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A new shepherd for technology transfer
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Stanford Willie is the new executive director of the Office of Technology Development. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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Modular Genetics, Inc., is a portfolio company in BU’s Technology Development Fund, which is administered by the Office of Technology Development (OTD). Started in 1975 as the Community Technology Fund to help BU researchers with innovative ideas develop business plans and obtain venture capital financing, OTD was one of the first such programs at any university and to date has helped launch 31 faculty start-ups.
The OTD shifted gears in December 2004 to consolidate and streamline technology commercialization activities on BU’s campuses. Until recently, there have been a variety of organizations involved in technology transfer, among them the Photonics Center, Beacon Photonics, the BioSquare Discovery and Innovation Center, the Fraunhofer Center for Manufacturing Innovation, the Entrepreneurial Management Institute, and the Center for Health Care Entrepreneurship. “A major goal of the OTD is to centralize technology commercialization resources at BU so that faculty have a clearer understanding of the many ways the University can help them,” says Stanford Willie, who became OTD’s executive director on March 3. Willie has spent the past 15 years developing and managing a $1.8 billion alternative investment portfolio for Qwest Asset Management Company. After earning his Ph.D. in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley, he did research on computer system design and network engineering and automatic speech recognition at Bell Labs and US West Advanced Technologies.
Ashley Stevens, director of OTD’s office of technology transfer, notes that faculty start-ups, in addition to financially benefiting researchers and the University through licensing agreements, serve the public by getting important technologies into the marketplace, where, for example, they can help treat disease and better society in other ways. “Publishing your research isn’t always enough,” Stevens says. “Sometimes you’ve got to take more aggressive steps to ensure that it realizes its maximum potential to get out into the world and benefit people. Research has shown that start-ups make a bigger financial commitment to developing new technologies than existing companies do.”
The OTD helps faculty commercialize their technologies in four ways: technology transfer focuses on licensing the University’s intellectual property for royalties and equity; a strategic preseed fund provides modest support for the initial stages of developing inventions; a coinvestment fund provides follow-on capital for start-ups as they gain momentum; and a corporate business development program facilitates strategic partnerships among companies with mutual areas of expertise and interest.
By addressing different stages of commercialization, says Stevens, the OTD hopes to make it easier for faculty to turn their good ideas into marketable technologies. “There were so many programs offered before that faculty were often confused and didn’t know where to go,” he says. “Now there’s one-stop shopping.”
BU start-up Modular Genetics, Monsanto partner to modify crops
25
March 2005
Boston University
Office of University Relations