Jane Muir, RTTP

Interview with John Fraser in 2019
 

• AUTM President, 2014
• First began volunteering with AUTM: Right after I attended my first Annual Meeting. (2000 – I think)
• First AUTM Committee position: 2003 Advanced Courses Committee
• First AUTM leadership position: Chair of the AUTM Marketing Course Committee
• First AUTM Board position: Vice-President for Professional Development

When and how did you find your way into tech transfer?
In 1992, after having recently moved to Gainesville, FL, the NASA Southeast Regional Technology Transfer Center (RTTC) located in the College of Engineering at the University of Florida (UF) was hiring a Marketing Director. During the interview, the Director asked me what I knew about technology transfer and my response was “Technology what?” He hired me anyway, and I spent seven years helping them translate science speak to business speak. I then transitioned into the UF Office of Technology Licensing (OTL) where I spent 18 years in a variety of roles as the office doubled in size.

During my nearly two decades at OTL, I was an active AUTM member. I served in dozens of volunteer positions and invested thousands of hours working with some of the most intelligent people I know. Without a doubt, what I gained from my AUTM involvement far outweighed my contributions and, for this I will always be grateful.

What had you been doing prior to making the leap?
Prior to working in technology transfer, I spent the first decade of my career in private industry working as Vice President of Sales for an international consumer products company and later as a consultant.

Why did you make the leap?
Truth be told, when we moved to Gainesville, I was a trailing spouse, and the University of Florida was not only the major employer in Gainesville, but also in the entire state. So, when I found an opportunity to apply my marketing expertise, I took it. It just happened to be in technology transfer.

Tell us about the state of tech transfer at the institution you joined.
Technology transfer was not well understood or appreciated when I joined the profession. The NASA RTTC was housed at the University of Florida and had many of the same roles and responsibilities for NASA that UF’s OTL had for the university. Yet, as is often the case at universities, they each operated in their own silos. While the NASA RTTC was not well-known by faculty because it worked mostly with the NASA field centers, the UF OTL was also not well-known by the faculty. But those faculty and companies who had interacted with OTL had very little positive to say about their interactions. This was due primarily because the office was notoriously poor at communicating. This was compounded by the fact that the OTL Director did not have the signature authority to finalize deals, making the negotiation process arduous.

When I transitioned from the NASA RTTC to the UF OTL, my training as a Dale Carnegie instructor was immensely valuable in helping to develop a customer-service approach for the office. Templates were created to set expectations and inform faculty inventors throughout the process. We changed the mission from: “to protect the intellectual property of the University” to “to facilitate technology transfer to serve faculty and community.”

What was your vision of tech transfer back then?
When I started, the majority of tech transfer practitioners had either a science, engineering or legal background. Only a handful of practitioners had a marketing or sales backgrounds like mine. While I felt a bit intimidated, I also saw it as a huge opportunity to utilize my knowledge of marketing to help expand the skill set of the profession.

What were some of the issues you faced in the early days?
Not unlike today, one of the key issues faced in the early days of both the NASA RTTC and the UF OTL was the lack of awareness and understanding of technology commercialization. Presentations and marketing materials aimed at educating faculty and other key constituents were a major effort. Additionally, for OTL, overcoming the horrible reputation of the office and getting faculty to disclose and engage again was a long process. A key to effectively doing so was managing expectations and ensuring regular communications that were customer-service oriented rather than legalese. 

What were some of your early successes?
Early successes included the infiltration of the concept of “value proposition” to all our marketing materials and communications. At the NASA RTTC, we created some of the first-ever “Technology Opportunity Sheets” which were flyers that described the value proposition for potential licensees of NASA technologies, rather than the scientific descriptions that had previously been used. I brought this practice to the UF OTL when I transitioned, with surprising resistance from the OTL staff. Since they were primarily scientists and engineers, they believed anyone who would be interested in licensing the technologies would be interested in the science. When the marketing campaigns ultimately increased the number of licenses executed, the resistance subsided. Eventually, this practice was adopted as a best practice by many offices across the country and many parts of the world.

What were some of your early failures?
The first faculty presentation I put together to use at departmental meetings included IP policies of the university and federal regulations about obligations to disclose. Since my husband was a faculty member at the time, I ran it by him before using it. To my surprise, he told me in no uncertain terms that it was really bad. After I licked my wounds, I went back to the drawing board and developed a presentation that focused on the positive impact that licensed discoveries were having on the lives of ordinary people. This helped faculty understand that commercializing their research discoveries was one of the best ways to make the biggest impact on the world.

What was faculty’s attitude to tech transfer back then?
When I decided to transition from the NASA RTTC to the UF OTL, my husband’s professorial colleagues thought I was crazy. It was rare for a faculty member to talk about the UF OTL without the use of profanity. Need I say more?

When did you start to get involved with SUPA / AUTM?
1999/2000

What was the Association like back then?
It was much smaller, and it was dominated by scientists, engineers, and lawyers - very few practitioners with marketing or sales training. While the membership and leadership of AUTM was quite diverse, the keynote presenters at the Annual Meetings were dominated by Caucasian men.

