Niels Reimers
From an interview conducted by Katharine Ku in July 2019 
Reimers: Let me tell you about the founding of SUPA. In 1974, the National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored a meeting of those involved with the rapidly spreading licensing activities of universities. The meeting was held at Case Western Reserve University, located just outside of Cleveland, Ohio. Around a hundred or so attended the meeting. I presented a talk on Stanford’s program, and others presented talks on their programs, including Research Corporation (RC). As I recall, it was Willard Marcy who spoke for RC. I had a twinge of feeling sorry for Will, as the trend clearly was toward campus-based licensing programs by university staff.
After the NSF meeting talks, an informal gathering was held in a separate room to discuss forming an organization of university licensing professionals. Around 30-40 attended. Roger Ditzel of Iowa State University Research Foundation and I both spoke about the Licensing Executive Society as an alternative. We noted the advantage of hearing from industry licensing professionals about their issues, plus the opportunity for marketing one’s university-developed technology over coffee breaks and the like. One fellow in particular who was from Florida spoke out adamantly against being around industry people and their views.
Later that year, there was a Licensing Executives Society (LES) Board meeting in Chicago near to Illinois Institute of Technology. LES had resisted any calls for separate meetings of licensing professionals in a specific industry because of the potential for antitrust claims, such as alleging that royalty rates being fixed at favored rates or the like. At the same time a founding meeting of an organization of university licensing professionals (to be called the Society of University Patent Administrators) was being held nearby, within walking distance.
At that time, I was on the LES Board, and Roger also may have been on the LES Board. We told the LES Board of the founding meeting of SUPA and recommended that LES alter its policy vis a vis antitrust concerns and allow a separate meeting of only university licensing professionals to be held the day after a regular LES meeting, but under the LES umbrella. After much discussion, the LES Board voted to agree with our proposition and Roger and I walked over to the university gathering to present the good news. Roger and I both felt that other university licensing professionals surely would not want to attend two licensing professional organization meetings and that agreement to the “compromise” proposal would be welcomed.
However, after hearing from both Roger and me, it was clear the momentum toward a separate organization was such that SUPA was formed that day. Those that may have supported our proposal of a more-or-less joint meeting with industry licensing professionals were quiet as the arguments against being “infected” by industry carried the day.
In fact, Larry Gilbert, who was at MIT, got involved and he liked to call it SUPA.
Ku: Steve Atkinson and I changed it to AUTM.
Reimers: You did it. That’s great!