: Look at the Value Chain and then see if you can sell your stuff one step down the stream!!
New Bedside-Diagnostics Tool: "Can microfluidics turn out cheap and powerful alternatives to microarrays?"(Via Technology Review Feed - Tech Review Top Stories.)
No Nano Chill from Canon’s IP Loss - NSTI Finds Legal, Partnership Lessons
I have earlier reported on how and why I think that Nanotechnology is going to be the big issue for litigation on IP Matters
No Nano Chill from Canon’s IP Loss - NSTI Finds Legal, Partnership Lessons: "Last week, the biggest nanotechnology licensing battle ever came to an end when a U.S. District Judge ruled that Canon Inc., one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers, violated a licensing agreement with nanotechnology component maker Nano-Proprietary, Inc. of Austin, Texas."(Via NSTI Nano World News™.)
From thinking and debating, to shaping the future
Thanks to a Cordis News email I have become aware of Action FORERA of the Joint Research Center of the European Commission, where future-oriented technology analyses (FTA) and studies, including strategic foresight, forecasting and technology assessment, are discussed to better enable policy makers to look into the future and choose among policy options. Now let's hope politicians will be listening ;)
In their web page there is a lot of information I had no time yet to read, and a forum has just been opened. In the publications section I have seen already reports about (nano/bio) manufacturing challenges and technology time horizons, policy recommendations, and a 'guide to regional foresight'.
The Ideas Factory-The Matter Compiler
I have often written about the need to know about what is coming , what we can expect from technology, see for instance my discussion of the articles about Ian Pearson's Business 2010 and Siemens' Pictures of the Future. Now British scientists have created a framework called the Ideas Factory and a weblog about it. So what comes out of the scientists' sandpit(That's what THEY call it ;-)? Read the blog and comment upon it. Software-controlled matter!! .
The Matter Compiler: "
The final project to go forward from the Ideas Factory on the Software Control of Matter is based on theoretical chemistry/materials science and computer science, and we anticipate this linking strongly to the experimental activities funded from the Ideas Factory. As with the two experimental projects, a few administrative hurdles need to be jumped before EPSRC funding can be confirmed.An ambition to assemble molecules and materials under atomically precise control demands a big leap forward in control engineering and computer science. Is it possible to anticipate the properties and needs of a ‘nano-assembler’? If so, there is a need for a high level instruction
language and a computer compiler that translates commands in this language into instructions for the ‘nano-assembler’. This development will require a breakthrough in understanding of chemical synthesis that must embrace the radically new ‘pick and place’ assembly method which is now possible in scanning probe microscopy (SPM). The Matter Compiler project is thus both an exercise in foresight, to anticipate developments in this area, and a prototype implementation for the engineering control and computer science aspects of directed molecular assembly. It has as inputs data from SPM experiments of collaborators, energy landscapes for ‘pick and place’ reactions and the vast knowledge base of classical synthetic chemistry, including methodologies such as retrosynthesis. This will be supplemented by reaction schemes for ‘pick and place’ reactions deduced from first principles quantum chemistry calculations and the technology of object
oriented databases and inference engines.
The team is led by Dr Harris Makatsoris (Engineering, Brunel University) and comprises Professor Malcolm Heggie (Chemistry, University of Sussex), Dr Nick Holliman (Computer Science, University of Durham), Dr Helen Wright (Computer Science, University of Hull) and Professor Jeremy Ramsden (Advanced Materials, Cranfield University)."
(Via Software Control of Matter.)
Name: wtb25
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: EU Research Programme Design
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EU Research Programme Design
On TII's Innovation Journal I have written an article about how to improve the prospects for commercial success of EU funded projects under FP VII. The basic point is about how the commercial success of a research result mainly depends on the quality of the research- and how I believe that quality in research can be greatly improved by using better peer review in the design of the research project. In short: make better/more literature studies by peers to make sure that research projects are
not redundant but that they add genuinely new knowledge. The "publish-or-die" syndrome works against this, because we would get less pages per year fro academia, but nevertheless...
My second point is to leave the researchers alone so they can concentrate on what they are good at. Why must EC funded research projects involve SMEs or industrial associations or members from at least x countries if it doesn't add value to the quality?
The third point is about the use of "accompanying measures consortia" to do all the necessary exercises to ensure better commercialisation.
This is where the topic of this blog becomes interesting. The skills in Beef work are exactly what could/should be employed in the support of better research and better chances of commercialisation .
EU Research Programme Design
In early October 2006, I was invited to a meeting in Brussels as an "expert" to participate in a workshop on how to improve the design, the monitoring and support and the follow-up of programmes and projects in one of the domains of the upcoming FPVII programme. A group of consultants had drafted a report, which a group of some 20 experts were to comment upon.
The word "improve" is important as it concerns how projects from this DGs can better lead to innovation and technology transfer. Should a subset of projects be reserved so more SMEs can be involved? Does it help projects to have end users onboard? How about industry associations or the many "clusters" (publicly induced)- will a research result better reach the market place if they are research partners? Can diligent review of socio-economic aspects or use of non-technical experts increase the "business-readiness" of a project?
These are concerns, then, which a group of researchers must consider to successfully bid for funds in this programme if it is up to this experienced group of international consultants.
I think the Commission may have gotten it wrong. My basic position is that the first and foremost criterion for market-oriented research is high quality of results. In other words, that genuinely new knowledge is created (patent language: it is "novel"). I don't see how an SME, an industrial association or a non-technical expert can contribute anything to the resolution of this question.
But politicians and the Commission as well, then, want to see more research results reach the market. What should they do?
Let me first say that I find the initiatives in many DGs outside the Research DGs have many good innovation support measures, especially the Technology Platforms and similar Foresight instruments to give overall guidance to research in a given area.
Secondly, I can see that many funded "R&D" projects do not deserve that title. Too often researchers state that a certain problem is unsolved or interesting, but most often there already exists a body of knowledge and research, which has answered the key questions of the "R&D project. The provocative statement probably is based on a criticism of the peer review process. Too many funding agencies and directors of research centres grant money to projects, which are not based on diligent studies of "prior art". OK, so we can solve that. And DG research should help do that by granting pre-proposal funds for literature studies, which also could contain an element of studies of the perceived needs of relevant industries.
Then my second position is that we should leave the researchers alone to do their research, but demand -and fund- that they spend some time on structured dialogue with industry representatives, associations, non-technical experts. The outcome of this dialogue should be used to feed back to the researchers what the "outside" world believes, but still we should leave the researchers at what they are best at (they may adapt and include the feedback into their work or not). But the outside experts could/should be organised as what is called an "accompanying measure" in Brussels: the outside dialogue partners could get funds to think creatively about what they learnt through the dialogues and then try to find potential industrial partners to the research project and on its
behalf. The accompanying measure partners could easily be a consortium of experts who were retained for the length of the programme to support all projects during the project cycle from application to commercialisation. Such consortia would gain a lot from adapting the lessons of good practice in commercialisation reported elsewhere and on this site.Why not let a whole sub programme's commercialisation, for instance in fuel cells, be managed by an outside consortium in the same way as eg. the IP Group for UK universities or how Cambridge University Enterprise manages IP coming out of its university? These IP management groups have continuity, commitment ,
expertise and - funding to follow up on promising research results. And do so with a commercial perspective. Give the group funding to help do the initial peer review both technically and with regard to nmon-technical aspects. Give full funding of the support to projects as they are ongoing -and give some funding for the final phases (in order to ensure that the best prospects get selected for future funding).
Name: wtb26
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Siemens Future Study
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Siemens' Future Study
Some time ago, I reported on British Telecom's Future Studies Group and their Technology Timeline. Now Siemens Corporate Technology Department has made a road map of the Future in six areas of interest.
With its "Pictures of the Future" approach, Siemens takes a long look into the future: 10, 20 or even 30 years, depending upon the area of activity. The goal is to identify promising technologies and future consumer wishes and to discover new business possibilities. The result is a coherent vision of tomorrow's world.
Name: wtb27
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Commercial is Commercial is Commercial: on spinoff companies
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Commercial is Commercial is Commercial
We (me included, until now) often talk as if there is only a dichotomy between university and industry. Commercial means anything, which has left the university side. But is "commercial" really commercial?
Michael Kenward commented on my article on the "survey" of university commercialisation performance by writing:A couple of points, do not lump all "European universities" together. In the UK at least it is not true that they have "only recently turned their focus on patents and licensing". You also miss another commercialisation route, the spin-out company. If anything, in the UK at least, this has been an overused option. Licensing can be a better bet. But it doesn't do to ignore spin outs.
Many spin outs, however, are not "commercial" at all! They have been "capitalized" by patient investors, but they don't make a profit. Recently I had an opportunity to review Geron Corp's Annual Reports: the company has "burnt" up to 30 million $ per year for more than 10 years. Look up any seed or venture capital fund and you will see the same picture. In my Danish home town, Østjysk Innovation in its 2005 annual report recorded losses in almost all of its portfolio companies. The same does
the largest Danish innovation fund. These companies are recorded as "hits" or successes in the survey statistics.
Add to this that many of these funds are initially or substantially publicly funded.
Commercial is not - always - commercial. One more reason to be extremely careful in the use of university commercialisation performance comparisons.
Name: wtb28
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: US Patents Datamining
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US Patents "grabbing" (data mining)
In an earlier article (see the same category as this), I have referred to how WIPO and espac@net allow some rather nifty ways to rapidly download and browse patent information. For some time, I have been looking for ways to the same with USPTO but have not been successful: you get only patent (application) number, and title.Well, I found a solution for my Macintosh (and I'm sure you Windows and Linux guys can find a similar solution at Bruce Pokras' web site). It works!
Patent Grabber creates a set of files on my hard disk. With Mac I can then use the internal index search engine, Spotlight, to find the files with hits that match my interest (Windows users will use Copernic, I guess).
Patent Grabber also works with WIPO and EPO files. To create the files from downloads from those respective web sites, you need to isolate the information containing country code and patent number (it takes a bit of copy-paste & find-replace in Excel, for instance, to create such a list. Fast!
Name: wtb29
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: EU beats US Universities on Commercialization Performance?
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EU beats US Universities on Commercialization Performance?
Two researchers from UNU Merit have made a report with the title: Developing internationally comparable indicators for the commercialization of publicly-funded research. Their basis for the report is that they have also conducted a survey for ASTP of ASTP members and their commercialization of research results and now they compare the survey and the use of indicators with four other surveys (AUTM in North America, one UK; a Canadian and an Australian survey).
The report got most attention because it concludes that European public research institutes outperform their US competitors on "licences executed" and start-ups created.
 Arundel and Bordoy mention the ProTon Europe Survey (led by my good collaborator from Valencia, Fernando Conesa and his team) but dismisses it because it uses a wrong denominator (academics per institution). It's a pity because that survey and the work behind it tell us that Europe hardly can be compared with the US. A&B see only two ways of how industry can gain from public research: either through formal arrangements involved in patenting and licensing or the "open science" of publications, seminars etc.
European universities have only recently turned their focus on patents and licensing, whereas collaborative and contract research contracts have accounted for the majority of activity and income for many years.A&B mention insights into this point gained from their reading of research from the Uni of Sussex SPRU. Professor Sodi and before him Keth Pavitt recommended the UK government to be careful about focusing too much on the formal and technology routes of the impact of oublic research on the economy in a wonderful set of articles and lectures: Talent, Not
Technology.
Conclusions: PROs should support creation of standardised indicators as is being produced by ProTon Europe and others, but policy makers should remember to take a balanced view on the results. And each PRO could find a group of peers with which to keep close relations in order to monitor their own performance, but be sure to keep their findings a secret! Use it for developing new strategy!
Name: wtb30
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Denmark jumps up the ladder?
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Denmark jumps up the ladder?
Recently I compared Cambridge University Enterprise with Danish Tech Transfer Offices. Now the 2005 statistics from the Danish side have been published- The report, which is not yet publicly available (?), shows that the Danish TTOs have improved 15-20% on average on major indicators. Well done!! Especially one of the small "regional" universities with a tradition for industrial collaboration has imporved a lot. For those who read Danish, it becomes obvious that the PROs invested more especially by increasing staff and other costs (of course, more patents-more expense).
