Operations and Administrative Resources Package 

Operations and Administrative Resources Package 

This package contains training from AUTM Annual Meetings and Online Professional Webinar trainings and includes 5 relevant chapters from the AUTM Technology Transfer Practice Manual.

$525 AUTM Members /$725 Non-members
Order The Package

AUTM's Operations and Administrative Resource Package is designed to broaden skills and inspire creativity. The package of 20 webinar recordings and 5 TTP Manual Chapters, covers a wide variety of subjects from the most respected leaders in technology transfer.
Whether you’re just beginning your tech transfer career, or are a seasoned professional, this investment in training will be there all day, every day and is sure to become your office’s go to resource for virtual tech-transfer know-how. It includes:

Anatomy of a License and Other Agreements
For attendees who play a role in managing executed license agreements, the ability to read a license agreement and to understand each party's obligations under it is a key skill for doing your job effectively. This session will help you understand the obligations - both your institution's and the licensees' - owed under license agreements. Using examples, this session provides an explanation of the sections and terms of typical license agreements, with attention to those most relevant to administrators. The session includes an interactive discussion of best practices for reporting, invoicing, and calendaring to ensure that your university receives the money, reports, and other obligations due under a license for years to come.

Assessing and Improving Your Office's Performance
Technology transfer is frequently criticized worldwide as underperforming and impeding, despite ample evidence to the contrary. It would however be naive to assume that we are universally doing a great job and don't need to do better. But how do we demonstrate how we’re doing and identify where we can improve? This panel looks at approaches that enable offices to critically assess their performance and identify opportunities for improvement. We explore, among other things, approaches based on office and practitioner competency.

Bayh-Dole Reporting: How-to for Compliance Managers
This webinar provides you with an overview of the Bayh-Dole reporting requirements, focusing on the newly revised regulations, commonly referred to as “Bayh-Dole II.” You will receive guidance on the information and tools your office should have for the proper and timely reporting of inventions, patents, and utilization reports in iEdison. You will also get recommendations on how institutions can clear outstanding iEdison notifications.
 
Beyond the Bottom Line: Justifying Your Existence with Administration
Most technology transfer offices (TTOs) are not cash flow positive from commercialization activities, yet institutions continue to support them. Given the funding realities facing many institutions, leadership is looking for cost savings that may include questioning the need for TTOs altogether. Lower-cost alternatives being considered are intra-institutional partnering, outsourcing, royalty sharing modification and outright elimination. We’ll discuss the challenges and how they’re being addressed.
 
Critical Considerations for Bayh-Dole Compliance
A heightened interest in Bayh-Dole Compliance (BDC) has emerged, giving rise to scrutiny by Federal agencies of recipient entities. High profile requests to enforce compliance, along with changes made to the manner and the content of reporting regulations, have heightened the stakes. The presenters will discuss the challenges that technology transfer offices face today regarding compliance and how to navigate the new playing field. You will learn how to be compliant under the recently promulgated regulations, who is filing petitions requesting the government to take title to inventions, and what the differing agency views are on US manufacturing requirements.

Effective Operation Strategies for Small Tech Transfer Offices
The focus of this webinar is highlighting the challenges and opportunities currently facing smaller tech transfer offices. While smaller offices may be “resource constrained,” their size allows them to potentially be more efficient and responsive due to its lean nature. The presenters will provide insights from their respective ecosystems and the rationale for their methods and strategies within their respective institutions. You will come away with ideas and approaches for better strategies and tactics to make your office more efficient and effective for its key stakeholders.

How to Keep Your Sanity While Negotiating and Managing Material Transfer Agreements
We’ll discuss proactive ways to manage the hundreds of material transfer agreements (MTAs) exchanged each year between academic and research partners. Different interests and perspectives can lead to different opinions regarding intellectual property and ownership rights, publication, confidentiality, reporting obligations and even the definition of the “materials” themselves. This session will provide an overview of the most heavily negotiated terms and supply examples of effective solutions and alternatives. We’ll also touch on expectation management — from the providers to the labs, which view the prolonged negotiation of challenging MTAs as a barrier to research.

How to Meet Those Pesky Requirements in Your IIA
Co-owned inventions happen regularly in our business, usually ending in an inter-institutional agreement (IIA) covering things like ownership, patent prosecution, marketing, reporting, and licensing. Negotiating the IIA is just the beginning. Then what do you do? How can your office effectively and efficiently meet those license requirements and be a good partner? Three universities, at different stages, will share their journey including goals, planning, process, and struggles along the way.

Innovative Programs from Government Tech Transfer Offices
The similarities between academic and government technology transfer programs are well recognized. This session features top federal technology transfer officials, who present cutting-edge approaches that have been highly successful and can be easily adopted by university TTOs. Examples of these innovative approaches include: the Department of Homeland Security's Transition to Practice program for federal cybersecurity technologies, which successfully engages researchers and allows companies to test and further develop innovations; Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which used an aggressive marketing campaign to successfully secure four licenses for the same technology; and NASA, which achieved a 155 percent increase in patent licensing over four years through several innovative programs that brought strong visibility to licensable NASA patents.

MTAs Made Totally Awesome!
Each year, hundreds of thousands of material transfer agreements (MTAs) are negotiated among research institutions worldwide. The time-consuming nature of negotiating MTAs imposes a substantial administrative burden and increases costs for technology transfer with very little value realized. In this session we discuss new developments in MTAs — from automation with the AUTM MTA Toolkit and other standard templates, to the policies and practices of research institutions and providers of research materials — that ease the burden on technology transfer offices and promote the sharing of research materials.

