UArizona Launches Program to Engage Faculty Leaders and Increase Impact from Innovative Research 

Paul Tumarkin
Assistant Director, Marketing and Communciations
Tech Launch Arizona
 

What should campus researchers and innovators do if they think their work has given rise to a useful innovation? How does the university patent and license inventions? How do you recognize when something might be a useful invention in the first place? What’s involved in launching a start-up?

The team at Tech Launch Arizona – the office of the University of Arizona that works with campus inventors to bring university innovations to the world – has been engaging in the work of commercializing university discoveries for over 10 years. That work has had a significant and measurable impact, including generating over 2,700 inventions, the granting of more than 600 patents, the creation of more than 135 startups, the support of over 2,500 jobs and the generation of a $1.6 billion impact on the Arizona economy.

“Even with our success and great, real-world stories of impact, there are still employees across the university who either don’t know about us or aren’t engaging when it would be so beneficial,” said TLA Associate Vice President Doug Hockstad. “People are very focused on the work at hand, but we want help them take that work further and impact the public good. Our goal is to engage innovators and bring their expertise to bear on making a better world for all.”

To extend its reach into the campus community, TLA launched a new in-reach strategy to improve access to information and assistance related to innovation, inventorship and entrepreneurship. The office’s Faculty Innovation Ambassador program places a volunteer faculty member who has expertise and experience in commercialization activities such as invention disclosure, intellectual property development, licensing and startups in key colleges across campus. While TLA has licensing managers embedded in academic units throughout the university, Faculty Innovation Ambassadors (FIAs) serve as an additional initial point of contact able to answer their colleagues' questions and point them to helpful resources.

Hockstad and the TLA team have not developed this program in a vacuum. For the past year, they has been collaborating with university teams from around the nation as they all work to strategize, learn from one another and share best practices. The working group, which meets quarterly, includes commercialization offices at Vanderbilt University, Duke University, the University of Michigan and Baylor University. Some have had programs already in place, while others are just getting established. All are committed to sharing their results and learning from one another’s successes, as well as their failures, and look forward to sharing best practices for the good of the technology transfer community in the future.