No doubt, the increase in disclosures and patents, spinoffs etc is a good investment which will pay back a few years from now.But there is a matter of concern: there must be (I don't yet have specifics) quite a number of patents, licenses and spinoff creations, which were obtained by using funds from another "box" of the same ministry which monitors the PROs. So there is a problem of semantics (and maybe also reality) whether such partners can be considered "industry" partners? I have no doubts that the money spent by
the Ministry is one of the best investments the Danish government may ever have made...BUT someone may have to create a smoke screen to persuade opposition politicians nothing is wrong??
 Name: wtb31
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Biotechnology explained
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Biotechnology explained
More often than not, the Tech Transfer officer meets a biotechnology invention. It can be difficult for us non-scientists to really understand all the science involved.
The National Health Center (US) has created an interesting Graphics Gallery and a wider overview of issues in biotechnology and human health related issues.Very useful to quickly get up-to-date on terms such as Retrovirus or details of Microscopy.
Science, Biology for the Rest of Us
Sometimes, if not always, I/we need to check what scientists tell us. They talk science language; we talk business. So we need "translators". Access Excellence is such a site, highly recommended!
Access Excellence, launched in 1993, is a national educational program that provides health, biology and life science teachers access to their colleagues, scientists, and critical sources of new scientific information via the World Wide Web. The program was originally developed and launched by Genentech Inc., and in 1999 joined the National Health Museum, a non-profit organization founded by former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop as a national center for health education. Access Excellence will form the core of the educational component of the National Health Museum Website that is currently under development. .
If, say, you wish to know about Transfer and Cloning of the Insulin Geneyou just go to http://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/VL/GG/transfer_and.html
I like the graphics or Visual Library. I pull down an illustration and ask the scientist to explain how and where her/his invention fits in. Works well.
Name: wtb32
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Do Universities sell their IP at too low a price?
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Imprimatur Capital (IC) started a new line of business around 2005, namely to source IP from universities, fund proof-of-concept work and forward-license inventions to next stage investors. IC has recruited universities in Russia, Ukraine, Baltic States, Singapore and Spain. I met their name in Spain recently and tried to find out more because I see IC as a new trend which is already moving fast in the US (eg-. Bridgehead Group)(their web site doesn't always work), who bought a new Danish start-up company recently. Formerly, I have described how Cancer Research Technology in London works. Also you might wish to study a BioTech group with Danish founders but now based in London: Bridge Bioresearch
.
I found (used JBEngine) some documents about IC's mode of work in the east. I note that they get a first right of refusal to commercialise against infusing proof-of concept funding for project in the order of 2-5k....and maybe also larger sums (<10k) (maybe this reflects the "eastern" prices??). First impression: universities pay a high price to commercialise....?
I then went to Companies House in the UK to see their ownership and financial background. The company is controlled by two persons who seemingly won a lot of money in the IT Bubble economy and then decided to invest in new ventures. They must have seen how lucky they were to get out of their individual ventures before the bubble burst?? And saw that portfolio management is better. The two invested 2,5 million € in 2005 and convinced Barclay's Bank and a few other minority investors to drop another 1 million (so it seems from the accounts).
With that money and an option programme they hire some good professionals to go on a "fishing expedition" in universities around the world, assuming that expert due diligence will do the rest (pick winners). Good luck: IC may find itself in another bubble experience soon and/or must attract even more capital to survive.
The model is great, but there is a point of warning to universities who sign up: the money you get for giving away your inventions may just be too small....But there is another even more alarming signals for the many new "Knowledge Transfer Offices" or tech transfer services in universities: for 5-10 years you have now tried to commercialise your universities' inventions but most of you have a low score on actual hits - and consequently spend more money than you cost etc. There is a danger that dismayed rectors will conclude that this business cannot be done inside universities - and, if it's outside, why not sell to companies such as IC.
I have downloaded the Background documents on my BeefBlog (for participants in my Where's the Beef Course).
Name: wtb33
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Search with independent entry points
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Search with independent entry points
I have been giving courses on "Where's the Beef" methods in 4 different countries over the last month. Faced with the tough questions and feedback from participants, I found or realized a few things about searching, which I hadn't thought of before.
If you click on the category Search Engines on this blog, you will see my earlier articles, in which I try to explain the needs of the profession,and , for example, why JBEngine is a good engine.
I have developed a new method in which I combine JBEngine with other good search engines to get a fast impression of a given invention, patent or new technology. The key in the method is to use several INDEPENDENT entry points to Internet, Extranets and Intranets.For instance, I will use JBEngine together with Kartoo, Edgar and my own Rollyo to understand a new topic. JBEngine would be used to look for market reports and patents, to mention an example. Kartoo would give me an impression of interlinkages between websites (I want pages which DO NOT link to each other), Edgar to see what
the US Stock Exchange "thinks" about the topic and Rollyo to see if a technology has been "buried" in the databases of the Rollyo sites.
If the hits from these INDEPENDENT sites give me sufficient information to think well about an opportunity I trust them. This method has the advantage compared to Googling, where one starts with a given search string and then follow the hyperlinks "deeper and deeper" into the web. One problem with this approach is that one has to rely on the quality of the first search string. Another is that the hits are biased by Google or Yahoo's highest ranked pages - and those hits are biased by money and popularity, which are not necessarily what one wishes to use as selection criteria for good hits. That is why INDEPENDENT hits which point in the same direction (good!) are indicators of something worthful, whereas conflicting indications might help one to form new hypotheses about the given topic
(ie. reformulate search to test the hypothesis).
Using independent hits gives one feedback which makes it easier to "brainstorm" to refine search strings: for instance, a "controlled release of drugs in a cardiovascular stent" turns out to point to "drug-eluting stent" as the best keyword.
Thinking graphically, the INDEPENDENT search method (we could call it that..) gives one hits at level 1 of many sites, whereas, I see the classical Google search as a method whereby one is guided many levels deep before one finds anything. In the Independent search, one finds possible new search strings at the same level 1, which then guide a dive into level 2 in these independent sites. Chances are that different writers will use different words and form opinions independently of each other. That's good to look through all the useless pages on the web.
Name: wtb34
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Do Universities sell their IP at too low a price? II
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Do Universities sell their IP at too low a price? II
Earlier today, I wrote an article with the same title: Do Universities sell their IP at too low a price?I was trying to understand what I see as a new phenomenon, namely the pre-VC fund (managers or maybe only entrepreneurial business angels who won in the past and now are looking for new investments) and used some examples (Imprimatur Capital, Bridgehead Group, Bridge BioResearch).In another context I read an interesting report which pointed me to PriceWaterhouseCoopers and their MoneyTreeReports.The
MoneyTree Report is a quarterly study of venture capital investment activity in the United States. As a collaboration between PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association based upon data from Thomson Financial, it is the only industry-endorsed research of its kind. The MoneyTree Report is the definitive source of information on emerging companies that receive financing and the venture capital firms that provide it. The study is a staple of the financial community, entrepreneurs, government policymakers and the business press worldwide.
The interesting point here is the overall drop in venture capital investment since the "Bubble" burst around 2000 and the trend to see business angels consolidate their activity to move downstream in the funding pipeline, ie. investing larger sums than usual. But it's also evident that the US now also realizes a widening gap between early stage and VC funding.
My interpretation is that the MoneyTreeReport explains why there is space for new types of investors, who take a proactive role to "scout" for new opportunities, fund proof-of-concept stages of devevlopment and then sell on to downstream investors: VCs etc.
I have earlier described - in this blog- how the IP Group in the UK does this brilliantly, or how Cancer Research Technology , also from UK, is a master in scouting for and developing proof-of-concept for its line of research and business.
