Jon Soderstrom 

Interview on May 28, 2019
 

• AUTM President, 2008
• First began volunteering with AUTM: 1986
• First committee position: I don’t remember, but it had to do with creating a startup course with Lou Berneman.  
• First Leadership position: Liaison to federal/national laboratories since I had come out of that world, and we were trying to unify the profession.
• First Board position: Janet Scholz and Pat Harsche asked me to create the VP - Public Policy office in 2002, and I was formally elected in 2003 and 2004.

When and how did you find your way into tech transfer?
I joined Yale University’s Office of Cooperative Research in July 1996. I was recruited to join a re-configured office that would for the first time have staff located at the School of Medicine. The School of Medicine was concerned that it was having trouble recruiting and retaining faculty due to a lack of support for commercializing inventions and developing corporate partnerships. The University also was interested in encouraging spinning off new ventures in support of local economic development.

What had you been doing prior to making the leap?
I had been working in business development for Martin Marietta Energy Systems and tech transfer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Why did you make the leap?
I wanted to get more involved in forming new ventures to commercialize inventions with inventors, as I saw that as the most focused way to develop many technologies.

Tell us about the state of tech transfer at the institution you joined.
It had been essentially a one-to-two-person office but had decided it needed to expand. The former director had health problems, so Yale hired a recruiter to find a new director. They hired the former head of external research and development at Pfizer who was retiring. He agreed to take the job on the condition that he could hire and train his replacement. When I was hired, I became the third professional staff person. We added two more positions in the first year to bring us to five.

What was your vision of tech transfer back then?
We publicly stated that our goal was to start three to four venture capital-backed companies per year.

What were some of the issues you faced in the early days?
No one believed that Yale had the capacity to create and retain that level of venture creation. We had to convince venture capitalists to spend more time on campus reviewing opportunities. We also had to recruit a lot of entrepreneurial talent to the area. And we did not have any suitable space for biotech companies to get started. 

What were some of your early successes?
Within three years we were starting three to four venture-backed companies per year and had developed a number of relationships with startup venture capitalists who were alums/friends of Yale.

What was faculty’s attitude to tech transfer back then?
Overall, faculty was highly supportive of our efforts - although they still questioned Yale’s support for the undertaking. There remained a few pockets of resistance to the idea of commercialization, but not so much among faculty in the life sciences. Also we had an extremely supportive Dean of Engineering - Allan Bromley - who had been on the faculty prior to becoming President George H.W. Bush’s science advisor. He returned to Yale with a goal of building our research reputation and saw tech transfer as an integral component.

When did you start to get involved with SUPA / AUTM?
1986

What was the Association like back then? 
My first meeting was at the Marriott in Cambridge, MA when attendance was about 200, so you could easily get to know/talk to everyone there.

Who were some of the leaders of AUTM then?
John Preston, Larry Gilbert, Steve Atkinson, Joyce Britton

What were some of the issues the Association was facing?
Credibility, professionalism, everything was done on a shoestring and relied heavily on volunteers to do the work. But it built a lot of camaraderie and esprit de corps since we sunk or swam together.

What were some of the issues the profession was facing?
Credibility - could we actually transform inventions into products and companies and attract serious investment capital and management talent.

Did you decide to get involved with any particular issue?
Public policy around ownership of inventions and corporate sponsored research agreements.

What were Board meetings like back then?  
Very informal affairs. This was prior to switching to Sherwood management.

What were some of the issues the Boards you were on wrestled with?
We were just beginning to engage with D.C., so a lot of our effort was reaching out to and developing more formal relationships with the Association for American Universities (AAU), Council on Government Relations (COGR), and what is now the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU). Establishing AUTM as a ‘brand’, but doing so in coordination with other higher education associations was a critical goal. At the time, there was a lot of talk from Sen. Wyden about ‘royalty recoupment’, drug pricing, and access to affordable medicines in the developing world.

What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the profession since you entered it?
Global growth in interest and participation, especially in Asia. The overall professionalism of the practitioners. AUTM has surpassed the Licensing Executives Society (LES) as the venue where technology investment opportunities and industry meet.

What do you wish might have turned out differently?
I wish the AUTM survey did not place such a spotlight on royalty income because it highlights the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ instead of being about impact over income. Unfortunately, too many institutions use royalties as a benchmark for comparing their relative success against ‘peers’. It is an ugly arms race that the profession should have ended long ago.

Where do you see the profession in the next ten years?
It will be less about the process of identifying patentable inventions, filing/prosecuting applications, and licensing the patents to companies. It will be more focused on developing strategic partnerships with entities who can help faculty translate their ideas into commercially interesting investment opportunities. The commercially valuable IP will be increasingly developed outside the university in collaboration with these development organizations. This will be especially true in the life sciences.

What is the biggest challenge on the horizon you see for our profession?
Drug price controls/march-in challenges from Sen. Wyden, Universities Allied for Essential Medicines [UAEM], Jamie Love and others), royalty recoupment, declining federal research, and development budgets (in real and inflation adjusted terms), patent validity challenges at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), continued activism by the Supreme and appellate courts that undermine the value of intellectual property, trade war with China - everything that is currently on the Public Policy groups’ list. These issues have been around for more than 20 years and will continue for the foreseeable future if not longer. And that doesn’t even include the possibility that university presidents might just say it isn’t worth the cost/effort to support these activities since they are losing money in a tight fiscal environment - hence the need to emphasize impact over income.

Is there an existing document (s) which describes the issues and the responses?  
We wrote congressional testimony, participated on National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panels with respect to America Invents Act, Creating and Resorting Equal Access to Equivalent Samples (CREATE) Act, and others. 

Were there particular people/viewpoint/mechanisms that were important to frame the issues and offer options for responses?  
Joe Allen, Howard Bremer, and Norm Latker and their institutional memories.

What was the outcome?  
We were actively engaged in the public debate and were usually able to help craft acceptable compromises, although not always entirely to our liking.

What advice would you give future Boards if the issue arose again?  
AUTM’s major role is to help mobilize its member institutions to educate their congressional delegations/state houses/governors with facts that push back on the ‘urban legends’ and other myths propagated by Sen. Wyden, Jamie Love and others in groups such as the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG).