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Shifting Your TTO from Market Push to Market Pull: Finding the White Space

Written by

Marie Powers

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Many tech transfer offices are stuck in reactive mode. They dutifully receive invention disclosures from faculty, assess them for commercial potential, file patents and provisionals, and seek licensees. This reactive strategy, while understandable given staff shortages and time constraints, does not even attempt to address one very critical factor in successful research commercialization efforts: what does the market want? Recognizing this, a growing number of TTOs have moved away from traditional and reactive “market push” strategies toward a more proactive “market pull” approach. They are actively engaging with innovation seekers in corporations and government agencies to determine their most pressing needs — and then feeding that information back to their research labs.

By listening to their markets, and building strong relationships with industry, they are smoothing a path to licensing revenues and assuring that more of their research dollars result in products that companies want and need. The concept isn’t hard to grasp, but execution can be difficult. It involves not only a shift in strategy and thinking, but also delicate negotiations with researchers who may balk at being “dictated to” about their research focus. In addition, it involves tough legwork in building a “listening” process in the form of strong industry relationships.

But the end result can significantly increase your research funding and licensing revenues while cementing long-term corporate partnerships. That’s why our Distance Learning Division has recruited one of the nation’s leaders in market pull strategy, Lina Ramos of Emerging Growth Enterprise, to give you practical strategies on determining the IP and innovation needs of industry and putting your researchers to work on meeting those needs. Shifting Your TTO from Market Push to Market Pull: Finding the White Space, Thursday, November 12th, from 1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. EST. For complete details and to register, CLICK HERE.

And don’t miss these other strategy-filled events coming soon:

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