Who were some of the leaders of AUTM then?
Many of the usual suspects. The person who got me involved was Pat Harsche Weeks. When I commented to her that there wasn’t much content at the Annual Meeting about marketing, she suggested I put something together.

What were some of the issues Association was facing?
AUTM had recently contracted with the Sherwood Management Group and was working through the transition. It was also searching for ways to better serve the ever-growing non-North American membership. Lastly, the lack of brand recognition among key constituents making decisions that impacted the profession of technology transfer was problematic. AUTM was seldom represented when important decisions impacting technology transfer were made.

What were some of the issues the profession was facing?
While the importance of commercializing university research discoveries was becoming more recognized, the complex process of doing so and the time required to take an idea from lab to market was sorely misunderstood by many people in positions of power who were ultimately making decisions about where and how to allocate resources. There was also a lack of appreciation for, and understanding of, how to properly market both university technology transfer offices and the technologies they were seeking to license. This was evident by how few offices actually had a dedicated marketing/communications person.

Did you decide to get involved with any particular issue?
Recognizing that while most of my colleagues were far more educated than I in science and law and better understood the science behind the discoveries they were trying to license, there were only a handful of tech transfer colleagues who truly understood marketing concepts and how to apply them to marketing the science. Working with Phil Ternouth, we created what I think was the first two-hour workshop on “The Science of Marketing Science” and presented it at the Annual Meeting. That grew to a half-day workshop and eventually into a two-day AUTM Marketing Course.

What were some of the big Issues in your early day?
For me, UF OTL is based in Gainesville, FL which was, and still is, a small community of approximately 130,000 citizens and very few companies that were capable of licensing and commercializing technologies. We therefore focused considerable energy leveraging the “Gator Nation” seeking out experienced entrepreneurs and subsequently investors from around the country who had connections to UF (many alums) and paired them with UF technologies to start companies. This was a very time-consuming activity and one in which most of our staff was not well-versed. In 2001, I received a federal grant from the Economic Development Administration (EDA) to become the Florida designated EDA University Center. The mandate of the program was to help create jobs, and our particular focus was to do so by assisting in the creation of university-based startup companies. The grant enabled OTL to hire a full-time person to help do some of the heavy lifting of creating the university startups, significantly augmenting the efforts of the OTL licensing staff and ultimately growing the number of licenses to startups from one to two per year to an average of 15 – 17 annually. From 2001 – 2017, the program assisted in the creation of approximately 200 university technology-based startups that created more than 2,000 jobs and attracted more than $2 billion in funding.

In general, most offices were understaffed and often did not have the breadth of expertise among their staff to do all the complex tasks associated with protecting, marketing, and commercializing research discoveries. 

What were Board meetings like back then?
Board meetings back then were very well-organized and operational driven. I learned a great deal from my colleagues about the profession, about governance and about politics by attending Board meetings.

What were some of the issues the Boards you were on wrestled with?
The first Board wrestled with financial shortfalls of the organization. Additionally, we tackled head on the “professionalization” of technology transfer. Recognizing that almost every profession that performs a service requires a credential of one sort or another, the board voted to create the Alliance of Technology Transfer Professionals (ATTP), which in collaboration with seven sister organizations from around the world ultimately created the process for technology transfer practitioners to receive designation as a Registered Technology Transfer Professional (RTTP). As VP of Professional Development, I served on the founding ATTP Board.

The second Board dealt with all the gnarly issues associated with transitioning a board from an operational board to a strategic board. This was ultimately a three-year effort initiated under the leadership of Past President Sean Flanigan and implemented during my tenure as President. As part of that transition, the Board also voted to hire a technology transfer professional as its first employee to serve as Executive Director for AUTM. The Executive Director would ultimately transition to become AUTM’s President, and the previous volunteer president would then assume the role of CEO for the organization. -While at first blush, both of these tasks appear pretty straight forward, they were fraught with many complex challenges. Through the amazing efforts of a very distinguished group of Board Members, we were ultimately able to work through the issues and transcend so the Board could be the forward-thinking board that so many past presidents ultimately believed it needed to become.

What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the profession since you entered it?
When I first started in the profession, one of the challenges was that very few people were familiar with technology transfer. Many begroaned this fact, and AUTM spent considerable effort to create awareness and understanding of our profession. Because of AUTM’s successful marketing efforts (an example is the tech transfer video created in 2014), its collaboration with sister organizations in D.C. on advocacy issues, and the tech transfer success stories of so many AUTM members’ offices, awareness of the profession grew significantly. With this increased recognition came an expanded scope of work. We’ve grown from primarily patenting and licensing scientific research discoveries to becoming intertwined with a broad array of activities and initiatives throughout university campuses, industries, and government organizations. This increased involvement has required a broadening of skills and expertise within the tech transfer office to encompass entrepreneurship, incubation, economic development, and much more. Many administrators are now familiar with their technology transfer offices and want it involved in many other aspects of the organization. The challenge now is managing the ever-increasing demands and expectations. Some colleagues joke that maybe we should have been more “careful what we wished for”.

