Politics and tech transfer make strange bedfellows, but with jobs and revenues evaporating in many states, it’s increasingly difficult for TTOs to avoid turf wars in the halls of their own statehouses. And some of the battles are getting ugly. Perhaps nowhere in the U.S. have more shots been fired across bordering states in recent months than in the upper Midwest, where the longstanding rivalry between Minnesota and Wisconsin has spilled over into tech transfer. Under the direction of VP for Research R. Timothy Mulcahy, PhD, the University of Minnesota has boosted licensing income and spun off six companies since 2006, and the school is constructing a $292 million Biomedical Discovery District to speed the commercialization of university medical research. However, rancor between the university and the administration of Governor Tim Pawlenty has stalled the development of a unified strategy that could nurture medical technology start-ups — and neighboring Wisconsin is all too happy to capitalize on that disarray. Last year, U-MN start-up Rapid Diagnostek moved across the state line, lured by Wisconsin’s generous tax breaks for angel investors that allowed it to secure a better financing deal. And a planned biotech start-up by world-renowned researcher Doris Taylor, PhD, director of U-MN’s Stem Cell Institute, threatens to do the same. Mulcahy — a former vice chancellor of research policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — often finds himself in the thankless position of trying to educate state officials about the challenges of transferring technology into the marketplace. He works doggedly to highlight the need to bridge the funding gap for start-up companies that have exhausted federal research grants but have not yet fully commercialized emerging technologies.<\/p>\n
“We try to emphasize in the legislature that the state needs to find creative ways to encourage financing for companies if university-based technologies are going to have a chance in start-up development and the job creation associated with that,” he says. “Many elected officials are unaware of the hurdles and the financing history of ideas from the discovery stage to the application stage.” Mulcahy tries to convince lawmakers that the state could play a supporting role in tech transfer by having mechanisms to fund start-up opportunities, policies to encourage angel investment, and matching grant programs to help companies accelerate early-stage research. Elected officials often fail to grasp the potential benefits to a state, however, when university technologies are licensed to companies elsewhere, Mulcahy adds. In a weak economy, TTOs face enormous pressure to license technologies to in-state companies. “We try to do that every chance we get,” he says. “But you go with the companies that can best ensure translation from idea to product.” A detailed article on pushing for political change to support tech transfer efforts appears in the December 2009 issue of Technology Transfer Tactics<\/em><\/a>. To get the complete article and become a subscriber, including access to the entire archive of back issues, CLICK HERE<\/a>.<\/p>\n Politics and tech transfer make strange bedfellows, but with jobs and revenues evaporating in many states, it’s increasingly difficult for TTOs to avoid turf wars in the halls of their own statehouses. And some of the battles are getting ugly. Perhaps nowhere in the U.S. have more shots been fired across bordering states in recent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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