Office Finance
Financial management is a critical function of any technology transfer office. This session covers major areas of financial management: budgeting for operations including forecasting; tracking revenue/expenses recovery; managing equity (real and imagined). You will learn basic financial management associated with the administration of a technology transfer office including benchmarking for budgeting purposes and managing expenses/revenues.

Outside Counsel: Friend, Foe or Force Multiplier?
In times of ever-increasing budgetary pressures, the fees and cost involved in using outside intellectual property counsel can often have a chilling effect on many tech transfer offices. You want a good product, but also at good price. These objectives can sometimes turn outside counsel from friend to foe. We’ll examine a tertiary approach to this problem: Outside counsel, far from being a drain on your limited resources, will become a force multiplier, allowing you to do more with less.

Partnering with Non-Profit Funders: Research to Commercialization
This session covers various intellectual property topics relevant for many non-profits and the research institutions that they fund, including: the non-profit funder's approach to intellectual property; the essential elements of the non-profit funder's intellectual property policy; and partnering with the non-profit funder after an invention has been created.
The speakers discuss National Multiple Sclerosis Society's intellectual property policy as it relates to university technology transfer practices and objectives. Dr. Allegretta provides his organization's insights and experiences, and Dr. Lu draws from her experience working with numerous other non-profit funders.  Dr. Lu also describes the work of the Non-Profit Funder Research Institution Partnership, a group of research institutions and non-profit funders whose goal is to establish a framework that encourages long-term effective collaborations between their organizations.

Patent Law 101
This webinar addresses the fundamentals of how to use the patent system to commercialize innovation. We start with the history and policy behind the patent system. We then discuss the process and requirements for obtaining a patent, which are important to know when evaluating viability of invention disclosures. Further, we address strategies for managing a portfolio of pending and granted patents, and for monetizing the portfolio.
 
Prioritizing Your IP Portfolio (audio only)
Do your technology managers have overwhelming caseloads? Are patent costs outpacing growth in licensing revenues? Are departments underreporting new inventions given their research dollars? This session presents best practices in getting the IP portfolio under control, which in turn increases staff productivity, minimizes patent costs, and positions the TTO to achieve greater success. 
Drawing on the real-world experiences at several universities, the panellists share their successful strategies to optimize the IP portfolio. Examples will illustrate how these strategies helped TTO staff focus on high-potential innovations; achieved substantial cost savings by eliminating unproductive patents; and revealed the portfolio’s strengths, weaknesses, and overall strategic value. Presenters will provide advice on how to plan for strategically examining every technology in the IP portfolio.
This session is ideal for TTOs with a backlogged/legacy portfolio of unprocessed disclosures as well as for those where ongoing operations need a boost in efficiency and/or effectiveness.

Real Time Reporting for Technology Transfer
As online services increasingly provide real time data, Cambridge Enterprise and other tech transfer offices have sought to provide real-time reporting to both internal teams and university stakeholders, through the use of web-based reporting tools connected to live data. As such, internal users are now able to see project progress, workload and other day-to-day indicators online, at anytime, anywhere. This frees-up staff time, gives university stakeholders on-demand reporting and offers faculty access to the status of their inventions without contacting their licensing officers. During the presentation, multiple universities share their experience using these reporting tools.

Royalties and Distribution of Income
Each technology transfer office has its own established policies and procedures for distributing licensing or royalty income. Taking care of this administrative task in an accurate, consistent, and timely manner may not always generate accolades from recipients of the income but failure to distribute properly will likely generate unfavorable responses. This presentation demonstrates the importance of understanding the terms and status of agreements, understanding royalty distribution policies, communicating with royalty participants, establishing a standard royalty distribution process, and avoiding obstacles while completing the distribution. The panel discusses the framework as well as provides useful tools that can help technology transfer professionals smoothly carry out this important task.

Tech Transfer Finance: A Beginners Course
This session provides a high-level overview of the most important issues for anyone new to tech transfer finance. Topics include types of financial accounts, tax burdens, revenue and reimbursements. Also covers strategies for tracking and managing equity, ensuring transactions are accurately reflected by the Finance Office, stumbling blocks that arise when corrections are required, and methods of finding specific transactions in your electronic records or those of your institution.
 
Technology Transfer Practice Manual Chapters:
  • Anatomy of a License
  • Data Management
  • Definitions of Intellectual Property
  • Record Retention
  • Performing a License Agreement Royalty Audit

The Basics of Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs)
Cooperative Research and Development Agreements or CRADAs are the principal mechanism used by federal labs to collaborate with non-federal entities. Universities have entered into thousands of successful research collaborations with federal labs in almost every area of science and engineering. CRADAs fall outside the usual government procurement and grants rules and regulations. This webinar provides a basic overview of what CRADAs are and can do for you.

U.S. Export Controls on Technology - What You Need to Know
Technology practitioners are often unaware of U.S. government regulations restricting the export of technology outside the U.S. or with foreign nationals located in the U.S. or abroad. Whether you work for a corporation, university, or any other institution, you should have a general awareness of legal restrictions on the export of certain technical information. Restricted transfers can take place when you send technical information via email, data downloads, or through conversations. Who is authorized to receive such information and when do you need to obtain an authorization from the government? How will that information be used abroad? Are you dealing with a denied party?  Does your institution have a procedure for laptop travel abroad?  Violations of the rules can yield penalties in the millions of dollars and jail time. In this webinar, we cover the basics of U.S. export controls under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations and the Export Administration Regulations, case examples, and best practices.