What do you wish might have turned out differently?
The AUTM Women Inventor’s Committee (WIC), for which I was the founding chair, was a very active and productive committee from 2012 – 2019, with many notable achievements to foster greater diversity and inclusion in innovation. It was also the only substantive diversity initiative supported by AUTM. Rather than building on the momentum and passionate volunteers who were interested in expanding WIC’s mission to include all under-represented populations, the 2019 AUTM Board elected to disband the WIC committee and create a completely new Diversity and Inclusion Committee. With no real explanation behind the decision, it left both internal and external WIC stakeholders with negative perceptions about AUTM’s lack of commitment to diversity and a new group of volunteers to start their diversity and inclusion efforts from scratch.

Where do you see the profession in the next ten years?
Unfortunately, my crystal ball is broken. However, if I were to optimistically venture a guess, I think the bright young minds who will become our future leaders of AUTM will innovate new ways using currently undeveloped technology to maximize the overall speed and effectiveness of turning research discoveries into products that make a better world.

What is the biggest challenge on the horizon you see for our profession?
There are currently many well-qualified groups of people who are significantly under-represented in all stages of the innovation lifecycle. Despite the fact that data shows women as a whole earn over half of all bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in STEM, they are woefully under-represented on patents, with less than 20% listing a woman inventor. Federal funding agencies continue to struggle to increase female and minority applicants and awardees, and universities experience a persistently lower participation rate of women and minorities in technology commercialization. This means that we are underutilizing a much-needed talent base to drive innovation and address the critical societal needs of all people.

While this is a multi-faceted problem that must be addressed on many levels, technology transfer professionals are uniquely positioned the to be drivers of diversity and inclusion because of the critical role we play in moving research discoveries from the laboratory to the marketplace. Unfortunately, although there are universities that have initiated strategies to change the paradigm, we as a profession and AUTM as an organization have done very little to address these challenges. Until we as technology transfer professionals implement concrete strategies within our purview to affect change, we will be under-utilizing the innovation potential of our institutions and limiting the impact our profession can have on making a better world.
 
Describe the main challenges either internal or external to the Association.
The biggest internal challenge was implementing the previously drafted plan from an operational board to a strategic board. Additionally, creating and filling the position of AUTM’s first employee, then Executive Director and now President of AUTM.

Externally, legislative bodies and economic development agencies added technology transfer to their "toolbox" of measures to improve and enhance economies. Unfortunately, the premise of those initiatives was that something must be done to “fix technology transfer” or to achieve greater results for the federal and state investments in research. As a result, the amount of legislative attention affecting academic tech transfer rivaled that of when Bayh-Dole was implemented. And, while well-intended, much of it was misinformed and had the potential for unintended negative consequences.
 
Is there an existing document (s) which describes the situation and the responses?
Yes, we created an extensive document detailing the transition plan from an operational board to a strategic board and the rationalization for doing so. Also, there is a position description and employee contract, and a contract with the University of Central Florida; the overarching entity that initially employed that person designating them as an AUTM employee.

The AUTM Board collaborated with other organizations (Association of Public and Land-grant Universities [APLU], Council on Government Relations [COGR], Association of American Universities [AAU], Biotechnology Innovation Organization [BIO]) to write collective responses to proposed legislation that threatened to undermine the strength of the patent system. These documents should be available in the AUTM archives.

Were there particular people/viewpoint/mechanisms that were important to frame the Issues and offer options for responses?
As mentioned above, working with like-minded organizations (APLU, COGR, AAU) to address particularly challenging proposed legislation. An effective mechanism was educating legislators about the potential implications of such legislation and offering suggestions for modifications that could strengthen the proposed legislation. Additionally, the Board annually scheduled one of its meetings in Washington D.C. so Board Members could take the opportunity to visit their representatives and share perspectives with them.
Mike Waring was immensely helpful in all of these efforts by keeping AUTM informed about the current state of affairs in Washington D.C. and the players who could benefit from a visit with an AUTM representative. He put together a packet for those unfamiliar with speaking to their representatives and also spent time educating board members prior to their Hill visits.

Additionally, Joe Allen organized a legislative caucus on technology transfer wherein I was joined on the panel by representatives from like-minded organizations to discuss issues regarding proposed legislation. He also frequently collaborated with Gene Quinn from IP Watchdog to ensure regular articles were published on pertinent technology transfer topics.

What was the outcome?
The outcome was varied with respect to proposed pieces of legislation but impactful in continuing to strengthen our collaboration with sister organizations and to create awareness for AUTM as the go-to organization to learn about technology transfer.

What advice would you give future Boards if the Issue arose again?
Because of the transitional nature of those in power, educating lawmakers about our profession and the impact technology transfer has had both on the economy and on the lives of so many people, requires constant vigilance. There is strength in numbers and collaborating with other well-respected organizations to spread the message, as well as to respond to threats, is key to being successful.