Name: wtb35
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: New medical search engine provides a wealth of nanotechnology information
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New medical search engine provides a wealth of nanotechnology information
This is an interesting twist to a classical search engine; but JBEngine already has this facility (as does Highwire, which is included in JBEngine)New medical search engine provides a wealth of nanotechnology information: "A new search engine provides medical professionals, researchers and the general public with a more efficient and targeted way to search PubMed for the latest, most relevant medical literature to answer medical queries."(Via Nanowerk News.)
Name: wtb36
Author: Ernst Max Nielsen
Subject: Future Now: IBM nominates five innovations
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Future Now: IBM nominates five innovations
In my series Future Now, I found this interesting article: IBM nominated Five Innovations which will change our lives over the next five years: 1) We will be able to access healthcare remotely, from just about anywhere in the world 2) Real-time speech translation—once a vision only in science fiction—will become the norm 3) There will be a 3-D Internet 4) Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environmental importance 5) Our mobile phones will start to read
our minds These five innovations were selected based on projects in our Research labs, research conducted by our business think-tank, and ideas pooled from more than 150,000 people from 104 countries who took part in an online brainstorming session called “IBM InnovationJam.” Item 4 deals with carbon nanotubes used for water desalination and nanostructure fabrication used in making better solar cells.
wtb36: Future Now: IBM nominates five innovations
In my series Future Now, I found this interesting article: IBM nominated Five Innovations which will change our lives over the next five years: 1) We will be able to access healthcare remotely, from just about anywhere in the world 2) Real-time speech translation—once a vision only in science fiction—will become the norm 3) There will be a 3-D Internet 4) Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environmental importance 5) Our mobile phones will start to read
our minds These five innovations were selected based on projects in our Research labs, research conducted by our business think-tank, and ideas pooled from more than 150,000 people from 104 countries who took part in an online brainstorming session called “IBM InnovationJam.” Item 4 deals with carbon nanotubes used for water desalination and nanostructure fabrication used in making better solar cells.
A new website called Peer-to-Patent intends to harness the power of online collaboration to streamline patent review. By creating a community around each application, the site facilitates public discussion and lets people upload relevant information. The United States Patent and Trademark Office
(USPTO) is currently involved in a limited trial of Peer-to-Patent, with the hope that it will bring openness and transparency to a review process that was previously limited to communication between the applicant and the examiner vetting the patent."There's never been a bridge built between the information available in these expert communities and the government institutions that make these important policy decisions," says Peer-to-Patent founder Beth Noveck. Noveck is a professor at New York Law School and the director of the school's Institute for Information Law and Policy. She is also the director of the Democracy Design Workshop, which is running an experiment, called Do Tank, to encourage research into projects that foster community and encourage citizens to take action.
Peer-to-Patent could benefit an overloaded government organization. The USPTO faces mounting difficulties stemming from large numbers of patent applications of increasing complexity. According to the USPTO, 173,771 patent applications were approved in 2006. The government agency claims that it is currently backlogged with more than 800,000 patents. This means that new submissions have a pendency, or time from filing to first action, of up to 52 months.
Currently, the process to grant patents begins when an application, describing the invention in painstaking detail, is submitted to the USPTO examiner, who conducts a search for prior art. Prior art can be any previous evidence of an invention: an academic article, schematic, photograph, data set, or nearly anything that demonstrates a similar concept. Searches for prior art must be as exhaustive as possible. If prior art is missed, the USPTO risks approving spurious patents, leading to lawsuits and requests for post-grant examinations.
Peggy Focarino, the deputy commissioner for patent operations at the USPTO, says, "The U.S. patent system is based on disclosure, and the earlier we can get our examiners the best prior art in front of them to help make that patentability determination, the better." The USPTO is working with Noveck on a limited trial of the Peer-to-Patent system involving 250 patent applications. While Focarino doesn't believe that considering the Peer-to-Patent site is an admission that the patent system, particularly the search for prior art, is too large or complex, she says she believes that "giving the public an opportunity to participate in that process ... is going to further improve our quality."
Patent examiners must use prior art to demonstrate that an invention is both novel and nonobvious. For a patent to be novel, it must have at least one new component above previous innovations. Obviousness, by comparison, implies that the claim lacks sufficient innovation and is self-evident to professionals in the field.
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