Economists say the country is on the verge of a recovery, but businesses and universities are still in cost-cutting mode. They’re slashing budgets, curtailing programs, and implementing hiring freezes. At the same time, TTOs are under increasing pressure to bring in fresh revenues. With few if any options for adding staff, many offices are turning to the student body for the help they need. Such raw talent needs to be developed, but a well-crafted internship program can significantly stretch your resources. “It’s a way of sending emissaries back out into the institution so that, once trained, these graduate student interns can talk about what kinds of things are necessary as you are developing invention disclosures,” explains Michael Batalia, PhD, director of the Office of Technology Asset Management at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. For example, while most researchers know their fields very well, they may not have good notebook practices, and they may not know what to look for the in the patent landscape, explains Batalia. “The graduate interns help to set up lines of communication between our office and the different departments.”
Batalia launched the Wake Forest internship program in 2008 as a way to offload some of the time-consuming legwork involved in managing disclosures, and also to build a “back bench” of qualified TTO professionals. “As an office grows and expands you need qualified people, and that can be a challenge,” he says. “It also gives the students alternate career paths and exposure.” A detailed article on using students to bolster TTO staff appears in the October issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. For subscription information, CLICK HERE.