John Fraser
- AUTM President, 2006

- First began volunteering with AUTM: 1998
- First AUTM Committee position: Chair of a Member Needs Survey
- First AUTM leadership and Board position: I was elected to the Board for 2001 and appointed VP Membership replacing Jon Sandelin, who had finished his term.
I, John Fraser, was President from Feb. 2006 to Feb. 2007 and followed Mark Crowell.
I want to thank Karen Hersey and Lou Breneman for bringing me actively into AUTM activities. Karen saw me give a presentation on the famous FSU Neck Ties during which the other workshop panelists walked through the audience and gave everyone a tie. Lou was President when I was asked to lead a Membership Needs survey. Once done, I was then asked to join the Board in 2001. The Nominations Committee selected me as Incoming President and I rejoined the Board in 2005. I was, I believe, the first individual where the nomination had to be voted on by the full Membership via electronic ballot rather than a quick voice vote at the Annual meeting.
When and how did you find your way into tech transfer?
In 1976, I worked at the National Research Council of Canada (NRCC), (Office of University Grants and Scholarships) in Ottawa and in addition to my responsibilities of managing all the peer-adjudicated grants program, I was given the responsibility for the NRC Project Research Applicable to Industry (PRAI) Program that provided grants to the university grantees to co-fund a project of interest to a Canadian company. The standard forms required an IP clause (NRC defaulted to the university regarding ownership, as Canada never had a Bayh-Dole Act). After eight years at NRCC, I left and joined a professional venture capital fund interested in university spinouts, based in Toronto, where I negotiated a license deal to a University of British Columbia (UBC) spin-out company called MOLI Energy based on UBC Prof. Rudy Herring’s Li Ion battery technology. In 1986, I joined UTC Inc, a for-profit private tech transfer firm based in the Research Triangle Park, North Carolina with four university clients who outsourced their TT activities to us six years after the Bayh-Dole Act.
What had you been doing prior to making the leap?
I worked at NRC as the Senior Awards Officer ultimately responsible for managing the largest grant program in Canada for basic and applied University-based research.
Why did you make the leap?
I moved out of government as I had decided either to move or to retire from using my brain for the rest of my government career.
Tell us about the state of tech transfer at the institution you joined.
I’ll address UTC Inc. where I joined in 1986. We serviced the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP), University of Connecticut, both campuses, the University of Kansas, the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and the University of Iowa. UMCP had no office, nor did Georgia Tech, and we opened one on each campus. Same for Kansas. I think the University of Iowa had tried something but then rolled that activity into our activities. In each case, we provided something like $125,000/year to each campus and helped hire a TTO director for the campus. The director scouted and helped disclose inventions, our North Carolina-based office marketed and negotiated potential licenses.
What was your vision of tech transfer back then?
We had no vision then. It was strictly practical – find, evaluate, market, and hope to find a licensee.
What were some of the issues you faced in the early days?
Really the same old, same old. Some faculty were interested. Some arts faculty were hesitant and somewhat apathetic, but not too confrontational once they realized that the activity was voluntary.
What were some of your early successes?
The UBC License led to a $9 million federal industry development grant and a healthy spin-out which was named MOLI. Our target market of electric vehicles, we realized, was too far in the future, so we built a mid-scale pilot manufacturing plant to make AA- and AAA-sized batteries for laptops and instrumentation and portable tools. If you had a Toshiba laptop in the mid 90s, it was likely powered by a MOLI battery.
Some of your early failures?
The UBC spin-out brought in USD $10 million equity from Japan. A faulty battery in a Japanese cell phone exploded, the steel-spined Chairman of the MOLI company had just passed away, and the company drifted from lack of leadership. The Japanese engineered a takeover and picked up the patents, the technology, and the manufacturing plant from the Government of British Columbia, the only secured investor, for five cents on the dollar, I seem to recall. This was a high-profile, high-tech Canadian disaster.
What was faculty’s attitude to tech transfer back then?
Some were interested. Some waited until there was a track record, as they wanted a lower risk activity with a more proven track record.
When did you start to get involved with SUPA / AUTM?
From 1980, I would travel from Canada to the occasional AUTM Annual Meeting. When we moved to Florida State University in Florida in 1996, I presented at the Hilton Head AUTM regional summer meeting (1998?) and Karen Hershey asked me to get involved with AUTM activities. Neither of us knew how exactly, but I was soon asked to head a Membership Needs task force.
Who were some of the leaders of AUTM then?
Karen Hersey, Lou Berneman, Jim Severson, Terry Young.
What were some of the issues the organization was facing?
I was unaware until I joined the Board for a two-year term in 2001 with Terry Young as President. The one issue I remember as an incoming Board Member was the disagreement between the Board and the Metrics Committee. The Metrics Committee had created an Economic Impact Estimation scenario to turn the AUTM transaction data into projected economic impact. They wanted it included in the Annual Licensing Report. Several Board Members opposed the idea of including projections in the same report as the factual transaction data. There was bitter disagreement that became personal for a couple of years.
Did you decide to get involved with any particular issue?
I decided on metrics as it was the one quantitative way we had to communicate the value of what we did. Once I finished my initial Board term, I realized that the Metrics Report was being read only for the Royalty Revenue Top Line, and newspaper articles were implying that if there were great royalties you had a great office; few royalties meant a poor office. I was asked by Lori Pressman, then Chair of the Metrics Committee, to help and we decided that my job would be to gather short vignettes of university inventions that were developed into a product and were in the market. That task coincided with an interest in such stories that I had had for a long time when we were in Canada, so the fit was great. I decided to expand the search to gather at least one story from each State and have AUTM create a database. I was fortunate that when I pitched this to the AUTM Board for some money, Ashley Stevens and the Board had obtained a grant from the Kauffman Foundation. So, enough money was set aside to create and publish the first edition of the Better World Report and have one hard-copy for every attendee at the 2005 AUTM Annual Meeting.
What were some of the big Issues in your early days?
In the early days it was figuring out how to do everything in the TTO where I was. I have founded/headed four TTOs – two in Canada and two in the U.S. Of the four, two were for-profit and two not-for-profit. In three cases, it was to found the office and start activities at universities that did not have a history or familiarity with the TTO activity.
What were Board meetings like back then?
Seemed well organized with the Sherwood Group as administrative support.
What were some of the issues the Boards you were on wrestled with?
The one that was a non-issue was Membership, as it was growing at 10% per year without a lot of AUTM effort.
What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the profession since you entered it?
The size of the Membership and the size of the Annual Meeting. When I joined as the Vice President for Membership in 2001, I think we had 3,000 Members, growing to 3,500 with 2,000 joining the Annual Meeting in San Francisco when I was President in 2007 just before the recession. It then shrank and has now rebounded.
What do you wish might have turned out differently?
Frankly, I would have liked to see AUTM more active in the international arena. However, it has taken considerable time to sort out and identify what exactly that meant. In retrospect, this was very reasonable given a volunteer organization with a management staff group that had expertise concentrated on meeting logistics. So, I was pleased to see AUTM regularly convening a group of active TT people in other countries (Bangkok 2019, Beijing, Jerusalem, Santiago, etc.) and the founding of the ongoing Alliance of Technology Transfer Professionals (ATTP) organization.
Where do you see the profession in the next ten years?
Expanding beyond a focus on transaction metrics to consistently include studying the impact and communicating the value of what we do for the economy. More emphasis on researcher entrepreneurship interest and spinout companies.
What is the biggest challenge on the horizon you see for our profession?
Paying more attention to Washington and representing our profession more regularly to educate elected and non-elected federal officials who change on a frequent and regular basis, as Joe Allen has continuously pointed out.