As an organisation, what are the goals of AUTM?
There’s always been the three-core mission of professional development, advocacy, and member benefits. We’ve been doing meetings for a long time – people love our meetings and they’ve also become incredibly popular. But we’re also 40 years old. When I started my term just over a year ago, right from the onset, I said we’re doing a lot of things good organisationally, so now’s the time to change as much as we possibly can.
It’s necessary as the world is changing around us. We have a changing demographic, the people who were around when AUTM was formed are now leaving. People are taking different tech transfer roles, such as the rise of the tech transfer consultancy over the past few years – particularly since the financial crisis – at a rate we’ve never seen before. We’re seeing the downwards trend in federal funding for research. We’re also seeing a lot of significant patent transactions, primarily coming off patents where a lot of universities which have had large licensing incomes coming to an end.
Therefore, we’re preparing the organisation to be better prepared for the next few years.
What changes have you implemented during your presidency?
The number one thing was getting our members to take a look at how we’re doing things. One example is our meetings. We had this strong record of profitable and popular meetings, but they were the same meetings. We were tech transfer people gathering around the country all to talk to other tech transfer people about the same issues. We’d done it to death. So we came up with industry-academia partnering forums. We’ve done two of them so far, which have been well received. It’s no longer just enough to meet up with peers and discuss horror stories, people now have an expectation when they get on the road that they are going to be doing deals. So, if we don’t get industry in the room, we’re doing a disservice to our members.
We’ve also had an ongoing effort over the past year and a half looking at our member structures. We’ve had good success with our members inside the United States, but it starts to get a little tricky in places further afield which are beginning to grow when it comes to technology transfer. Although 75% of our membership does come from the US, if we want to be that which we set for ourselves in our strategic plan, ie. a global organisation, we have to mindful of these differences.
The biggest thing for me though, my personal quest at AUTM, was changing the governance system of the organisation. At our last meeting in San Francisco, we voted to change the structure of the board in a way that makes it less hands on, which was making us less strategic. Our structure for years is that we have three presidents, president-elect, president, and immediate past president and you cycle through the roles over three years. When we consulted other associations, they find it very frustrating to deal with presidents were only around for a year. You also had presidents who had the office for the year, and brought their initiative or idea to the role and focused squarely on that.
So, to bring forward the strategic plan, you had to overcome all these special projects. If you are a fan of sailing, you know you are going spend more time if you are tacking rather than going in a straight line, and that’s one of things our move towards a more strategic board is meant to elevate. The president shouldn’t be coming on with an idea of what they can do in their term, but how they can move the strategic plan along.
As a Canadian in the role, only the second non-American to be a president of AUTM, I’ve also attempted to bring the perspective of what the rest of the world can bring to bear on the organisation, and getting more people from around the world to participate to give AUTM the look and feel of a global organisation.
Essentially, we’re all about innovation, but we need to innovate the innovation process. We haven’t done a lot to change, we haven’t done a lot to alter people’s perceptions that this is an old boy’s network. We have to open up the opportunity for people to participate otherwise they won’t feel engaged.
So is the future of AUTM focusing on promoting this more strategic outlook?
I hope so! The challenge is that our organisation is made up of very bright, very driven, very type A personalities, and then getting them all in a room to think strategically is tough. What we’ve got at the moment is the thinking that we’re going to grab the bull by the horns and get it done and we’re going to put another year under our belts. But when you think strategically, you need to float higher than that and look at how we’re going to achieve our goal of being global. As we’re becoming more recognised as a leader in tech transfer, we’re seeing that it is hard to wrestle away from the basics, but we need to focus on the bigger picture.
What do you have planned personally once your term is up?
Our office at Ottawa is expanding, which is a combined sponsored research and tech transfer office, so we do a whole host of different things. We’re coming to the point where our office is evolving into something new, and it’s going to be nice to have my cycles freed up to commit to that.
I’m also the chair of the governance committee of the Alliance of Tech Transfer Professionals, and have been there since it was formed. So, my retirement from AUTM plan is to see the international body which AUTM has helped create to move to its highest level.
Interview has been edited for clarity from original transcript.